Laws of Ordered Form

How are datasets created, and who gets to decide?

Anna Ridler 

Laws of Ordered Form was created by manually reclassifying thousands of photographs of images found in Victorian and Edwardian-era encyclopaedias, mimicking the process of building a training dataset for machine learning projects. 

In many ways, a training dataset can be seen as a contemporary encyclopedia: both try to describe everything in the world and make decisions about what is important enough to record, and these decisions inevitably reflect the cultural and social attitudes of the time, and the individual biases of the author.

The exhibit also draws attention to the inherent ridiculousness of trying to capture and flatten the world into categories, through the creation of arbitrary classifications that are applied to the dataset photographs. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Anna Ridler is an artist and researcher who lives and works in London. She is interested in systems of knowledge and how technologies are created in order to better understand the world. She is particularly interested in ideas around measurement and quantification and how this relates to the natural world. Her process often involves working with collections of information or data, particularly self-generated data sets, to create new and unusual narratives in a variety of mediums and how new technologies, such as machine learning, can be used to translate them to an audience. Her work has been exhibited widely at cultural institutions worldwide including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Barbican Centre, Centre Pompidou, HeK Basel, The Photographers’ Gallery, the ZKM Karlsruhe, and Ars Electronica.