Anna Ridler (born 1985, age 41) is an artist associated with London, England, who works in digital art, machine learning, handmade archives, moving image, classification, datasets, systems, and financial speculation. She was educated at the Royal College of Art and Oxford University. She builds her own datasets to expose the labour and ideology embedded in the systems that organise knowledge. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, M+, and ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, and has been exhibited widely at cultural institutions including Tate Modern, Barbican Centre, Centre Pompidou, The Photographers' Gallery, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, MIT Museum, Kunsthaus Graz, ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, the Francisco Carolinum, and Ars Electronica.^[2,3,1] Her official website is annaridler.com.

Born in London in 1985, Ridler spent her childhood raised between Atlanta, Georgia and the United Kingdom. She obtained a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Language from Oxford University in 2007 and a Master of Arts in Information Experience Design from the Royal College of Art in 2017.^[4]

Ridler's practice uses technology, and in particular machine learning, to investigate how naming, classification, and financial speculation determine what can be seen and what is erased. Her interests lie in drawing, machine learning, data collection, storytelling, and technology.^[7] She began working with machine learning as an artistic material in 2017, at a moment when the technology required building every dataset by hand, a constraint that became the foundation of her practice. A core element of Ridler's work lies in the creation of handmade data sets through a laborious process of selecting and classifying images and text.^[5] By creating her own data sets, she is able to uncover and expose underlying themes and concepts while also inverting the usual process of scraping pre-classified images found in large databases on the Internet.^[6]

Some of Ridler's most notable works to date fall within her 'tulip series', which explores the hysteria around tulip mania and compares it to the speculation and bubbles surrounding cryptocurrencies.^[8] The series is expressed in three forms: a photographic dataset in Myriad (Tulips), 2018; two iterations of machine generated videos in Mosaic Virus (2018) and Mosaic Virus (2019); and a website with an accompanied functioning decentralized application in Bloemenveiling (2019).

Myriad (Tulips) (2018) is an installation of ten thousand hand-labeled photographs forming a dataset of unique tulips. The ten thousand, or myriad of, photographs were taken by Ridler over the course of three months, roughly the length of a tulip season, spent in Utrecht. Each photograph is carefully affixed one by one with magnets to a specially painted black wall in a laborious process to form a seemingly precise grid. Ridler noted of the work, "I wanted to draw together ideas around capitalism, value, and the tangible and intangible nature of speculation, and collapse from two very different yet surprisingly similar moments in history."

Myriad (Tulips) (2018) has been exhibited in AI: More than Human at the Barbican Centre in London, UK (May 16 - August 26, 2019); Error—The Art of Imperfection at Ars Electronica Export in Berlin, Germany (November 17, 2018 – March 3, 2019); and Peer to Peer at the Shanghai Centre of Photography in Shanghai, China (December 8 - February 9, 2020).^[12,11,10] The work was featured in Bloomberg, It’s Nice That, and Hyperallergic.^[13] For Myriad (Tulips), Ridler was nominated for a Beazley Design of the Year award for her presentation of an alternative perspective on how to engage with artificial intelligence; demonstrating a departure from ownership and control of major corporations to a more personalized process of constructing and conceptualizing from the ground-up.^[14]

Mosaic Virus (2018) is a single screen video installation displaying a grid of continually evolving tulips in bloom, whereas for Mosaic Virus (2019) Ridler used three screens.^[15] The appearance of the tulips is controlled by artificial intelligence using fluctuations in the price of bitcoin, with the stripes on the tulips' petals reflecting the value of the cryptocurrency. The work takes its name from the mosaic virus which caused stripes in tulip petals, subsequently increasing their desirability and leading to speculative prices; through this, Ridler draws parallels with the tulip mania of the 17th century to represent the hysteria and speculation around crypto-currencies.

Ridler trained a general adversarial network (GAN) on the set of ten thousand photographs of individual tulips from her work Myriad (Tulips), using a technique called spectral normalization to improve the output.^[16,9] The work was exhibited in Error—The Art of Imperfection, Ars Electronica Export, Berlin, Germany (November 17, 2018 – March 3, 2019).

Bloemenveiling (2019) is an auction of artificial-intelligence-generated tulips on the blockchain in the form of a functioning decentralized application: http://bloemenveiling.bid.^[17] Ridler collaborated with David Pfau, a senior research scientist at DeepMind, to investigate whether blockchain could be used as a means of finding poetic substance within it.^[5] In the work, short moving image pieces of tulips created by generative adversarial networks are sold at auction using smart contracts on the Ethereum network.^[18]

The piece interrogates the way technology drives human desire and economic dynamics by creating artificial scarcity.^[18] Each time a tulip is sold, thousands of computers around the world all work to verify the transaction, checking each other's work against each other. While the artificial intelligence behind the moving image pieces has the potential to generate infinite flowers, the enormous distributed network is used, at great environmental cost, to introduce scarcity to an otherwise limitless resource. Bloemenveiling was exhibited in Entangled Realities, HEK Basel, Basel, Switzerland in 2019.^[19]

In 2020, Anna Ridler presented solo exhibitions including Laws of Ordered Form at The Photographers' Gallery in London and The Abstraction of Nature at Aksioma in Ljubljana. Her subsequent solo exhibitions include Circadian Bloom at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe (2023), Time Blooms at the Buk Seoul Museum of Art in Seoul (2025), and Trace Remains at Galerie Nagel Draxler in Cologne (2026).

Their honors include becoming a European Union EMAP Fellow in 2018 and receiving the DARE Art Prize (2018–2019). They were also featured in Thames & Hudson's Digital Art (1960s–Now) and British Art: The Last 15 Years. In 2025, they were recognized as the ABS Digital Artist of the Year.