2025
The Art of Categorisation
Algorithmic Imaginations | January 2025
I have, in a way, been working with data as part of my artistic practise for my entire career. I have always tried to collect, to sort, to organise. But when I started working with machine learning in 2016 it became a central part of my practise, with data becoming an important tool and medium that I use. A dataset is fundamental to making machine learning or artificial intelligence work. What is contained in the dataset becomes the knowledge that an algorithm has in order to create its world. The datasets need to be large, so that the algorithm has enough information to make inferences; they also need to be cleaned and standardised so that they become useable.
Read in full →2022
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.
Read in full →2021
A Contemporary Tulipmanie
Antennae Journal | March 2021
Anna Ridler is an artist and researcher who is interested in exploring how systems function and are built. She works with new technologies and scientific knowledge, exploring how they are created in order to better understand society and the world. Her recent projects have looked at the commodification of nature, particularly in relation to machine learning.
Read in full →2019
Making sense of it all
DAMN Magazine | August 2019
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.
Read in full →2018
Fall of the House of Usher. Datasets and Decay
V&A | September 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.
Read in full →2017
Speaking in Tongues
Syrup Magazine | October 2017
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.
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Fairy Tales and Machine Learning: Retelling, Reflecting, Repeating, Recreating
ARC Magazine | January 2017
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'.
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