Bespoke AI Artwork
A Company Portrait
We commissioned internationally acclaimed AI artist and researcher Anna Ridler to create a new artwork for our client at 100 Bishopsgate.
This bespoke AI artwork presents an ever-evolving video generated by a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), trained on a unique dataset of landscape imagery contributed by individuals from across the global organisation. Drawing from this diverse visual archive, the piece continuously generates a shifting tapestry of potential landscapes, imagined terrains that exist somewhere between memory, interpretation, and machine learning.
By harnessing the mechanics of artificial intelligence, the artwork not only explores the boundaries of generative technology but also serves as a visual metaphor for collective identity. Each frame reflects the varied geographies, perspectives, and lived experiences of a global community, reassembled through the lens of computational creativity. The result is a contemplative and immersive experience, one that invites viewers to consider how data, place, and imagination intersect in the age of AI.
When working with AI, there are really two separate things: an algorithm and a training set. Training sets are the data – words, images, numbers – that an AI algorithm needs to build a model from which it can then work from. Training sets have thousands of datapoints, sometimes millions so we needed photographs taken at different times of day, as well as a varity of locations, topography and environment. Individuals were encouraged to send many different “perspectives”.
The commission draws inspiration from two existing visual anchors: the client’s curated collection of landscape paintings and the architectural use of landscape motifs and biophilia in the interior design. Both celebrate the idea of place, and this artwork extends that narrative into the digital realm, using AI to weave together thousands of individual perspectives into one evolving visual story.
Beautiful stills from the GAN film showing “potential” landscapes
A series of “stills” printed on fine art archival paper
“Training sets are reflections of their context. They inevitably come to enshrine certain cultural or social attitudes and because they are always compiled by human beings, they are the products of people (and a similar thing could be said of algorithms, they too are the products of people) – and using AI is a way of exploring this – it allows us a way of reflecting back on ourselves and the world that we have created. ”
Anna Ridler (UK, b.1985) is an artist and researcher whose work explores the poetic and political potential of machine learning.
Her practice centres on self-generated datasets and the stories they can tell — especially when they resist categorisation.
Anna’s work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou, V&A Museum, Barbican, Ars Electronica, and HeK Basel. She holds degrees from the Royal College of Art, Oxford University, and University of the Arts London, and was named one of Artnet’s nine “pioneering artists” exploring AI’s creative potential.
