‘Mosaic Virus (see Figure 13) is a video installation generated by an artificial intelligence of tulips, creating a Dutch still life for the twenty-first century. Over the course of a tulip season spent in Amsterdam, Ridler collected ten thousand tulips which she then photographed and hand classified for the dataset. Drawing historical parallels from the ‘tulip mania’ that swept across the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, the stripes on the tulips respond to the rise and fall of bitcoin prices in real time, drawing a parallel to the hysteria and speculation around crypto-currencies today.’56
Firstly, I will analyse the components of the assemblage and their intra-actions. Then, I will discuss the agency which this whole assemblage is enacting.
Groups of the Assemblage Components -Creative/Material: Trained GAN
GAN is a framework which has been created with ML algorithms that generate original still images using what it had learned from the dataset, Machne Learning is the creative in our assemblage. The framework of GAN is designed by Ian Goodfellow and his colleagues in 2014 and available as open-source code. It has been widely used by various artists as well as Anna Ridler with some alterations. However, the images it creates depends on the dataset, which is a material grouping. Since these two works together, I want to think the GAN algorithm and dataset as sub-component together of the Trained GAN, which produces the original still images. The dataset for this work is the photographs taken by Anna Ridler. -Creative: Bitcoin While bitcoin is a cryptocurrency using blockchain algorithms and many other complex networks, it resembles nearly a performer in this context co-acting the composition with other creative components. It also has a subassemblage if we consider the technological architecture and millions of traders. -Audience: Viewers of the work in any space and time -Concept: Historical event of Tulip Mania
Intra-Actions The intra-actions within this assemblage is how art is enacted. I will try to unfold these entanglements to analyse how they constituted the becoming with of art.
-Tulip Mania Event – Trained GAN The mosaic virus was infecting tulips with stripe patterns on their petals in the 1600s, which drove speculative buying of tulips. Through the intra-action of this event and GAN, the 10,000 images of tulips with the labels
56
Anna Ridler, "Mosaic Virus, 2019 — ANNA RIDLER", ANNA RIDLER, 2020 <http://annaridler.com/mosaic-virus> [Accessed 9 July 2020].
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