Anna Ridler

Anna Ridler (born 1985) is an artist and researcher who lives and works in London. She works with collections of information or data, particularly self-generated data sets, to create new and unusual narratives in a variety of mediums.

Her work has been exhibited widely at cultural institutions including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Modern, Barbican Centre, Centre Pompidou, The Photographers' Gallery, ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, and Ars Electronica.

Born in London in 1985, Ridler spent her childhood raised between Atlanta, Georgia and the United Kingdom. She obtained 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.

A core element of Ridler's work lies in the creation of handmade data sets through a laborious process of selecting and classifying images and text. By creating her own data sets, Ridler is able to uncover and expose underlying themes and concepts while also inverting the usual process of scraping pre-classified images found in large databases on the internet. Her interests are in drawing, machine learning, data collection, storytelling, and technology.

Some of Anna Ridler's most notable works to date fall within her ‘tulip series’ which explores the hysteria around tulip mania and compares it to the speculation and bubbles surrounding cryptocurrencies. The series is expressed in three forms: a photographic dataset in Myriad (Tulips), 2018; two iterations of machine generated videos in Mosaic Virus (2018) and Mosaic Virus (2019); and a website with an accompanied functioning decentralized application in Bloemenveiling (2019).

I wanted to draw together ideas around capitalism, value, and the tangible and intangible nature of speculation, and collapse from two very different yet surprisingly similar moments in history.

— Anna Ridler,

Myriad (Tulips) (2018) is an installation of ten thousand hand-labeled photographs forming a dataset of unique tulips. The ten thousand, or myriad of, photographs were taken by Ridler over the course of three months, roughly the length of a tulip season, spent in Utrecht. Each photograph is carefully affixed one by one with magnets to a specially painted black wall in a laborious process to form a seemingly precise grid.