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Myriad (Tulips) — Anna Ridler

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“[Tulip Mania meant that] the order of the stock market was introduced into the order of nature. The tulip began to lose the properties and charms of a flower: it grew pale, lost its colours and shapes, became an abstraction, a name, a symbol interchangeable with a certain amount of money.” - Zbigniew Herbert "The Abstraction of Nature", the title of a recent solo show, references the above ideas around value and the mania, but also how computer vision abstracts certain characteristics in order to "learn". The iris flower data set is a multivariate dataset created by statistician Ronald Fisher in his 1936 paper The Use of Multiple Measurements in Taxonomic Problems. It contains the measurements of 50 specimens from 3 different types of Iris and is included in the R base and SciKitLearn so it is automatically included whenever a user downloads these programmes. Myriad (Tulips) references this history of datasets and how so many pieces of machine learning code also import a floral datase

Year: 2018 Medium: C-type digital prints with handwritten annotations, magnetic paint, magnets Dimensions: variable 1 / 5 Myriad (Tulips) is an installation of thousands of hand-labeled photographs of tulips; these photographs were later used as the dataset for Mosaic Virus 2018 and Mosaic Virus 2019. By choosing to make the dataset an artwork it draws attention to the skill, labour and time that goes into constructing it, whilst also helping to expose the human element in machine learning, usually hidden by algorithmic processes. By creating my own dataset, it forces me to examine each tulip

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