Anna Ridler – What's it worth?

As new ways of making unfold, Notes on Creation reflects on the self-devised processes used by today’s most exciting artists.

An object’s value can be defined in two ways.
1. by a number we assign to it (usually its price)
2. by how much you care about it

The two are interconnected. How much we are willing to pay for something is directly related to how much we care about it. This is not just an individual decision, but collectively defined. The simplest explanation of value is a calculation of supply and demand – how many people want an object compared with how many are available. However, why an object might be in demand in the first place is a complex question. For several years, conceptual artist Anna Ridler has dedicated her practice to speculation and its impact on value.

Although Anna Ridler works with generative systems, artificial intelligence and blockchain, she doesn’t consider herself a web 3.0 artist. In fact, her research-based practice predates much of what we would call web 3.0 art today. Anna is most concerned with abstract concepts like time, desire and, of course, value. For her, web 3.0 is an arena within which these ideas are being reconstructed, and therefore ripe for exploration.

Take cryptocurrency, for example. In 2018, the price of Bitcoin was falling fast. Economists and commentators were rushing to declare the crypto bubble burst, like the dot-com bubble of the 1990s. Anna saw parallels with a much earlier phenomenon – tulipmania.

In the early 1600s, European high society went wild for tulips. They had arrived on the continent from Western Asia in the previous century, and were celebrated for their beauty and diversity. Tulips quickly became a status symbol, particularly among the growing Dutch merchant class. Prices skyrocketed. Anna describes how “at the height of the mania a single tulip bulb went for the same price as an Amsterdam townhouse, before tumbling down to the price of an onion. It's thought to be one of the earliest known speculative bubbles.” This means that part of the reason the value of tulips continued to increase was because of investors' faith that this would happen. Many merchants made a quick fortune with tulips, but bubbles always burst.

While it’s easy to blame tulipmania on the naivety of a bygone era, what it reveals about the relationship between human desire and value remains prescient. This revelation led Anna to embark on a mammoth project. In 2018 she took 10,000 photographs of tulips to make a dataset that she in turn used to train a GAN. A GAN, or generative adversarial network, is a machine learning system that can model new images or information based on existing data.

During tulipmania and still today, the value of a tulip is dependent on colour, pattern and variety. Anna sought to replicate this in her dataset. The process was time-consuming and challenging.

There is always a human decision somewhere along the chain of using AI, it is not this absolute correct thing. 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.

Anna Ridler

Complexity is what Anna does best. Her artistic process is research intensive, yet exploratory. She allows new lines of inquiry to emerge based on what the data reveals, and doesn’t begin with a rigid idea of what the final output will be. Her research on tulips is the basis of various interrelated projects, the first three being Myriad (Tulips), Mosaic Virus and Bloemenveiling.

Myriad Tulips

Myriad (Tulips) (2018) is an arrangement of all of the photographs that Anna took of the tulips. Anna refers to this visualisation of the training data as the “DNA of the model.” It is rare for datasets to be public knowledge, let alone exhibited. Many AI companies are intentionally secretive about the data used to train their models. Anna rebels against this secrecy.

The hand-labelled photographs form an enormous 50 square metre grid when displayed in full. The work appears like an impressionist garden of the digital age. The mental and physical labour behind the craft is right there for the viewer to see. This is pertinent because artists that work with machines are often maligned as not doing any ‘real work.’ The process of working with computers is misunderstood and therefore devalued, particularly in the era of text-to-image generators like Midjourney. Anna’s practice stands apart.

l think there’s parallels between working with machine learning and the very involved, slow methods of land artists. You're spending time planning, thinking and building a system. Then you allow something that you can predict but never control to act on the system that you've created and that becomes part of what comes out.

Anna Ridler

Mosaic Virus

Mosaic Virus (2018 and 2019) returns to the inquiry that prompted the artistic investigation. Was Bitcoin a speculative bubble in the same way as tulipmania? Anna prompted her GAN to create new tulips based on the 10,000 real ones she photographed. While all of the original tulips had since wilted, these generative tulips could, in theory, live forever.

The GAN I have made is constructing an image not of a real tulip, but what it thinks a tulip should be, based on all of the tulips that are contained in the dataset. Neither are replicating an exact flower, but rather forming a concept of a flower, and recording it as such.

Anna Ridler

Aesthetically, the generated tulips resemble Dutch still life – a painting style that was popular in the 17th century during tulipmania. The title of the work, Mosaic Virus, is also a nod to that era. It refers to a virus that causes the flower to have unique stripes – the cause of the mutation was unknown, but these flowers fetched the highest prices. Mosaic Virus emphasises the element of unpredictability and confusion that characterises speculative bubbles, attributing it to a "knowledge gap."

Anna then coded the tulips into video works that were controlled by the price of Bitcoin – “shifting and morphing as the market shifts and morphs.” The work oscillates between sublime and uncanny as the flower mutates, and asks whether the abstract value associated with an object can change how the actual object is perceived. Furthermore, as a work of art, the value of Mosaic Virus is dependent on another market entirely. Where does that value emerge from?

Bloemenveiling

Bloemenveiling (2019) was the third phase of Anna’s tulip project. Created in collaboration with David Pfau, the early NFT series remains one of the most groundbreaking works in the field. The series is named after the enormous flower auction that takes place in the Netherlands. Global flower prices are determined there by a combination of human bidders and bots – because even flowers aren’t separate from this new digital world. Similarly, these generative tulips were auctioned off unseen as if still in bud form. The highest bidders on each tulip could activate the custom Ethereum smart contract and actually see the work, but that wasn’t the end of the story.

The contracts were programmed to show the video, or bloom, for a week – approximately the same amount of time a cut tulip lasts – before the tulip became ‘blighted’ and disappeared from the owner’s view. This allowed the viewer to appreciate it as a work of art as opposed to a commodity – negating the original intent of NFTs as speculative assets.

Anna Ridler

The disappearance of the tulips confused collectors who failed to read the fine print. Today only traces of the original work remain, like an on-chain fossil. It raises important questions about how NFTs – and all art – should be valued and experienced. Is something more valuable if it’s eternal or ephemeral, like a flower that blooms only once? Is value always pure speculation or can it ever be fixed? Ultimately, the answer to these questions cannot be found by studying objects – physical or digital – but in the human behaviours that govern both markets and AI.

In pursuit of these conceptual questions, Anna Ridler has become one of the most innovative voices in contemporary art. Her practice extends far beyond tulips to cypress trees, coral, love letters and circadian rhythms. Nonetheless, she often returns to this dataset of tulips to test new models and ideas.