Anna Ridler

Anna Ridler (b. 1985) is an artist and researcher who lives and works in London. She works with collections of information or data, particularly self-generated data sets, to create new and unusual narratives in a variety of mediums.[1]

Anna Ridler
Born1985 (1985)
London, United Kingdom
NationalityBritish
EducationRoyal College of Art
Oxford University
Known forDigital art, Machine learning
Websiteannaridler.com

Her work has been exhibited widely at cultural institutions including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Modern, Barbican Centre, Centre Pompidou, Hek Basel, The Photographers' Gallery, ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, and Ars Electronica.[2]

Biography

Born in London in 1985, Ridler spent her childhood raised between Atlanta, Georgia and the United Kingdom.[3] She obtained a Master of Arts in Information Experience Design from the Royal College of Art in 2017 and a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Language from Oxford University in 2007.[4]

Art

A core element of her work lies in the creation of handmade data sets through a laborious process of selecting and classifying images and text.[5] By creating her own data sets, Ridler is able to uncover and expose underlying themes and concepts while also inverting the usual process of scraping pre-classified images found in large databases on the internet.[6] Her interests are in drawing, machine learning, data collection, storytelling, and technology.[7]

Selected works

Some of Anna Ridler's most notable works to date fall within her ‘tulip series’ which explores the hysteria around tulip mania and compares it to the speculation and bubbles surrounding cryptocurrencies today.[8] The series is expressed in three forms: a photographic dataset in Myriad (Tulips), 2018; two iterations of machine generated videos in Mosaic Virus (2018) and Mosaic Virus (2019); and a website with an accompanied functioning decentralized application in Bloemenveiling (2019).

Myriad (Tulips) (2018)

I wanted to draw together ideas around capitalism, value, and the tangible and intangible nature of speculation, and collapse from two very different yet surprisingly similar moments in history.

— Anna Ridler, [9]

Myriad (Tulips) (2018) is an installation of ten thousand hand-labeled photographs forming a dataset of unique tulips. The ten thousand, or myriad of, photographs were taken by Ridler over the course of three months, roughly the length of a tulip season, spent in Utrecht. Each photograph is carefully affixed one by one with magnets to a specially painted black wall in a laborious process to form a seemingly precise grid.

Exhibited in AI: More than Human, Barbican Centre, London, UK (May 16 - August 26, 2019);[10] Error—The Art of Imperfection, Ars Electronica Export, Berlin, Germany (November 17, 2018 – March 3, 2019);[11] Peer to Peer, Shanghai Centre of Photography, Shanghai, China (December 8 - February 9, 2020).[12]

Featured in Financial Times, Google Arts & Culture, Bloomberg, It’s Nice That and Hyperallergic.

Nominated for a Beazley Design of the Year award for her presentation of an alternative perspective on how to engage with artificial intelligence; demonstrating a departure from ownership and control of major corporations to a more personalized process of constructing and conceptualizing from the ground-up.[13]

Mosaic Virus (2018, 2019)

Mosaic Virus (2018) is a single screen video installation displaying a grid of continually evolving tulips in bloom. For Mosaic Virus (2019) Ridler used three screens.[14] The appearance of the tulips is controlled by artificial intelligence using fluctuations in the price of bitcoin. The stripes on the petals reflecting the value of the cryptocurrency. She draws parallels with the tulip mania of the 17th century; representing the hysteria and speculation around crypto-currencies. The work takes its name from the mosaic virus which caused stripes in tulip petals, subsequently increasing their desirability and leading to speculative prices.[15]

Ridler trained a general adversarial network (GAN) on the set of ten thousand photographs of individual tulips from her work Myriad (Tulips). She used a technique called spectral normalization to improve the output.[16][15]

The work was exhibited in Error—The Art of Imperfection, Ars Electronica Export, Berlin, Germany (November 17, 2018 – March 3, 2019).[11]

Bloemenveiling (2019)

Bloemenveiling (2019) is an auction of artificial-intelligence-generated tulips on the blockchain in the form of a functioning decentralized application: http://bloemenveiling.bid.[17] Ridler collaborated with senior research scientist at DeepMind, David Pfau to investigate whether blockchain could be used as a means of finding poetic substance within it.[18] The piece interrogates the way technology drives human desire and economic dynamics by creating artificial scarcity.[19]

In the work, short moving image pieces of tulips created by generative adversarial networks are sold at auction using smart contracts on the Ethereum network.[20] Each time a tulip is sold, thousands of computers around the world all work to verify the transaction, checking each other's work against each other. While the artificial intelligence behind the moving image pieces has the potential to generate infinite flowers, the enormous distributed network is used, at great environmental cost, to introduce scarcity to an otherwise limitless resource.

Exhibited in Entangled Realities, HEK Basel, Basel, Switzerland (9 May – 11 August).

Solo exhibitions
  • 2020 – The Abstraction of Nature, Aksioma, Ljubljana, Slovenia
  • 2020 – Laws of Order and Form, The Photographers’ Gallery, London, UK
  • 2019 – Cryptobloom, A+T Espacio de Fundación Telefónica, Mexico City, Mexico
  • 2019 – Dreaming, Automated, Robert L. Ringel Gallery Purdue University, Indiana
  • 2018 – Traces of Things, Blitz Gallery, Valletta, Malta

Selected group exhibitions
  • 2020 – Mutations Créations: Neurones, intelligences simulées, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (26 February - 20 April)
  • 2019 – Beazley Designs of the Year, Design Museum, London, UK (11 September - 9 February 2020)
  • 2019 – City of Participatory Visions, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany (8 August - 15 September)
  • 2019 – AI: More than Human, Barbican Centre, London, UK (16 May - 26 August)
  • 2019 – Entangled Realities, HEK Basel, Basel, Switzerland (9 May – 11 August)
  • 2019 – Forging the Gods, Transfer Gallery, New York, USA (18 April - 11 May)
  • 2019 – New Technologies, New Visions, Geffen Contemporary Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (April)
  • 2018 – Error: The Art of Imperfection, Ars Electronica Export, Berlin, Germany (17 November - 31 March 2019)
  • 2018 – Post Truth: Algorithmic Superstructures, Impakt, Utrecht, Netherlands (October - November)
  • 2018 – The Line Up: The Power of Drawing, Centraal Museum, Utrecht, Netherlands (22 September – 18 November)
  • 2018 – Error Fake Failure, Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria (6-10 September)
  • 2018 – Artificially IntelligentDisplay, V&A Museum, London, UK (7 September - 31 December)
  • 2018 – Gradient Descent, Nature Morte, New Delhi, (17 August - 15 September)
  • 2017 – Machine Fictions, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, Cambridge, UK (July)
  • 2017 – Alternate Realities, Sheffield Documentary Festival, Sheffield, UK (6-11 June)

Awards and fellowships
  • 2020 – Ars Electronica AI Lab Fellowship
  • 2019 – Google Artists + Machine Intelligence (AMI) Grant
  • 2019 – Beazley Designs of the Year awards nominee
  • 2019 – Honorary Mention in Ars Electronica prix category AI and Life Arts
  • 2019 – UAL Creative Computing Institute Fellowship
  • 2019 – DARE Prize for Radical Interdisciplinary Research
  • 2018 – EMAP Fellow

References
  1. "Meet the speakers: Anna Ridler, Artist". Future Everything. Retrieved 14 May 2020.
  2. "About - Anna Ridler". Anna Ridler. Retrieved 13 May 2020.
  3. Ridler, Anna. "CV - Anna Ridler". Anna Ridler. Retrieved 14 May 2020.
  4. Ridler, Anna. "CV - Anna Ridler". Anna Ridler. Retrieved 14 May 2020.
  5. Hutchings, Patrick; Ridler, Anna. "Artist Interview with Anna Ridler". ai.SensiLab. Retrieved 14 May 2020.
  6. Ridler, Anna. "Guest blog post: Fall of the House of Usher. Datasets and Decay". Victoria & Albert Museum. Retrieved 14 May 2020.
  7. Wagner, Siobhan. "A British Artist Gathered 10,000 Tulips to Show AI Is Beautiful". Bloomberg. Retrieved 14 May 2020.
  8. "Artificial intelligence: the art world's weird and wonderful new medium". Financial Times. Retrieved 14 May 2020.
  9. Boddington, Ruby. "Anna Ridler uses AI to turn 10,000 tulips into a video controlled by bitcoin". It's Nice That. Retrieved 14 May 2020.
  10. "AI: More than Human | Barbican". www.barbican.org.uk. Retrieved 2020-05-15.
  11. "ERROR - The Art of Imperfection". Ars Electronica Export. Retrieved 2020-05-15.
  12. "Peer to Peer-SCoP". en.scop.org.cn. Retrieved 2020-05-15.
  13. "Myriad (Tulips)". The Design Museum. Retrieved 14 May 2020.
  14. "A British artist gathered 10,000 tulips to show AI is beautiful". Hindustan Times. 2019-08-14. Retrieved 2020-05-15.
  15. Ayers, Elaine (1 March 2019). "Using AI to Produce "Impossible" Tulips". Hyperallergic. Retrieved 14 May 2020.
  16. "Has Artificial Intelligence Brought Us the Next Great Art Movement? Here Are 9 Artists Who Are Exploring AI's Creative Potential". artnet News. 2018-11-06. Retrieved 2020-05-15.
  17. Campbell-Dollaghan, Kelsey (27 June 2019). "17th-century Tulip Mania is alive and well—on the blockchain". Fast Company. Retrieved 14 May 2020.
  18. "Artist Interview with Anna Ridler". ai.SensiLab. Retrieved 14 May 2020.
  19. "Editor's Pick: 'Bloemenveiling' by Anna Ridler and David Pfau". CLOT Magazine. Retrieved 15 May 2020.
  20. "Editor's Pick: 'Bloemenveiling' by Anna Ridler and David Pfau". CLOT Magazine. Retrieved 14 May 2020.
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