Anna Ridler

Anna Ridler (born 1985 in London) is a British artist who came to machine learning from literature — an Oxford English degree followed by a master’s in Information Experience Design at the Royal College of Art in 2017, just as GANs were becoming usable by individual artists. She has since become one of the most institutionally collected AI artists in the world, with work held by the Whitney, the Victoria and Albert Museum, M+, and ZKM.

Ten thousand tulips

Her signature works, Myriad (Tulips) and Mosaic Virus (2018), began with an act of deliberate labor: over one tulip season in the Netherlands she photographed 10,000 tulips and categorized every image by hand, then pinned the whole dataset to a gallery wall as an artwork in its own right. The GAN trained on those photographs generates endless imaginary tulips whose striped petals are controlled by the live price of bitcoin — binding the 17th-century tulip mania to crypto speculation. She has said the hand-made dataset confronts viewers with the human elements of technology, reminding us that data is physical and starts in the real world.

Ridler’s embrace of AI is thoughtful rather than boosterish: she treats the dataset, not the output, as the meaningful artistic act, and has repeatedly stressed that there is always a human decision somewhere along the chain of using AI. That position — build your own data, own every choice — has made her a touchstone in debates about scraped training sets, cited by admirers and critics of generative AI alike. In 2025 she was named Digital Artist of the Year by the Art Business School, and her work has shown at Tate Modern, the Barbican, and the Centre Pompidou.