Nature, Reimagined: Sofia Crespo
When you think about technology and nature, the two might seem like polar opposites. But Sofia Crespo is blurring the lines between the two; resourcing from nature and creating with AI. Join our conversation with Sofia, where we explore more of her work, her passions and learn more about her world of digitalized nature.
Let’s start with the basics. Can you tell a little about yourself?
Sofia Crespo: I’m an artist. I’ve been working with AI for my work for the past five years. And my work tries to envision this boundary between nature and technology and how we can use this technology to work with nature and how can we use all these tools such as AI to have a conversation about the natural world.
Were you always interested in nature and environment? How did you tie your artwork with nature?
Sofia Crespo: I think I was always fascinated with biology but I never fully pursued it. I kind of rediscovered my passion when I found my old microscope at my parents’ place. When I found the microscope I was like; ‘Oh my God, this is amazing!’. I remembered how much fun I had with it. It made me think about how we look and see, how the microscope itself is a technology. It allows us to see the natural world in a different way that we normally couldn’t see with our eyes. Suddenly, I found myself at home, taking pictures of my food through the microscope. This new vision made me want to buy a new microscope, a better one. So I did. Then eventually, I discovered AI and that kind of allowed me to look at things that I normally wouldn’t be able to, in an intuitive manner.
”We decided to dedicate ourselves to art and nature.”
– Sofia Crespo
How do you utilize AI in your work?
Sofia Crespo: So normally the process starts by, well, thinking. What do I want to do? Let’s say I want to generate an insect. I have to think; where can I get data from insects? -Because AI doesn’t exist without data. You have to train it. So data collection can mean going out in the wild and photographing insects or it can mean getting an archive online of open source data set. Or it could mean creating artificial data, for example; creating 3D renders of insects. Once I have the data, I can train a model. the model is like the compressed version of the data that I trained it with. It contains all the main patterns, like the average patterns from dataset I gave it. After I have the model, I can say ‘generate 10,000 variations of insects’ and see what AI picked up and how much of that resonates with me?
There is still a lot of skepticism around AI. The argument against it grows as the technologies surrounding it advances. What’s your take on the skeptics?
Sofia Crespo: I know AI seems a little scary when you look at it from a distance, without really understanding how it works and what it’s doing. Another scary thing is that how quick paced it’s developing. It’s less about the AI itself but more about how quickly these shifts are happening. I totally understand peoples’ concerns about their jobs being at risk and data safety issues. But, it’s important to remember that it’s not the AI itself that is responsible, but the humans who are using it and how they are using it. AI is not alive, it doesn’t make decisions on their own.
How long do the creative process and the development process take for a project?
Sofia Crespo: It depends per project. For some projects we spend a lot of time gathering data because sometimes I go diving with an aquatic drone and that’s a whole operation. Sometimes it can take months to get the whole process done. I’ve done research that took nine months to develop. But, we’ve also done projects where the research took maybe a week to develop. That was because we were able to create a data set without a lot of field work, dealing with less logistics.
You also have a creative partner. How did you meet and how did this partnership evolve for you?
Sofia Crespo: Feileacan and I, met on Twitter in 2019. He retweeted my work, and when I saw a weird username, I was curious so I looked at his work. I was absolutely fascinated by them! So from there, we started talking and when we met in person, we decided to collaborate. We realized we had a lot of points of resonance. We were both interested in digital nature. He was approaching the idea from a different angle; kind of like an achieve, he digitalized old tress that are thousand and thousand years old. It was so interesting to me; they’ve seen generations of humans pass by, that’s precious. Meanwhile, I was working on Neural Zoo, which is like a zoo of creatures that don’t exist, basically. I approached him with this idea and told him, “Hey, you know, I always had this vision of creating these amazing creatures, but in 3D. However, I didn’t know how to do it.” He has architectural background, so he is very good at thinking methodically and creating a structure around the project, in a way that I don’t know. So we started brainstorming and we had a huge challenge, a big technical question; How do you train a model? We’re both not engineers, so we had to figure out ourselves. One day he came up with a solution, a hacky solution. We went for it and it worked. Not right away of course, first few results were terrible. They looked like blobs but it was something. So we got really excited and it went from there. Later on, we co-founded our little studio together; Entangled Others. We decided to dedicate ourselves to art and nature.
What does your creative process look like together?
Sofia Crespo: We do brainstorming sessions together where we talk about a project and we come up with different approaches. Our minds work very different from each other, and I think that’s one of our strengths. It’s crucial that we communicate and say what we like and understand what’s on each other’s mind. From there, we come up with a semi-plan where we decide who’s going to do what and we build from there.
What’s been a significant moment for you in your career so far?
Sofia Crespo: I have two! One of them was gibing a TED talk. It was huge, I’ve never given a talk like that before. It was a lot of preparation. I had to learn a script beforehand, so it was a little challenge for me. There was also the pressure of all the amazing people listening to you. Such a big deal! Maybe millions of people could watch this; I had to think about what points I wanted to mention, what am I going to use this chance to talk about? One of the big titles I wanted to mentions was data sets and the bias around the natural world. How we care more about saving species that are ‘cute’, versus all species. Like, what if cockroaches go extinct?
The second big moment for me was when I got offered to be in a group show in Shanghai, China. They asked us to produce one of our 3D designed insects as an 11 meter inflatable sculpture. It was crazy for us; seeing our digital asset transform into physical form. It was extremely meaningful for me.
As an artist, you get to travel a lot. Do you collect anything from the places you go?
Sofia Crespo: I really enjoy diving. When I go to a new place, I’m naturally drawn into bodies of water. I want to go diving there. So, I could say I collect bodies of water, mentally.
What is next for you?
Sofia Crespo: Recently, I’ve been really excited about quantum computing. It’s been on my mind for a while. Now that there is conversation happening around AI, I’m naturally gravitating towards technologies that are less spoken about. I’m very excited because we are releasing our first project where we use quantum computing to entangle two life forms. I’m very curious to see where this exploration will go.
