Mosaic Virus 2018

Mosaic Virus (2018) is a single-screen work displaying a grid of AI-generated tulips. The tulips were trained on thousands of photographs of real tulip bulbs, and their colours, shapes and movements shift continuously according to the price of Bitcoin. The mosaic virus is the disease responsible for the striped tulip, the rarest and most expensive variety during the Dutch tulipmania of 1637, the world's first speculative financial bubble. The virus creates the stripe by infecting the bulb, but it also weakens it: infected plants produce weaker offspring until they can no longer reproduce, meaning the supply of striped tulips was always inherently finite. Bitcoin operates on the same logic: only 21 million will ever exist, the scarcity built into the protocol as the basis of its value. The work places these two objects in the same frame: a seventeenth-century flower and a twenty-first-century cryptocurrency, the same structure of desire, scarcity and speculation repeated across four centuries. The material of AI echoes the subject. Machine learning has had its own boom and bust cycles since the field began, with periods of intense investment and hype followed by collapse in funding and interest. The work was made during one such moment of acceleration, and the technology has since transformed beyond recognition. The GANs used to generate the tulips have this instability built in. During training, a GAN can appear to improve rapidly as the model learns to produce more and more convincing images before suffering sudden "mode collapse," where the output deteriorates sharply. The argument is made visible in the material as the model strives to create a perfect tulip and then collapses.