Anna Ridler (born 1985) is an artist and researcher who lives and works in

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

. She works with collections of

information Information is an Abstraction, abstract concept that refers to something which has the power Communication, to inform. At the most fundamental level, it pertains to the Interpretation (philosophy), interpretation (perhaps Interpretation (log ...

data Data ( , ) are a collection of discrete or continuous values that convey information, describing the quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted for ...

, particularly self-generated data sets, to create new and unusual narratives in a variety of mediums. Her work has been exhibited widely at cultural institutions including the

Victoria and Albert Museum The Victoria and Albert Museum (abbreviated V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.8 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and named after Queen ...

Tate Modern Tate Modern is an art gallery in London, housing the United Kingdom's national collection of international Modern art, modern and contemporary art (created from or after 1900). It forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Live ...

Barbican Centre The Barbican Centre is a performing arts centre in the Barbican Estate of the City of London, England, and the largest of its kind in Europe. The centre hosts classical and contemporary music concerts, theatre performances, film screenings a ...

Centre Pompidou The Centre Pompidou (), more fully the (), also known as the Pompidou Centre in English and colloquially as Beaubourg, is a building complex in Paris, France. It was designed in the style of high-tech architecture by the architectural team of ...

The Photographers' Gallery The Photographers' Gallery was founded in London by Sue Davies opening on 14 January 1971, as the first public gallery in the United Kingdom devoted solely to photography. It is also home to the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, established ...

ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe The ZKM , Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (until March 2016: ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology), a cultural institution, was founded in 1989 and, since 1997, is located in a former munitions factory in Karlsruhe, Germany. The ZKM (Germa ...

, and

Ars Electronica Ars Electronica Linz GmbH is an Austrian cultural, educational and scientific institute active in the field of new media art, founded in Linz in 1979. It is based at the Ars Electronica Center (AEC), which houses the Museum of the Future, in t ...

Biography

Born in

in 1985, Ridler spent her childhood raised between

Atlanta, Georgia Atlanta ( ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital and List of municipalities in Georgia (U.S. state), most populous city in the U.S. state of Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia. It is the county seat, seat of Fulton County, Georg ...

and the United Kingdom. She obtained a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Language from

Oxford University The University of Oxford is a collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the second-oldest continuously operating u ...

in 2007 and a Master of Arts in Information Experience Design from the

Royal College of Art The Royal College of Art (RCA) is a public university, public research university in London, United Kingdom, with campuses in South Kensington, Battersea and White City, London, White City. It is the only entirely postgraduate art and design uni ...

in 2017.

Art

A core element of Ridler's work lies in the creation of handmade data sets through a laborious process of selecting and classifying images and text. 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 Scrape, scraper or scraping may refer to: Biology and medicine * Abrasion (medical), a type of injury * Scraper (biology), grazer-scraper, a water animal that feeds on stones and other substrates by grazing algae, microorganism and other matter ...

pre-classified images found in large databases on the internet. Her interests are in drawing,

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

data collection Data collection or data gathering is the process of gathering and measuring information on targeted variables in an established system, which then enables one to answer relevant questions and evaluate outcomes. Data collection is a research com ...

, storytelling, and technology.

Selected works

Some of Anna Ridler's most notable works to date fall within her ‘tulip series’ which explores the hysteria around

tulip mania Tulip mania () was a period during the Dutch Golden Age when contract prices for some bulbs of the recently introduced and fashionable tulip reached extraordinarily high levels. The major acceleration started in 1634 and then dramatically co ...

and compares it to the speculation and bubbles surrounding

cryptocurrencies A cryptocurrency (colloquially crypto) is a digital currency designed to work through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it. Individual coin ownership records ...

. 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 A decentralised application (DApp, dApp, Dapp, or dapp) is an Application software, application that can operate autonomously, typically through the use of smart contracts, that run on a decentralized computing, blockchain or other distributed le ...

in ''Bloemenveiling'' (2019).

''Myriad (Tulips)'' (2018)

''Myriad (Tulips)'' (2018) is an installation of ten thousand hand-labeled photographs forming a

dataset A data set (or dataset) is a collection of data. In the case of tabular data, a data set corresponds to one or more database tables, where every column of a table represents a particular variable, and each row corresponds to a given record o ...

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 Utrecht ( ; ; ) is the List of cities in the Netherlands by province, fourth-largest city of the Netherlands, as well as the capital and the most populous city of the Provinces of the Netherlands, province of Utrecht (province), Utrecht. The ...

. 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. ''Myriad (Tulips)'' (2018) has been exhibited in ''AI: More than Human'', Barbican Centre, London, UK (May 16 - August 26, 2019); ''Error—The Art of Imperfection'', Ars Electronica Export, Berlin, Germany (November 17, 2018 – March 3, 2019); ''Peer to Peer'', Shanghai Centre of Photography, Shanghai, China (December 8 - February 9, 2020). The work was featured in Bloomberg, It’s Nice That, and Hyperallergic. For ''Myriad (Tulips)'', Ridler was 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.

''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. The appearance of the tulips is controlled by

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

using fluctuations in the price of

bitcoin Bitcoin (abbreviation: BTC; Currency symbol, sign: ₿) is the first Decentralized application, decentralized cryptocurrency. Based on a free-market ideology, bitcoin was invented in 2008 when an unknown entity published a white paper under ...

. The stripes on the tulips' petals reflect the value of the

cryptocurrency A cryptocurrency (colloquially crypto) is a digital currency designed to work through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it. Individual coin ownership record ...

. Ridler draws parallels with the

of the 17th century; representing the hysteria and speculation around crypto-currencies. The work takes its name from the

mosaic virus A mosaic virus is any virus that causes infected plant foliage to have a mottled appearance. Such viruses come from a variety of unrelated lineages and consequently there is no taxon that unites all mosaic viruses. Examples Virus species tha ...

which caused stripes in tulip petals, subsequently increasing their desirability and leading to speculative prices. 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. The work was exhibited in ''Error—The Art of Imperfection'', Ars Electronica Export, Berlin, Germany (November 17, 2018 – March 3, 2019).

''Bloemenveiling'' (2019)

''Bloemenveiling'' (2019) is an auction of artificial-intelligence-generated tulips on the

blockchain The blockchain is a distributed ledger with growing lists of Record (computer science), records (''blocks'') that are securely linked together via Cryptographic hash function, cryptographic hashes. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of th ...

in the form of a functioning decentralized application: http://bloemenveiling.bid. Ridler collaborated with senior research scientist at

DeepMind DeepMind Technologies Limited, trading as Google DeepMind or simply DeepMind, is a British–American artificial intelligence research laboratory which serves as a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. Founded in the UK in 2010, it was acquired by Go ...

David Pfau
to investigate whether blockchain could be used as a means of finding poetic substance within it. The piece interrogates the way technology drives human desire and economic dynamics by creating

artificial scarcity Artificial scarcity is scarcity of items despite the technology for production or the sufficient capacity for sharing. The most common causes are monopoly pricing structures, such as those enabled by laws that restrict competition or by high f ...

. In the work, short moving image pieces of tulips created by generative adversarial networks are sold at auction using

smart contracts A smart contract is a computer program or a transaction protocol that is intended to automatically execute, control or document events and actions according to the terms of a contract or an agreement. The objectives of smart contracts are the re ...

on the

Ethereum Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether (abbreviation: ETH) is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. Among cryptocurrencies, ether is second only to bitcoin in market capitalization. It is open-s ...

network. 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, a
great environmental cost
to introduce scarcity to an otherwise limitless resource. ''Bloemenveiling'' was exhibited in ''Entangled Realities'', HEK Basel, Basel, Switzerland in 2019.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ridler, Anna 1985 births Living people Artificial intelligence art Artificial intelligence researchers Artists from London Alumni of the Royal College of Art Alumni of the University of Oxford 21st-century British women artists