Anna Ridler

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.