Anna Ridler

Biography

Anna Ridler, born in 1985, is a London-based artist and researcher whose work investigates the creative and social possibilities of artificial intelligence and machine learning. A distinguishing feature of her practice is her insistence on building her own datasets by hand rather than relying on existing, pre-labeled image collections, a slow and deliberately handmade process that she treats as an artistic act in itself and a way of retaining authorship and care within otherwise automated systems. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Language from Oxford University and a Master of Arts in Information Experience Design from the Royal College of Art, a combined background in language and design that informs her interest in how data, narrative, and value intersect. Ridler is best known for her tulip-focused body of work, beginning with Myriad (Tulips), an installation of thousands of individually hand-photographed and labeled tulip images that she created herself as training data. She used this dataset to produce Mosaic Virus, a multi-screen video installation in which an AI-generated tulip blooms and mutates on screen, its appearance tied to the fluctuating price of Bitcoin. The work draws a deliberate historical parallel between the seventeenth-century Dutch tulip mania and contemporary cryptocurrency speculation, using flowers to comment on the volatility of speculative markets, whether floral or financial. Since 2017, Ridler's AI-driven work has been exhibited at major institutions including the V&A, the Barbican Centre, Tate Modern, HEK Basel, the Centre Pompidou, ZKM Karlsruhe, and Ars Electronica. She has also collaborated with other artists and researchers, including projects made jointly with Sofia Crespo and Caroline Sinders. Across her output, Anna Ridler treats artificial intelligence not as an autonomous creative force but as a tool that is only as thoughtful, careful, and honest as the human-built data placed behind it.