AI Artist Spotlight: Sofia Crespo
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to create pieces of art has transformed the art industry, allowing artists to stretch their creativity further up and become more productive in their work. Sofia Crespo is one of the popular digital visual artists who are using text-to-image AI tools to create generative lifeforms and artificial life.
She is known for using neural networks to generate pieces of art that replicate different elements found in the natural world, such as birds, mammals, landscapes, reptiles, and insects. If you analyse her work closely, you’ll notice the nuanced distortions generated through generative adversarial networks (GAN). Crespo is ranked among other top AI artists like Alexander Reben, Mario Klingemann, Memo Akten, and many others.
Biography
Born in 1975 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Sofia Crespo is a renowned digital artist with a special interest in biology-inspired art. Throughout her career as an artist, Crespo has always focused on understanding how organic life employs artificial intelligence to mimic itself and progress. She is of the view that technology is a biassed product of the biological life that created it and not a fully separate product.
Her art pieces and studies mainly revolve around the similarities between AI image generation and the creative and cognitive ways in which humans express themselves as they try to understand the world around them–this is why most of her art pieces tend to interrogate the impact of AI on the art industry and its ability to transform how humans understand creativity. Crespo also focuses on the dynamic alteration of the roles of artists using AI and other machine learning systems.
Career
Crespo’s interest in AI and GAN art came from an AI art workshop that she attended once on her birthday. Although she had already developed an interest in this form of art before Gene Kogan’s workshop, she didn’t know that she had the competence to do it professionally, and her interest in AI art became profound, compelling her to dive into the medium immediately.
She also admits that she didn’t initially plan to pursue art as a career, but after practising it for some time, she realised that she had the potential to become a professional artist and decided to pursue art instead of going to university. Although this decision was seen as irrational at the time, Crespo admits she’s quite content with it now.
Unlike other digital artists who use specific AI programs to generate pieces, Crespo insists that she doesn’t have a preferred program for her work. Instead, she combines different AI programs, depending on the type of work she’s doing. She notes that her decision to use multiple programs comes from the belief that art should transcend the tools used.
According to Crespo, the most important aspect of art is the exploration and discussion of the pieces created and why they’re created–not how they’re made. She maintains that if artists fail to deliberately engage with their work and why they do it, they are likely to turn their work into a niche of technology-based showpieces, which serve a completely different purpose than art.
Projects and Exhibitions
So far, Crespo has created numerous popular pieces, including the Sediment Nodes, Chimerical Stories, Critical Extant, Aqua Formings–Interweaving the Subaqueous, Beneath the Neural Waves, Hybrid Ecosystems, Artificial Remnants, Encounters with Aquatic Chimeras, and This Jellyfish Does Not Exist, among others. She is also a co-founder of the Entangled Others Studio, where most of her pieces are exhibited.
Crespo has also exhibited her work at various popular exhibitions at locations such as Vellum LA, The Jam Factory Oxford, and the AI Everything Summit. She is currently working towards making her work available in more public spaces so that it can continue to nurture minds and generate ideas.