Anna Ridler & Avant Arte
New collaboration coming soon
“Showcasing a dataset is like exposing the DNA of the model.”
Nature, speculation and artificial intelligence
Anna Ridler spins the sublime out of cold, hard data. One of her early collaborative works, Alice and Bob (2017) is composed of two screens that display love letters between an imaginary couple. The declarations are so emotive it is hard to believe that the generative algorithm behind them is trained solely on sterile, scientific texts. “Is this all we should expect? We hoped for more,” one machine asks the other. Anna uses artificial intelligence to better understand human desire and how it is projected onto the world in the form of what we value. In subversive works like TTL (2023), a series...
Anna Ridler spins the sublime out of cold, hard data. One of her early collaborative works, Alice and Bob (2017) is composed of two screens that display love letters between an imaginary couple. The declarations are so emotive it is hard to believe that the generative algorithm behind them is trained solely on sterile, scientific texts. “Is this all we should expect? We hoped for more,” one machine asks the other. Anna uses artificial intelligence to better understand human desire and how it is projected onto the world in the form of what we value. In subversive works like TTL (2023), a series of NFTs programmed to self-destruct if traded within the next few centuries, Anna challenges the idea of what makes something valuable in the first place.
Abstract concepts like time, value and desire find grounding in the earthly objects Anna chooses to express them with like coral, flowers and sea water. Anna likens her methodology to that of land artists on account of the “very slow involved way of building a system, and then allowing something that you can predict but never control to act on that system.” For example, in Mosaic Virus (2018) and Mosaic Virus (2019) she programmed an image of a tulip to mutate based on the fluctuating value of Bitcoin. The output is an enchanting portrait of our collective decisions. Anna shows how everything we produce, from oil paintings to algorithms, inevitably contains fragments of our humanity.
Bio
Anna Ridler (she/her) was born in 1985 in London, where she continues to live and work.
Tricks on-chain
Bloemenveiling (2019) is a series of generative tulip videos sold as NFTs via smart contract. Much to the dismay of collectors who failed to read the fine print, the artworks were programmed to self-destruct one week later. While traces of the project survive across the internet, none of the tulips themselves remain.
On AI
“There is always a human decision somewhere along the chain of using AI – even something as simple as a tulip is difficult to put into discrete categories - is it white or pale pink? Is it orange or yellow? If this is difficult for something as simple as a flower, imagine how difficult it will be for something as complex as gender or identity.”
