A system of knowledge may seem like an usual place to find artistic inspiration. For Anna Ridler, the process of knowing is key to her exploration of machine learning—and her ability to create new and unusual creative narratives.
Mosaic Virus is a three-screen video installation of continually evolving tulips in bloom, generated by an artificial intelligence. Drawing historical parallels to 17th century ‘tulip mania’, their appearance responds to the prices of bitcoin, representing the hysteria and speculation around crypto-currencies today.
2021-2022
Digital Screen-based artwork using GAN models and custom code
Visualization of time through AI Generated flowers
Check back on the December solstice to experience Circadian Bloom.
The photographs from Myriad (Tulips) served as the training set for the creation of Mosaic Virus. Over three months spent in Utrecht, Netherlands—roughly the length of a tulip season—Anna captured a myriad of digital photos (10,000) of individual flowers. She then printed and hand-labeled the color, size, and shape of each tulip to accentuate the human element to data gathering.
A deep learning model can generate endless tulips, but within the art market, work is only ‘valuable’ once it’s scarce. In this work, the shape and appearance of the tulip is controlled by the price of bitcoin. As the price goes up, the tulips become more stripey (mirroring how striped tulips were deemed most valuable at the height of tulipmania). Labelling the dataset she made with information about the tulips allowed Anna to have more control over the eventual GAN output.
Anna is interested in working with machine learning techniques not to showcase the technology, but as a way to engage with ideas of memory, the role of the creator, the prospect of degeneration, and working through concepts around classification and ontology. Machine learning lets her embed these ideas in the process and bring out associations, expectations, and traces that she wouldn’t be able to do otherwise.
Each screen shows a plant that has a particular type of chronobiological clock, one that will consistently open and close its flowers at fixed times of the day. Together, the artwork essentially works like a kind of clock with the amount the flowers are open indicating the time of day.
These plants behave this way regardless of external stimuli. For example, a night-blooming cactus will only bloom at night, even if it’s exposed to darkness during the daytime and light at night, but a morning glory moved into permanent darkness will still flower in the mornings. The clock is designed to run from dawn to dusk, and changes daily to reflect the precise longitude and latitude it’s programmed for. Imagery of the different flowers evolve in synchrony with their natural counterparts, blooming and closing at the correct time of day.
Circadian Bloom is inspired by Carl Linnaeus’ horologium florae that he proposed in his Philosophia Botanica in 1751 after observing this phenomenon of certain flowers opening and closing at set times of the day.
The flower clock since then has mostly remained a concept. A flower’s circadian rhythm is “filled with complications”–geography, climate, light levels, and seasonality all play a part–which makes it impossible to grow a clock that covers the entire day.
“By working digitally, I’m able to make the clock in real-time, and create a tension between the highly precise and accurate time-keeping methods that sit inside computers and the impractical, imprecise images that result.”
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 measurement and quantification and how this relates to the natural world. Her process often involves working with collections of information or data, particularly datasets, to create new and unusual narratives.
Ridler’s work has been exhibited at cultural institutions worldwide, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Barbican Centre, Centre Pompidou, HeK Basel, the ZKM Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica, Sheffield Documentary Festival, and the Leverhulme Centre for Future Intelligence. She was listed as one of the nine “pioneering artists” exploring AI’s creative potential by Artnet and received an honorary mention in the 2019 Ars Electronica Golden Nica award for the category AI & Life Art. She was also nominated for a “Beazley Designs of the Year” award in 2019 by the Design Museum for her work on datasets and categorisation.
Annaridler.com | Twitter | Instagram
It's said that art imitates life, but what if that art is flora and fauna created by an artist using artificial intelligence? Join a discussion with artists Sofia Crespo, Feileacan McCormick, Anna Ridler, and Daniel Ambrosi and NVIDIA technical specialist Chris Hebert to explore how they use AI in their creative process of generating interpretations of natural forms.
This panel discussion with GTC AI Art Gallery contributors Anna Ridler, Scott Eaton, and Sofia Crespo will explore their personal journeys that led to connecting AI and fine art. It will also cover how the technology has influenced their artistic process, why AI is important in the broader field of fine art, how art education intersects with AI education, and whether AI will be capable of achieving autonomous control over the creative process.
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