Anna Ridler is an artist and researcher who works with systems of knowledge and how technologies are created in order to better understand the world. She is particularly interested in ideas around measurement and quantification and how this relates to the natural world. Her process often involves working with collections of information or data, particularly datasets, to create new and unusual narratives.

For Natively Digital, Ridler presents Shell Record, a new work made especially for the show. Ridler is known as one of the early tech and AI artists that experimented with NFTs with her groundbreaking project, Bloemenveiling. The AI and dataset that examined tulips as a symbol of greater tool theory and mania presented an innovative use of smart contracts that marked her out a leading thinking around the use of smart contracts as a medium. Her rigorous approach to AI and GANs translates well to the NFT space. Shell Record presents a series of jpegs of the different shells gathered from the foreshore of the river Thames that form part of the dataset for the moving image piece generated by using a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network).

In Ridler’s own words, “most people looking along the river are trying to find traces of human history (pottery shards, pipes, coins). I have been collecting this different record of time. It is made up of multiple different species, including shells that no longer can be found in the Thames (Oysters, prevalent in Georgian and Victorain times but now decimated by pollution). A recent paper shows that shells that have been in the river since the end of the last Ice Age are now ‘rare, outcompeted and replaced by a massive influx of invasive species’ and suggests that these new species might become time-markers for the Anthropocene as they become fossils in the strata.”

Shells have also been used as symbols of value and methods of exchange for thousands of years. Used as money on almost every continent (regularly outside of traditional financial systems), they have also been the subject of a mania (much like tulip mania) where European collectors spent thousands on rare shells in the 18th and 19th centuries. Collected on the Thames, a river fraught with both colonial memories and the memories of trade, the shells were foraged over the shadow of the City of London - one of the world’s major financial centers. As Ridler notes, “As such, they seem to be an appropriate subject matter for working with for an NFT, where value is given by those who agree upon it.”

Ridler holds an MA in Information Experience Design from the Royal College of Art and a BA in English Literature and Language from Oxford University. Her work has been exhibited at cultural institutions worldwide including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Barbican Centre, Centre Pompidou, HeK Basel, ZKM Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica, and Sheffield Documentary Festival. She was a European Union EMAP fellow and the winner of the 2018-2019 DARE Art Prize. Ridler has received commissions by Salford University, the Photographers Gallery, Opera North, and Impakt Festival. She was listed as one of the nine “pioneering artists” exploring AI’s creative potential by Artnet and received an honorary mention in the 2019 Ars Electronica Golden Nica award for the category AI & Life Art. She was nominated for a “Beazley Designs of the Year” award in 2019 by the Design Museum for her work on datasets and categorisation.