Anna Ridler is an artist and researcher who is interested in working with collections of information of data, creating new and unusual narratives in a variety of mediums. In Myriad (also named Tulips), she looks at the process of using large dataset to produce a piece of art. This project is inspired by “tulip-mania”, a financial craze for tulip bulbs in the 1630s. And it has long been considered as the first economic bubble. In this project, she took 10,000 photographs of tulips and categorized them, revealing human’s feeling about those pictures.

Then, Ridler used this large sample of photographs as the training set of an AI based project —— ‘Mosaic Virus’. This project creates a video work generated by an AI, which shows a tulip blooming. The appearance of the tulip is controlled by the price of bitcoin. ‘Mosaic’ is the name of the virus that causes the stripes in a petal which increased their desirability and helped cause the speculative prices during the time. In this piece, the stripes depend on the value of bitcoin, changing over time to show how the market fluctuates

Though this project not a complicated project as it is only a GAN trained on 10,000 photographs, I am much impressed by its insight and creativity. First, Ridler successfully use AI to do the visualization of the data. Second the way she achieves the visualization is quite creative, she chose a historic event which similar to the circumstances nowadays. By reflecting the speculative price of bitcoin with the different shape and stripe of tulips. She ingeniously combine the economic bubble caused by bitcoin and the bubble caused by tulips together. Lastly, the name of this project —— ‘Mosaic Virus’ add to its insight. Mosaic Virus is the cause of the desirable stripes of the petal, thus is also the cause of the bubble 400 years ago. And she tries to make a connection between the speculative price of the ever-changing stripes of tulips, reminding us that bitcoin can be another virus to cause another bubble.