Anna Ridler: can datasets create art?
Artist Anna Ridler looks at the politics and process of using large datasets to produce a piece of art in her tulip inspired work.
Myriad (Tulips)
In Myriad (Tulips), artist Anna Ridler looks at the politics and process of using large datasets to produce a piece of art.
Anna Ridler, Myriad. (2019/2019) by Anna RidlerBarbican Centre
Inspiration
Inspired by ‘tulip-mania’ - the financial craze for tulip bulbs that swept across the Netherlands in the 1630s, she took 10,000 photographs of tulips and categorised them by hand, revealing the human aspect that sits behind machine learning.
Anna Ridler, Myriad. (2019/2019) by Anna RidlerBarbican Centre
The work is an updated version of a Dutch still life for the 21st Century.
Anna Ridler, Myriad. (2019/2019) by Anna RidlerBarbican Centre
Anna Ridler, Myriad. (2019/2019) by Anna RidlerBarbican Centre
The algorithm
Myriad is the training set - the information given to the algorithm from which it learns - and was used to create the work, Mosaic Virus which is on display in AI: More than Human
'Mosaic Virus'
Anna Ridler's second piece 'Mosaic Virus' uses this data set to create a video work generated by an AI, which shows a tulip blooming. The appearance of the tulip is controlled by bitcoin price. 'Mosaic' is the name of the virus that causes the stripes in a petal which increased their desirability and helped cause the speculative prices during the time. In this piece, the stripes depend on the value of bitcoin, changing over time to show how the market fluctuates.
Still from Anna Ridler's work, Mosaic Virus (2019/2019) by Barbican Centre and Anna RidlerBarbican Centre
"What is nice about getting an AI to "imagine" or "dream" tulips is that it echoes 17th century Dutch still life flower paintings which, despite their realism, are "botanical impossibilities" and imagined as all the flowers in them could never bloom at the same time."
Anna Ridler
Still from Anna Ridler's work, Mosaic Virus (2019/2019) by Barbican Centre and Anna RidlerBarbican Centre
Still from Anna Ridler's work, Mosaic Virus (2019/2019) by Barbican Centre and Anna RidlerBarbican Centre
Still from Anna Ridler's work, Mosaic Virus (2019/2019) by Barbican Centre and Anna RidlerBarbican Centre
Still from Anna Ridler's work, Mosaic Virus (2019/2019) by Barbican Centre and Anna RidlerBarbican Centre
Still from Anna Ridler's work, Mosaic Virus (2019/2019) by Barbican Centre and Anna RidlerBarbican Centre
Snapshot of Anna Ridler's algorithm 'learning' what tulips look like for Mosaic Virus. (2019/2019) by Barbican Centre and Anna RidlerBarbican Centre
Anna Ridler is an 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 have shown at a variety of cultural institutions and galleries including Ars Electronica, Sheffield Documentary Festival, Leverhulme Centre for Future Intelligence, Tate Modern and the V&A. 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, and how new technologies, such as machine learning, can be used to translate them to an audience. She is currently working with and researching the creative potential of machine learning, and how it relates to drawing and painting.
AI: More Than Human is a major exhibition exploring creative and scientific developments in AI, demonstrating its potential to revolutionise our lives. The exhibition takes place at the Barbican Centre, London from 16 May—26 Aug 2019.
Part of Life Rewired, our 2019 season exploring what it means to be human when technology is changing everything.
