Flower Acts: Commercialism, Objectification, and Art

A series of works by London-based artist Anna Ridler centers around tulips and the tulip industry. She produces tulip imagery by reproducing technologies of genetics with artificial intelligence. This complicates questions of power, representation, and agency in the relationship between technology and plants/life, in this case genetically engineered flowers. Ridler's work sets out to “trace the lineage of natural history with technology,” to capture life with the tools of artificial intelligence. Tulips are one of the most common spring garden flowers, familiar but made uncanny in their multiplicity in Ridler's artwork. These tulips speak of manipulation and of the markets in which they are sold, but they also speak of variation. The imagery estranges viewers from ideas and associations they might bring to tulips, such as spring flower bouquets, Easter decorations, or spring gardens. These tulips ask questions about beauty, production and reproduction, commercialization, and representation.

Anna Ridler starts with the premise that a virus causes the color variations in tulips; she then creates AI-generated art to represent the repetition and variation that is at the heart of the tulip industry. Ridler's three works in the tulip series, Elaine Ayers argues, “make the case that the artist and algorithm can never be separated, that flowers are inextricable from systems of social and economic currency.” Ridler's work references Dutch economic exploitation in the present and the past going back to colonialism, when, as Ayres explains, the tulip craze was part of an “economic bubble,” “driving overzealous buyers to financial ruin.”

The emphasis on the colonialist social and economic currency of flowers is but one aspect of this work. Ridler's work is also about beauty and becoming, about manipulation and control, about virality and excess, vulnerability and connection. The tulip cycles pose questions about the future of plants, specifically flowers, their relationship to technology, and our (ethical) relationships to them. The artworks’ focus on digital and manufactured reproduction as well as chance creates an ambivalent sense of place, agency, and the ethics of care. Ridler's imagery builds on the tension between a harmonious alignment of people and flowers and human attempts to dominate and manipulate plants, between production and reproduction, between agency and being acted upon or violated.