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.
