Using AI to Produce "Impossible" Tulips

Reaching a fever-pitch in the 1630s, "tulipmania" -- a Dutch Golden Age obsession with the rare and exotic flowers responsible, supposedly, for driving overzealous buyers to financial ruin -- has long been considered the first economic bubble. The tulip craze served as a convenient analogy for stories of our desire to monetize the natural world and our tendency towards speculative absurdity. While the extent of this botanical craze has been vastly exaggerated in books, blockbuster movies, and principles in economics, the idea that flowers might control markets continues to captivate social scientists as well as artists. In her latest work, London-based artist Anna Ridler brings this historic phenomenon into the future, using AI to produce thousands of invented "impossible" tulips, slowly developing the features that early modern collectors considered valuable -- their unpredictable stripes and stipples -- along with the price of bitcoin. Ridler's video installation, "Mosaic Virus," is named for the plant virus that creates the strange variations in color that catapulted the price of some tulips far beyond others for 17th century collectors.