This workshop will explore ideas around datasets, especially their relationship to machine learning or artificial intelligence, as the dataset is fundamental to making this type of technology work. What is contained in the dataset becomes the knowledge that an algorithm has to create its world. Looking at existing datasets through algorithmic and analogue methods, participants can interrogate how data, and by extension datasets, work – how it can be warped and manipulated and ignored and lost, how it can be both individual and human and vast and conceptual – and by doing so, offer critical and conceptual ways of engaging with this methodology that is made and constructed from the ground up.

Workshop instructor: Anna Ridler 

Anna Ridler is an artist and researcher. She is interested in working with collections of information, particularly self-generated data sets, to create new and unusual narratives in various mediums and what happens when things cannot fit into discrete categories. She is currently interested in the intersection of machine learning and nature and what we can learn from history.