Anna Ridler
Londres, Royaume-UnisBiography
Anna Ridler is a British artist and researcher who lives and works in London. She has degrees from the Royal College of Art, Oxford University, University of Arts London and has a fellowship at the Creative Computing Institute at UAL. She has shown at a variety of cultural institutions and galleries including the Tate Modern and the V&A. She was listed by Artnet as one of nine “pioneering artists” exploring AI’s creative potential and received an honorary mention in the 2019 Ars Electronica Golden Nica award for the category AI & Life Art. She is interested in working with collections of information or data, particularly self-generated data sets, to create new and unusual narratives in a variety of mediums.
About the artwork
Mosaic Virus
Drawing historical parallels from “tulip-mania” that swept across The Netherlands and Europe in the 1630s to the speculation currently ongoing around crypto-currencies, Mosaic Virus work is generated by an artificial intelligence (AI). It shows a tulip blooming, an updated version of a Dutch still life for the 21st century. The appearance of the tulip is controlled by bitcoin prices. “Mosaic” is the name of the virus causing the stripes in a petal which increased their desirability and helped cause speculations over prices. In this piece, the stripes depend on the value of bitcoin, changing over time to show how the market fluctuates.
Myriad
Myriad (Tulips) is an installation made up of 10,000 polaroid photos of Dutch tulips that Anna personally photographed and labelled by hand. The images become a ‘training set’ – information given to an algorithm so it can learn – for a separate project. The artist has laboriously created her own dataset through capturing, organizing and labelling the images. Through this, Anna is showing the possibility of an alternative way of engaging with artificial intelligence (AI).
