Anna Ridler (born 1985) is an artist who works with machine learning, handmade archives and moving image. She builds her own datasets to expose the labour and ideology embedded in the systems that organise knowledge.

Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, M+ and ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, and has been exhibited widely at cultural institutions including Tate Modern, Barbican Centre, Centre Pompidou, The Photographers' Gallery, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, MIT Museum, Kunsthaus Graz, ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, the Francisco Carolinum[1] and Ars Electronica.[2] [3]

Biography

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

Art practice

Ridler's practice uses technology, and in particular machine learning, to investigate how naming, classification and financial speculation determine what can be seen and what is erased. 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.[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] She began working with machine learning as an artistic material in 2017, at a moment when the technology required building every dataset by hand; that constraint became the foundation of the practice. Her interests are in drawing, machine learning, data collection, storytelling and technology.[7]

Work

Some of 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.[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)

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.

Myriad (Tulips) (2018) has been 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]

The work was featured in Bloomberg,[13] It’s Nice That,[14] and Hyperallergic.[15]

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.[16]