Anna Ridler

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.

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.