Holly Herndon

[7] In addition to her solo work, Herndon has been involved in numerous artistic collaborations, including projects with Iranian writer Reza Negarestani, Chicago-based producer Jlin and Dutch design studio Metahaven.

[4] As a teenager, she spent several years living in Berlin on a high school exchange program, absorbed in the city's dance[9] and techno scene.

[2] She studied under John Bischoff, James Fei, Maggi Payne, and Fred Frith, receiving her MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media.

[2] Movement received a score of 8.1 on Pitchfork, who stated that Herndon "uses her crystalline voice as a chief input for her laptop, ultimately arriving at a poignant nexus of electronic accessibility and experimentation that owes as much to her academic forebears as her club contemporaries.

"[16] According to The Quietus, "Movement's sound certainly has its forebears and contemporaries – it's possible to detect traces of everyone from Coil and Aphex Twin to Ellen Allien and Laurel Halo in the mix – but equally it contains elements, both sonic and thematic, that are quite unlike any other electronic music currently out there.

Her rapid-punctuated, ethereal vocals... float above complex, dance music-inspired machinery, producing an effect that is arrestingly gorgeous and frightening all at once.

[8] The album explores a complicated relationship with technology,[22] and includes a track titled "Lonely at the Top" that is intended to trigger Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR).

[29] In 2015, Dryhurst and Herndon released an eleven minute long track called "Recruit", which they made for British menswear line Cottweiler.

[31] This collaborative work with Dryhurst and programmer Jules LaPlace involved a singing AI named Spawn, which they developed over the course of several years.

"[35][36] Holly+ is a method to decentralize Herndon's own identity, which enables a community of stewards to determine whether new media created with her voice should be co-sold in collaboration with Holly herself.

[37][36] In 2021, a real time version of Holly+ premiered at Sonar Festival in Barcelona, Spain in collaboration with Maria Arnal and Tarta Relena.

[46] Herndon contributed a composition titled "Relations" for artist Conrad Shawcross' installation, ADA, which was on view at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, from February 4 to May 19, 2014.

[51] The exhibition, titled Everywhere and Nowhere, featured a combination of a 23.2-channel sound installation and related video works, as well as live performances by dancer and choreographer Jone San Martin, Jiu Jitsu fighter Sam Forsythe, and artist Brian Rogers.

[54] They set up a website called haveibeentrained.com, where artists can search the nearly 5.8 billion images in the Laion-5b dataset that is used to train AI art models Stable Diffusion and Midjourney.

[37] If an artist finds out that their work exists within the dataset, Spawning allows them to declare whether they want to continue or terminate the use of their imagery for AI training.

[37] In March 2023, Spawning, partnering with stock footage company Shutterstock and portfolio platform Artstation, announced that 80 million artworks have been opted out of Stable Diffusion V3 to honor artists' claims.

Herndon (second from left) performing Proto in Bristol, 2019
Herndon being awarded an Art Prize for Digital Human Rights in 2024 by Alexander Schallenberg , foreign minister of Austria.