Anna Ridler – Mosaic Virus – AI/Machine learning

Digital Video with AI & Machine learning

Anna Ridler is an artist and researcher who works with systems of knowledge and how technologies are created in order to better understand the world. She is particularly interested in ideas around the natural world. Her process often involves working with collections of information or data, particularly datasets, to create new and unusual narratives.

In the installations of Mosaic Virus 2018 and Mosaic Virus 2019, the tulips mutate and morph controlled by the unseen financial markets – their colors change along with their shapes, positions and sizes. However if the viewer tries to measure and inspect the stripes on the petals, it becomes evident that this metric is illegible. The first known line chart was created in 1786; the first stock market line chart published in 1933. Before then the display of economic information did not have the same visual narrative that we are now used to, the story was not as fixed. These pieces gesture at other ways of understanding information and perhaps emphasises the strangeness of trying to put an economic value on nature.
It has been exhibited at AI: More than Human, Barbican Centre, London, UK (May 16 – August 26, 2019); City of Participatory Visions, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (August 8 – September 15, 2019); Mutations Créations: Neurones, intelligences simulées, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (February 26 – April 20, 2020); Peer to Peer, Shanghai Centre of Photography, Shanghai, China (December 8 – February 9, 2020). It has been featured in Financial Times, ‘How to Spend It: Artificial intelligence: the art world’s weird and wonderful new medium’ (March 21, 2019); Google Arts & Culture, ‘Anna Ridler: can datasets create art’ exhibition (2019); Bloomberg, ‘A British Artist Gathered 10,000 Tulips to Show AI Is Beautiful’ (August 13, 2019); It’s Nice That, ‘Anna Ridler uses AI to turn 10,000 tulips into a video controlled by bitcoin’ (June 28, 2019); Hyperallergic, “Using AI to Produce “Impossible” Tulips’ (March 1, 2019).