Anna Ridler (born 1985) is a British artist who works with machine learning, handmade archives and moving image. She constructs her own datasets to reveal the labor and ideology embedded in the systems that organize knowledge, often drawing parallels between historical economic phenomena and contemporary digital speculation.
Ridler's work has been acquired for the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, M+ and ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. She has exhibited widely at institutions including Tate Modern, the Barbican Centre, Centre Pompidou, The Photographers' Gallery, the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the MIT Museum, Kunsthaus Graz, the Francisco Carolinum and Ars Electronica.
Biography
Ridler was born in London in 1985. She spent her childhood raised between Atlanta, Georgia and the United Kingdom. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Language from Oxford University in 2007 and a Master of Arts in Information Experience Design from the Royal College of Art in 2017. The shift from literary study to computational art informed her later focus on how naming, classification and narration shape perception.
Art practice
Ridler's practice uses technology - in particular machine learning - to investigate how naming, classification and financial speculation determine what can be seen and what is erased. A core component of her working method is the creation of handmade datasets through laborious processes of selecting, sorting and labeling images and text. By building her own datasets, Ridler exposes the subjective choices and cultural assumptions that typically remain invisible in large, automated archives scraped from the internet.
She began working with machine learning as an artistic material in 2017, when the technology often required building every dataset by hand - a constraint that became the foundation of her practice. Ridler draws on interests in drawing, natural language, data collection, storytelling and technology. She has articulated that laboratory expenditure contrasts with corporate norms of scraping pre-classified images from massive online databases.
Tulip series
Ridler's best-known body of work encompasses her 'tulip series', which explores the historical hysteria around tulip mania during the Dutch Golden Age and draws parallels with speculation and bubbles surrounding cryptocurrencies. The series exists in three complementary forms: a photographic dataset in Myriad (Tulips) (2018); two iterations of machine-generated videos in Mosaic Virus (2018) and Mosaic Virus (2019); and an online auction functioning through a blockchain-based decentralized application in Bloemenveiling (2019).
Myriad (Tulips) (2018)
Myriad (Tulips) (2018) is an installation of ten thousand hand-labeled photographs forming a dataset of unique tulips. Ridler took the ten thousand photographs herself in Utrecht over the course of three months, roughly the length of a tulip season. Each print is affixed carefully by magnets to a specially painted black wall in a seemingly precise grid - a process that arguably inverts the invisibility of data labor. In describing the work, Ridler said she wanted to draw together ideas around capitalism, value, and the tangible and intangible nature of speculation, collapsing two different yet surprisingly similar moments in history.
The work has been exhibited at several venues: AI: More Than Human at the Barbican Centre in London (May 16 to August 26, 2019); Error: The Art of Imperfection at Ars Electronica Export in Berlin (November 17, 2018 - March 3, 2019); and Peer to Peer at the Shanghai Centre of Photography (December 8 to February 9, 2020). It was publicized in Bloomberg, It's Nice That and Hyperallergic. For this piece, Ridler was nominated for a Beazley Design of the Year award,
Mosaic Virus (2018, 2019)
Mosaic Virus (2018) is a single-screen video in bRich grid of continually blooming tulips. For Mosaic Virus (2019), Ridler used a three-screen presentation. The appearance of the tulips is driven by an artificial intelligence model that uses the fluctuating price of bitcoin as input. The stripes on the tulip petals reflect the value of the cryptocurrency, drawing parallels to the tulip mania of the 17th century. The work is named after the mosaic virus that caused stripes in tulip petals, increasing their desirability and leading to speculation.
To make the work, Ridler trained a generative adversarial network (GAN) on the ten thousand photographs from Myriad (Tulips). She incorporated Layer Normalization regularization and used a technique called spectral normalization to stabilize training and improve output. The 2018 version was shown at Error - The Art of Imperfection at Ars Electronica Export in Berlin from November 17, 2018 to March 3, 2019.
Bloemenveiling (2019)
Bloemenveiling (2019) is a series of generative algorithm-driven auctions of AI-generated tulips on a blockchain in the form of a functioning decentralized application deployed at bloemenveiling.bid. Ridler collaborated with senior research scientist at DeepMind, David Pfau, to investigate whether blockchain technology could offer poetic substance within a digital marketplace. The work interrogates how technology drives human desire and economic dynamics by creating artificial scarcity.
In the piece, short moving image representations of tulips generated by a GAN are sold at auction using smart contracts on the Ethereum network. Each time a tulip is sold, thousands of computers around the world work to verify the transaction, checking each other's work. While the artificial intelligence behind the moving images has the potential to produce infinite flowers, the distributed network is deployed - at a significant environmental cost - to introduce scarcity into an otherwise limitless resource. Bloemenveiling was shown in Entangled Realities at HEK Basel in Switzerland in 2019.
Solo exhibitions
Ridler's solo exhibitions have included:
- Circadian Bloom***, ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe (2023);
- Time Blooms, Buk Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul (2025);
- Trace Remains, Galerie Nagel Draxler, Cologne (2026);
- Laws of Ordered Form, The Photographers' Gallery, London (2020);
- The Abstraction: Nature, Aksioma, Ljubljana (2020).
These shows have brought her examination of data curation, spiritual algorithm and environmental expenditure to a range of international audiences.
Awards and recognition
Ridler's contributions have been recognized with several honors: she was a European Union EMAP emerging Media Arts Innovation Fellow in 2018, and the DARE Prize in 2018-2019. In 2025, she was named ABS Digital Artist of the Year. Her work has also been featured in the surveys Digital Art (1960-present) (Thames & Hudson) and British Art: The Last 15 Years, consolidating her position among contemporary practitioners examining labour, technology, and market speculation.