On Decentralized Clocks: Anna Ridler in Conversation | ZORA ZINE
September 2022
Charlotte Kent speaks to Anna Ridler on the uncanny systems of the blockchain shattering our understanding of time.
Blockchain’s rhetoric of immutability introduces a sense of things unchanging: a fixed past, an enduring present, and a reliable future. But that’s not the affective sense of blockchain’s temporality. It’s exhaustingly fast, excitingly new, and presents an infrastructure completely disconnected from other time systems—calendrical, mechanical, or Unix-based.
The series of works around tulips, particularly Mosaic Virus and Bloemenveiling, are very much about ideas around the nature of speculation. There is some debate about whether tulipmania was truly a mania (the work by Anne Goulder argues persuasively that it was not) but in cultural consciousness, it is often held up as an example of early speculative behaviour. By linking this moment to the ongoing hype around cryptocurrencies - but also the excessive expectations around artificial intelligence I am able to bring together ideas around value and collapse…
Entangled Realities, a group show currently on at HeK Basel, looks at the impact of artificial intelligence (AI). Increasingly our world is being created by software we hardly understand – financial markets where bots endlessly trade with other bots, social media algorithms that control what narrative we see, even AI fakes that make us doubt our own ears and eyes – so that it becomes harder and harder to sort out where the human influence is. Works in the show question this entanglement, and by exploring it seek to disentangle notions around what it might be to be both machine and human.
Fall of the House of Usher. Datasets and Decay | V&A
September 17, 2018
The Fall of the House of Usher is a 12 minute animation where each still has been generated by a GAN (a type of AI) trained on my own drawings. It is a piece that could have been hand animated, but by choosing machine learning I was able to heighten and increase these themes around the role of the creator, the reciprocity between art and technology, and aspects of memory in a way that would not be available to me otherwise. I am interested in how the process of using artificial intelligence can be used to push ideas in a way that would not be possible otherwise.
Voices carry information. We can hear and interpret almost instantly someone’s gender, age, education levels, social class when they speak. We know that we judge based on appearances, but we equally judge based on voice. Zadie Smith has observed that voices are meant to be ‘unchanging and singular’; that they are the true signifiers of our identity, instantly showcasing how we would like to be perceived to the listener. To use different versions, particularly in Britain, she goes on to write, represents to most people ‘at best, a Janus-faced duplicity, and at worst, the very loss of our soul’. But of course human voices are not static - they change and shift according to mood, who you are speaking to, situation. The same person can speak in different voices in the same conversation, in the same sentence.
In the introduction to his retelling of the Grimms’ Children’s and Household Tales, Philip Pullman writes ‘fairy tales don’t come whole and unaltered from the minds of individual writers’. The archetype emerges through countless retellings across cultures and across time; recent research analysing folk tales from Europe and Asia date the origins of some stories to thousands of years ago and the oldest – The Smith and the Devil – to the Bronze Age. These stories are told and retold, written and rewritten: Cupid and Psyche, transformed into Beauty and the Beast, transformed into Angela Carter’s, The Courtship of Mr Lyon, or The Tiger’s Bride. Helen Oyeyemi observes that ‘when you retell a story, you’re testing what in it is relevant to all times and places. Bits of it hold up, and bits of it crumble and then new perspectives come through’.
Entangled Realities, a group show currently on at HeK Basel, looks at the impact of artificial intelligence (AI). Increasingly our world is being created by software we hardly understand – financial markets where bots endlessly trade with other bots, social media algorithms that control what narrative we see, even AI fakes that make us doubt our own ears and eyes – so that it becomes harder and harder to sort out where the human influence is. Works in the show question this entanglement, and by exploring it seek to disentangle notions around what it might be to be both machine and human.
Repeating and remembering: the associations of GANs in an art context
Abstract
Briefly considering the lack of language to talk about GAN generated art in an art context, I look how GANs and training sets should be considered in the same manner that other materials are in art pieces. I will look at the potential associations of training sets and GANs, in particular pix2pix, and how I have attempted to embed these associations in my own work.
Intro
There has been research that has looked at whether artificial intelligence, and more particularly machine learning, can creating create art [4, 2, 6]. However, the focus of this work has been to consider and judge the result as “art" through the impact of visual parameters on a viewer (i.e. “does this look like art?"). This ignores a vital consideration of an artist when producing a piece, that of the impact which the materials used have. Producing an image using a GAN versus any other way gives the viewer a different experience, expectation, history, traces and contexts to consider. What are these associations and how might they be used in a piece of work? Materiality is “one of the most contested concepts in contemporary art and is often side-lined in critical academic writing"[5] and has only recently begun to be explored digital art, and has not to my knowledge been applied to work produced by neural nets. This is an important gap: art should be able to comment on the advanced contemporary scientific theories as they are used in a creative practise whilst also “ensuring a critical distance that prevents the elevation of these fields to the status of unquestioned authority" [5].
