Life drawing and machine learning: An interview with artist Anna Ridler

Machine learning already plays a big part in your everyday life, and its role is only going to grow. Google searches and muttered requests to Amazon's Alexa may tap into a veiled world of clever algorithms, but these techniques teeter on something much larger: a world of self-developing artificial intelligence. Deep learning, and the neural networks that do the thinking, is becoming an integral seam to digital technology. By extension, artificial intelligence is having a growing effect on our experience of the world and, as an artist, it is a material that can't be ignored. That at least is the thinking of Anna Ridler, who is building a name for herself with works that hoist machine-learning techniques and bring them into the gallery.