Artist Sofia Crespo Is Speaking To Unseen Worlds

I met Sofia Crespo on a cold evening in late January. I took the elevator up to her seventh-floor hotel room in Barcelona, just an hour before the groundbreaking premiere of her latest projection mapping work, Structures of Being. The artist’s kinetic, nine-minute animation of lustrous florals, coral reefs, and insectoids was set to illuminate the historic 100-foot facade of Antoni Gaudí's Casa Batlló, which could be seen from her balcony. The spectacle was sure to draw tens of thousands of onlookers, dutifully wielding iPhones in hand (“like Times Square on New Year’s Eve,” someone assured me earlier). But Crespo didn’t seem all that nervous. Donning all black with her round glasses, she smoothed her long hair behind one ear and invited me to make myself comfortable on the loveseat.

Crespo spent nearly a decade living and working in Berlin before relocating to Lisbon in 2022. For almost six years now, she has been working with her own custom-trained AI models to conjure other-worldly creations that feature a host of surreal biological lifeforms—cephalopods, amorphous plants, and jellyfish with vivid internal organs. A lover of math and science, Crespo never received a formal art education. Initially determined to study computer science at a public university, she pivoted as she was drawn more deeply into her artistic practice. “I saw that I had two paths in front of me that were quite different from each other,” she recounts, “I ended up choosing to do art full time, which was a huge risk.”

Her dedication to using AI as a tool for digital art crystallized after she was gifted a workshop with artist and programmer Gene Kogan (as a birthday present). But long before then, she had already found herself enamored with negotiating our relationship to the world through her own lens. “It was actually microscopes.” she muses, “I had all these second-hand microscopes that I collected in Berlin—and it made me so happy because I could look at these incredibly tiny structures and see the universe at a different scale.”

Her more recent biomorphic animations have been created in part with Feileacan Kirkbride McCormick, her collaborator in the media-art duo Entangled Others. Together, they craft striking, uncanny images that tread a tenuous line between taxonomy and technology, speculation and art. “Culture can touch people in a way that scientific facts and data visualizations alone cannot,” she explains.

For the datasets that inform Structures of Being, the duo worked with open-source biological photographs, textbook illustrations, and inputs from researcher and crystallographer Waad AlBawardi. The Barcelona Supercomputer Center even provided them with data on the behavior of marine currents—recordings from temperature levels at the ocean's surface—so that motion from the physical world could be rendered at scale. “It’s poetic, really,” Crespo shares, “In the data, you can see the change of seasons happening from one hemisphere to another. You can see a storm passing. You can see clouds.”

The ambitious work was completed in a little over two months, during which Crespo was invited to be an artist in residence at Gaudí’s inspired modernist building in the center of Barcelona. Over her tenure there, she visited a number of the celebrated architect’s sites across the city. “We basically got a crash course in Gaudí,” she tells me, “it was overwhelming at first.” She brought on composer Robert M. Thomas to produce the musical soundtrack for the piece, and regards him as indispensable to the project. “We were brainstorming how to illustrate this progression,” she shares, “It’s not a scientifically accurate account, by any means. But metaphorically, the piece starts with the shock of the Big Bang, then moves into sand, clay, and other materials for creation—all of these things melting and reforming, pointing to the very beginning of the planet.”

Against the ornamental facade of the Casa, ice ages melt into vast bodies of water. Senses are jolted by flora and fauna dressed in brilliant shades of blue, then purple. What might be a feather is actually a leaf, or a brilliant pool of viridescent color. There are evocations of sky, cells, or streams of light seen from underwater. Oceans give rise to all kinds of anomalous life forms. In person, it is an ineffable flow of organic and inorganic objects—the ultimate trompe-l’œil. As mesmerized as I was by the sequence, I felt keenly aware of how the work would live on in our imaginations: bound up within the programmatic, viral haunts of the digital—each clip an ecstatic blur of a moment in space and time, cropped into a neat 9:16 ratio.

Like many of Crespo’s artworks, in Structures of Being, written codes of rhythm and algorithm dance beneath a seamless topographic choreography. Crespo insists that as she is mapping her AI works, she is also meticulously setting the computational rules of their output and thinking critically about what can (or should) be output. “My work is not necessarily about AI as a subject. I tend to think of it as a tool I use with intention,” she tells me, “When I train a model, I am not arbitrarily selecting what makes one jellyfish more aesthetically pleasing. Similarly, with Midjourney, or DALL-E, someone has chosen to label and classify each category. And the result is one singular, circular idea of ‘jellyfish,’ even if there are many other, wildly different kinds.”

We tend to approach AI as its alien life form—an omniscient mirror that speaks back to us as if it possesses a mind much like ours. Inputting prompts and asking it questions, we feign an understanding of each new encounter, enchanted by the impression of its predictive capabilities. Maybe it is the very same attraction to these future-casted worlds, colored by an interpretation of the present, that guides us to seek answers from astrological readings, tarot cards, and other forms of psychic divination. As we stagger haplessly toward an era of digital proliferation, in what ways are we steered by the lingering, collective fear of becoming the default byproduct of algorithmic futurity?

Crespo’s work makes the case that it now requires much more intentionality, not less, to create art that deeply resonates with our current environmental consciousness. She is trying to get to the core of something fundamental to, and deeply embedded within, our human relation to technology. She centers the idea of “nature” to make tangible, parallel arrangements of our lived world, like the anatomy of certain creatures and insects, or the data of marine ecosystems. “This all stemmed from a curiosity about using technology to change how we engage with and see the world,” she notes.

At the reception later that evening, a collector told me they thought that Sofia Crespo’s career would soon see a meteoric rise to the top. In the weeks that followed, a storm of headlines covered her brilliant display, which was dubbed a stunning takeover of Barcelona. Her artwork promises to plunge us into the future—weary witnesses to unforeseen shifts in our own ecological landscape. A kinetic index of a decadent natural world, it cuts across art-historical sightlines, activating a deep awareness of the spatial, the archival, and the algorithmic at once. As Gaudí himself said, “Nothing is art if it does not come from nature.”