Anna Ridler is a British artist and writer based in London who treats machine learning, datasets and classification systems as artistic materials. Born in London in 1985, she studied English at Oxford before completing an MA in Information Experience Design at the Royal College of Art. Since 2017, she has often built training data by hand rather than relying on pre-existing image banks, making the labour and choices behind automated vision visible. Her work moves between moving image, installation, photography, drawing, code and written research.
Ridler examines how categories shape knowledge and value. Botanical taxonomies, archives, financial speculation and algorithmic models recur across projects such as Myriad (Tulips), Mosaic Virus and Circadian Bloom. In these works, individually photographed or annotated plants become datasets for generative systems, while market prices or natural cycles influence what the software produces. This approach connects seventeenth-century tulip speculation with cryptocurrency, and contrasts computational speed with patient acts of collecting, labelling and observing.
In 2026, the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities in Oxford presented A Perfect Language of Images, a three-part commission developed with scholar William Poole around John Wilkins’s seventeenth-century universal language. Her solo exhibition Trace Remains at Galerie Nagel Draxler in Cologne examined unstable archives, handwriting and disappearing online infrastructures. Further 2026 activity included Circadian Bloom at Kunsthaus Graz, group exhibitions in Paris, London, Poznań and Rotterdam, and the Centre Pompidou’s acquisition of The Breathings of the Moon.