Moving from art work to art work, the couple discussed Mary’s “embedding.” In machine learning, embeddings distill data down to concepts. They were particularly taken with an exhibit of Virgin Mary iconography from around the world: a faceless, abstract stone carving from Cameroon a pale, blue-eyed statuette from Ecuador a Black Mary from Senegal, dressed in an ornate gown of blue and gold. Herndon and her husband, Mathew Dryhurst, had been on a short vacation in the mountains nearby. The sanctuary, built in the nineteen-seventies, sits on a cliff overlooking an inviting blue reservoir, in a remote area just south of the Pyrenees.
Last fall, the artist and musician Holly Herndon visited Torreciudad, a shrine to the Virgin Mary associated with the controversial Catholic group Opus Dei, in Aragón, Spain.
