Introducing Sofia Crespo: Virtual Artist Studio Visit

Sofia Crespo is inviting us on an exclusive ‘behind the scenes’ video tour of her studio! 

‘Can we use new technologies to dream up biodiversities that do not exist ?’  – Sofia is a generative artist working with neural networks and machine learning with a huge interest in biology-inspired technologies. One of her main focuses is the way organic life uses artificial mechanisms to simulate itself and evolve, this implying the idea that technologies are a biased product of the organic life that created them and not a completely separated object. On the side, she is also hugely concerned with the dynamic change in the role of the artists working with machine learning techniques. 

Sofia guides us through a little journey where we get the amazing opportunity to see the creative and coding process behind her work, with a special focus on her latest series Artificial Remnants developed together with artist Dark Fractures and ‘{}Chromatophores’ created with engineer Andrew Pouliot: Both works are exclusively available at SuperRare https://superrare.com/sofiacrespo/creations

“The pigment-bearing organs, or chromatophores, that enable many cephalopods to change the colouring and patterns of their skin in order to camouflage themselves are thought not merely to increase the odds of survival, but also be a means of communication. These works are communicative meditation wherein the generative output of an aquatically trained neural network is interacted with, and gently manipulated, so as to create a (bio)mimicry of multiple cells acting in concert to convey tonality, atmosphere and accentuation.”

Selected works from  {}Chromatophores, Artificial Remnants  and Neural Zoo projects are available for sale exclusively at Kate Vass Galerie as unique works on the blockchain on opensea https://opensea.io/accounts/0xb91f32958c4c6a775f882439c5b8d3b4a36e9cdc

Sofia, recently interviewed by CLOT magazine, shares:

‘… My work aims to visually understand the shapes of nature using new technologies such as deep learning. 

The fact that Neural Networks got abstractly inspired by the functioning of the visual cortex, led me to think about the flow of information in the creative process ie the way as a child I developed a phobia of jellyfish, which eventually became a fascination for the visual elements of the jellyfish and finally the focus of an artwork. I wondered if there’s a ‘dataset’ of human experiences in our brains, that we constantly filter through and rearrange, and that ‘rearranging’ of the elements into novel ones is what we refer to as creativity. No matter how hard I try, I can’t imagine a colour that I haven’t previously seen, but I can imagine combinations of the ones I have seen, similarly, a neural network can’t create something out of the blue from a dataset that hasn’t been fed to it but it can recombine elements from data that has been given to it.’