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.
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.
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.
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.
