Artificial tulips

posted Jun 1, 2018


This is random and weird and kind of wonderful, and because tulips...

An artist in the Netherlands named Anna Ridler is working on a project in which she's training an alogrithm to create tulips. It's called "Mosaic Virus" and it's a commission for the Impakt Festival in Utrecht later this year (festival theme "Post-Truth"). Blurbage from her website:

Drawing historical parallels from "tulip-mania" that swept across Netherlands/Europe in the 1630s to the speculation currently ongoing around crypto-currencies, this video work is generated by an artificial intelligence (AI). It will show a tulip blooming, an updated version of a Dutch still life for the 21st century. The appearance of the tulip would be controlled by bitcoin price. "Mosaic" is the name of the virus that causes the stripes in a petal which increased their desirability and helped cause the speculative prices during the time. In this piece, the stripes will depend on the value of bitcoin, changing over time to show how the market fluctuates.

Here's a video that might provide a better look.

The streaked tulips that result from this virus -- such as the famed Semper Augustus -- are called "broken tulips."

How Albany does not have a bar called The Broken Tulip, we do not know.

[Via the whims of the Twitter recommendation algorithm, maybe because of Abe? Who knows.]

Earlier:
+ Portraits of tulips
+ Because it's park furniture shaped like a tulip

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tags: tech, tulips, weird

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