University of Salford Art Collection is delighted to welcome Anna Ridler to talk about using machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) in her creative practice.  She will use tulipmania, a moment in history when the price of a tulip bulb was equivalent to the price of town house in Amsterdam, as an analogy to illustrate the human desire to monetize the natural world and our tendency towards speculative absurdity. This historic phenomenon is used to examine the future in the creation of her works Myriad (Tulips), Mosaic Virus and Bloemenvieling and to question what can be learnt about value, human control, and the tenuous line between “nature” and “artifice.”

 Anna Ridler (b. 1985, UK) is an artist and researcher. She has exhibited at institutions such as the V&A Museum, Ars Electronica, HeK Basel, Impakt and the Barbican Centre and has degrees from the Royal College of Art, Oxford University and University of Arts London. She was a 2018 EMAP fellow and was listed by Artnet as one of nine “pioneering artists” exploring AI’s creative potential. She is interested in working with collections of information, particularly self-generated data sets, to create new and unusual narratives in a variety of mediums, and what happens when things cannot fit into discrete categories. She is currently interested in the intersection of machine learning and nature and what we can learn from history.

 Anna’s work was recently shown in Peer to Peer (Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool and Shanghai Centre of Photography) where she was selected for one of two new commissions for the University of Salford Art Collection.  Her most recent commission, for the Photographers' Gallery in London, opens on 20 February.

For travel, parking and campus details visit the University of Salford website.

Image credit: Anna Ridler, Peer to Peer at Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool. Photograph by Tabitha Jussa.