Drawing historical parallels from the “tulip-mania” that swept across Netherlands/Europe in the 1630s to the speculation currently going on around crypto-currencies, the video work Mosaic Virus is generated by an artificial intelligence (AI). This AI has been trained on 10,000 photographs of tulips that the artist took and then labelled to make the piece Myriad (Tulips). It then uses this information to create a tulip blooming, an updated version of a Dutch still life for the 21st century. The appearance of the tulip is 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.
Credits:
This project was commissioned by IMPAKT within the framework of the EMAP/EMARE program with support of the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
