SOUND MACHINES - Art exhibition on Feral File

Holly Herndon and Mathew Dryhurst are renowned for their groundbreaking work in machine learning, software, and music. They develop their own technology and protocols for living with the technology of others, often with a focus on the ownership and augmentation of digital identity and voice. These technical systems not only facilitate expansive artworks across media, but are proposed as artworks unto themselves. They were awarded the 2022 Ars Electronica STARTS prize for digital art and have been on ArtReview’s Power 100 list since 2021. Herndon holds a PhD in Computer Music from Stanford University CCRMA. Dryhurst is largely self taught. They have held faculty positions at NYU, the European Graduate School, Strelka Institute, and the Antikythera Program at the Berggruen Institute. They publish their studio research openly through the Interdependence podcast, and recently co-founded Spawning, an organization building a consent layer for AI. Their critically acclaimed musical works are released through 4AD.

Since emerging onto the international art scene in the early 1960s, Yoko Ono has made profound contributions to visual art, performance, filmmaking, and experimental music. Born in Tokyo in 1933, she moved with her family to New York in the mid-1950s and enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College. Over the next decade she lived in New York, Tokyo, and London, greatly influencing the international development of Fluxus and Conceptual art.

Ono's earliest works were often based on instructions that she communicated to the public in verbal or written form. Painting to Be Stepped On (1960–61), for example, invited people to tread upon a piece of canvas placed directly on the floor, either physically or in their minds. Though easily overlooked, the work radically questioned the division between art and the everyday. It is currently on view at MoMA in the collection galleries. In 1964, Ono compiled more than 200 of her instructions in her groundbreaking artist's book Grapefruit. The instructions range from feasible to improbable, often relying on the reader's imagination to complete the work. By turns poetic, humorous, unsettling, and idealistic, Ono's early instruction pieces anticipated her later work, such as Cut Piece (1964), a performance in which people were invited to cut away portions of her clothing; Sky Machine (1966), a sculpture that speaks to her environmental concerns; and To See the Sky (2015), a spiral staircase installed beneath a skylight that visitors were invited to ascend in order to contemplate the sky. All were on view in her retrospective at MoMA in 2015.

Ono's collaborations with her late husband, Beatles legend John Lennon, including Bed-In (1969), a weeklong antiwar protest in their honeymoon suite, boldly communicated her commitment to social justice. Never one to confine her work to the gallery space, Ono continues to perform with her avant-garde Plastic Ono Band, promote world peace through her ongoing WAR IS OVER! campaign, and create works that blur the boundaries between art, politics, and society. In recent years, she has embraced social media to communicate her artistic and activist messages to even broader audiences.

Her work for SOUND MACHINES is Ono's first engagement with blockchain technology.

American Artist makes thought experiments that primarily take the form of sculpture, software, and video. Artist is a recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in Visual Art and has exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and The Museum of Modern Art, NY. Artist is a co-director of the School for Poetic Computation and a faculty at Yale School of Art. Their work, Untitled (2019) is currently on display in MoMA’s collection galleries. Immersing the viewer within the digital interfaces of predictive policing — a contemporary technology used by law enforcement — the video installation highlights biases inherent in seemingly neutral tools.

Tommy Martinez is an artist and programmer working primarily through research, sound, and code. He creates software and musical systems for the internet, for embedded devices, and for live multi-channel performance. Martinez has performed at MoMA PS1, The DiMenna Center for Classical Music, Fridman Gallery, and Pioneer Works. He has lectured on sound and electronic art at School for Poetic Computation, UC Berkeley (CNMAT), Stanford University (CCRMA), NYU (IDM and ITP), and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

Martinez and Artist created the performance Integrity Protocol/Lower Limb Lecture, which was originally performed at Pageant in Brooklyn, NY on January 7, 2023, and subsequently recorded later that year.

0xDEAFBEEF is an artist and engineer based in Toronto, Canada. Over the past 20 years he has been tinkering in diverse areas overlapping art and technology including music, sound recording, computer animation, blacksmithing, and generative art. He received his BASc in electrical engineering and MSc from the University of Toronto, where he contributed to internationally recognized research in the field of computer animation. As a classically trained musician with a strong background in sound technology, he brings together all of his interests in a bespoke art practice, using low-level computer code and a minimal toolset to craft raw information into audiovisual artworks. His recent generative works explore the unique affordances of programmable blockchains as both subject and medium.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is a Berlin/London-based artist. They received a BA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2019. Brathwaite-Shirley works predominantly in animation, sound, performance, and video game development. Their practice focuses on intertwining lived experience with fiction to imaginatively retell the stories of Black Trans people. Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions and performances at institutions such as SCAD (2023), Artnight Dundee (2023), Villa Arson, Nice (2023), FACTLiverpool (2022), Project Arts Centre, Ireland (2022), Skänes konstförening, Malmö, Sweden (2022), QUAD, Derby, England (2021), Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2021), Science Gallery, London (2020), and MU Hybrid Art House, London (2020). Their work has been included in group exhibitions at institutions such as Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin (2022); Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich (2019); Les Urbaines, Lausanne (2019); and Barbican, London (2018).