Anna Ridler: A Perfect Language of Images
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25 Apr 2026-31 Aug 2026Open dailySchwarzman Centre, OxfordGreat Hall
Anna Ridler has explored the creative and societal possibilities of artificial intelligence, building her own datasets to ask questions about how knowledge is made and shared. Herself an Oxford University alum, her work has been shown at major institutions worldwide, from the V&A to the Centre Pompidou, and she has been recognised by Ars Electronica and by Artnet as one of nine “pioneering artists” exploring AI’s creative potential.
The digital artwork is made up of three new pieces by artist Anna Ridler through collaboration with Dr William Poole from the Faculty of English at Oxford University.
A Perfect Language of Images is directly inspired by Oxford scholar John Wilkins who, in his 1668 publication ‘An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language’, attempted to classify and organise the world through a rational, ordered system; and Jorge Luis Borges who, three centuries later, reflected on Wilkins’ attempt and concluded that all classification is negotiated, incomplete, and unable to fully contain what it describes. These ideas map onto machine learning; contemporary generative models share the desire to totalise and the recurring inability to hold the world without distortion. Ridler’s new works for the Schwarzman Centre link Wilkins and Borges through these technologies, each system promises order but ultimately discloses its limits to reveal what cannot be placed, what can be approximated, and what cannot be reconciled.
Work 1:
A Catalogue of Exceptions shows some of the things that strain or fail to fit within Wilkins’ taxonomy. Throughout the system there are acknowledged difficulties; organisms that are “imperfect”, “strange originals” and things suspended in “betwixt” categories: coral that is neither mineral nor plant, fungi that “seem to want” essential parts, zoophytes suspended between kingdoms. Created using roughly a decade of different generative systems (2016–2025), each with its own unique aesthetic, and trained on imagery drawn from Wilkins’ own descriptions, it becomes almost a cabinet of curiosities, even as the logic that links each image remains unstable or not immediately legible.
Work 2:
Between Things displays Wilkins’ phrases as evidence of classification under pressure—instances where his system hesitates, hedges, and cannot decide. Handwritten text is rendered large and placed into the environment as a record of doubt, but one that is only visible at 3am, for an hour.
Work 3:
An Infinity of Lists assembles Wilkins’ language itself, showing every word used in his system, first mapped to the hierarchy he imposed, then gradually reframed through the logic of word2vec. Over the duration of the work the mapping shifts from the symbolic architecture of Wilkins’ invented order toward statistical relations in learned embedding space. The piece flutters between word, image, and symbol, making visible how translation across systems and across time changes what counts as related.
Dr William Poole said “Ever since I was an undergraduate, I have been fascinated by attempts to create entirely new, artificial languages, with their promise to be ‘philosophical’ in a way that natural languages are not. The most famous of these is the language proposed by the Oxford scholar John Wilkins in 1668. This is of particular interest here because Wilkins was also one of the founders of the Royal Society of London (1662), our premier scientific academy. The early Royal Society supported Wilkins in his project, and we have therefore a historic twinning of what we now treat as separate areas of enquiry, namely language and science.
But with the rise of AI, these are returning to closer entanglement. Wilkins’ language, with its own script and pronunciation, was based on the idea that we can classify reality into internally organised lists. A ‘Wilkins’ character by its design shows where it sits in the lists of things. But even at the time not everyone was convinced that life works like that, and I have long been interested in the reception of Wilkins’ scheme, and what adjustments people proposed to it. What Anna Ridler and I share is a sense that the grandeur and ambition of such a project is also distinctly ‘Babelic’: and, paradoxically, it is in its limitations that it is most revealing."
