Anna Ridler (b. 1985) is an artist and researcher who builds handmade datasets and trains machine learning systems on them to create drawings, videos, sound and installation works about knowledge, value and memory.Born in London and raised between Atlanta, Georgia and the United Kingdom, she studied English Literature at Oxford University before completing a master's in Information Experience Design at the Royal College of Art.,
Where many artists working with machine learning use existing public datasets, Ridler builds and controls her own, and describes favoring a “decayed look” in which visible artifacts trace the machine's learning process.In Wikileaks: A Love Story (2016), an augmented-reality installation, she mined leaked Wikileaks emails to construct a hidden narrative of romance between two people.,For Drawing with Sound (2017), made with composer Ben Heim, she wore a headset that translated the shapes of her drawings into a neural-network-driven soundscape of overlapping voices.,In Fall of the House of Usher (2017) she trained a generative adversarial network on around two hundred ink drawings based on a 1929 silent-film adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's story, producing animations that fed each new drawing set back into the next generation of the network.,
During a 2018 residency at Impakt in Utrecht she made Myriad (Tulips), a dataset of ten thousand hand-labelled tulip photographs presented as an installation that draws attention to the labour hidden inside machine learning.,She used that dataset to train the generative adversarial network behind Mosaic Virus (2018-2019), video works in which tulip patterns shift in real time with the price of bitcoin, echoing the seventeenth-century Dutch tulip mania she had been researching.,With AI researcher David Pfau, she extended the project into Bloemenveiling (2019), a live Ethereum-based auction of GAN-generated tulip videos that used bots to help drive speculative bidding.,
In 2021 she trained a GAN on a handmade dataset of shells collected from the Thames foreshore to make The Shell Record, a blockchain-recorded work linking shells' early use as currency to ideas of ecological change.Her work has been exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Modern, the Barbican Centre, Centre Pompidou, HeK Basel and the ZKM Karlsruhe, and she won the 2018-2019 DARE Art Prize and received an honorary mention in Ars Electronica's Golden Nica awards.,Represented at Paris Photo 2025 by Nagel Draxler Gallery, she showed Slowly Fading Quietly, a paired installation of Polaroids and on-chain images evolving in opposite directions over ten years, alongside Circadian Bloom, AI-generated flowers that open and close on real biological rhythms.
