Anna Ridler facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Anna Ridler
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| Born | 1985 (age 39–40) |
| Nationality | British |
| Education | Royal College of Art Oxford University |
| Known for | Digital art, Machine learning |
Anna Ridler, born in 1985, is a British artist and researcher based in London. She creates art using collections of information, also known as data. Anna often makes her own unique data sets to tell interesting stories through different art forms. Her artwork has been shown in many famous places, like the Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate Modern in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
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About Anna Ridler
Anna Ridler was born in London in 1985. She grew up living between Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States, and the United Kingdom. She studied English Literature and Language at Oxford University. Later, she earned a Master's degree in Information Experience Design from the Royal College of Art.
How Anna Ridler Creates Art
A key part of Anna Ridler's art is making her own data sets. She does this by carefully choosing and sorting images and text. This process takes a lot of effort and time. By creating her own data, Anna can find hidden meanings and ideas. It also changes the usual way data is collected from large online databases.
Anna is very interested in drawing and how computers can learn. She explores how we collect data and tell stories. Her work often combines art with new technologies.
Famous Artworks: The Tulip Series
Some of Anna Ridler's most well-known artworks are part of her 'tulip series'. This series looks at the wild excitement around "tulip mania" from the 1600s. She compares it to the excitement and speculation around cryptocurrencies today. The series includes three main types of art. These are a photo collection, videos made by computers, and a special website.
Myriad (Tulips) (2018)
Anna Ridler once said about this work: "I wanted to connect ideas about money, value, and the real and unreal parts of speculation. I also wanted to link the ups and downs from two very different times in history."
Myriad (Tulips) (2018) is an art piece with ten thousand unique tulip photographs. Anna took these photos herself over three months. This is about how long a tulip season lasts. She took the pictures while staying in Utrecht, a city in the Netherlands. Each photo is carefully placed one by one onto a black wall. They form a neat grid using magnets.
This artwork has been shown in many places. It was part of the AI: More than Human exhibit at the Barbican Centre in London. It was also displayed in Error—The Art of Imperfection in Berlin, Germany. In 2019, Anna Ridler was nominated for a Beazley Design of the Year award for Myriad (Tulips). This was because she showed a new way to think about artificial intelligence. She focused on a personal way of creating art, rather than just using big company data.
Mosaic Virus (2018, 2019)
Mosaic Virus (2018) is a video art piece. It shows a grid of tulips that are always changing and blooming. For Mosaic Virus (2019), Anna used three screens instead of one. The way the tulips look is controlled by artificial intelligence. This AI uses changes in the price of bitcoin, a type of cryptocurrency. The stripes on the tulip petals show the value of the cryptocurrency.
Anna connects this to the "tulip mania" of the 17th century. This was a time when tulip prices went incredibly high. Her art shows the excitement and speculation around cryptocurrencies today. The artwork gets its name from the mosaic virus. This virus caused stripes on real tulip petals, which made them more popular and expensive during the tulip mania.
To create this, Anna taught a special computer program called a GAN. She used the ten thousand tulip photos from her Myriad (Tulips) project. She used a technique to make the computer-generated tulips look even better. This work was also shown in the Error—The Art of Imperfection exhibit.
Bloemenveiling (2019)
Bloemenveiling (2019) is an online auction of tulips created by artificial intelligence. These tulips are sold using blockchain technology. You can find this auction at bloemenveiling.bid. Anna Ridler worked with David Pfau, a scientist, on this project. They wanted to see if blockchain could be used to create poetic meaning. This artwork explores how technology influences what people want and how money works. It does this by creating something called "artificial scarcity."
In this artwork, short videos of AI-generated tulips are sold. These videos are made by computer programs called generative adversarial networks. The sales happen using "smart contracts" on the Ethereum network. When a tulip is sold, thousands of computers around the world work together to check the transaction. They all verify each other's work.
Even though the AI can create endless flowers, a huge network of computers is used to make them seem rare. This process uses a lot of energy, which can be bad for the environment. Bloemenveiling was shown in the Entangled Realities exhibit in Basel, Switzerland.
See also
In Spanish: Anna Ridler para niños
