Anna Ridler

Year
2018 (ongoing)

Medium / Material / Technic
video (excerpt 30 sec.), color

Place
On a LED screen at the Badisches Staatstheater

Running Times
5 pm – 10 pm

Depicting tulips blooming and their colors changing, »Mosaic Virus« brings the historical phenomenon of Dutch »tulip mania« into connection with present-day speculations about blockchain technology.

In the 1630s, the obsession with rare and exotic flowers that spread across the Netherlands and Europe caused a financial bubble. When the unprecedented cost for a single flower –which could exceed a skilled worker’s annual income – collapsed over a week, many collectors went bankrupt. The title of Anna Ridler’s work evokes the viruses that caused petals’ colors to break into stripes, which boosted tulip prices among seventeenth-century collectors.

Ridler draws historical parallels between tulip mania and today’s hype and concerns around crypto-currencies. She applies a computer vision algorithm that »imagines« the flowers blossoming and decaying, whereby their appearance depends on the value of bitcoin, changing over time with market fluctuations.

In the Dutch Golden Age, tulip mania reflected deep controversies and anxieties around the transformation of Dutch society. The artwork, referring to that time, hints at the controversies of blockchain technology, and the transformations it is generating for the capitalist value and nature of speculation. 

This work is funded by the EMAP#EMARE program (part of Creative Europe) and commissioned by Impakt.