OFFICIAL LAUNCH OF our new video series as KVG Virtual Artist Studio visits - TODAY WITH SOFIA CRESPO FROM HER STUDIO IN BERLIN, GERMANY!
Starting today, we are launching our first video from our new series as KVG Virtual Artist Studio visits! Short films are created out of desire to give a sneak pick of how the artists work and talk about their practices.
Sofia Crespo is our first artist, inviting us on an exclusive ‘behind the scenes’ video tour of her studio!
Title: biomimicry_003
Year: 2020
Authors: Dark Fractures & Sofia Crespo
Series: Artificial Remnants
Technique: GANs
Duration: 00:04
‘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 is guiding us through a little journey where you can get the amazing opportunity to see where and how she produces 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:
Title: chromatic_meditations()
Authors: Sofia Crespo & Andrew Pouliot
Year: 2020
Series: Chromatophores
Technique: GANs
Duration: 00:09
“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 store as unique works digitally and on the blockchain.
Sofia, recently interviewed by CLOT magazine, shares
‘… My work aims to visually understand the shapes of nature using new technologies such as deep learning. Working on Neural Zoo has led me to reflect on the meaning of creativity, the functioning of our visual cortex for pattern recognition, and the evolution of life in itself with its adaptations and challenges.
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.’
Sofia Crespo
{unfolding_2121}, 2020
Neural Zoo series
Technique: Convolutional Neural Network
P.S. First of all, we would like to say thank you to Sofia for taking her time to invest in this project , it is a real pleasure to work with her and the works that she creates are absolutely stunning! Secondly, we would like to encourage everyone to place comments and questions to the artist after watching the “studio visit”, so we can follow up and respond to all in our next chapter with Sofia Crespo!
Enjoy it!
Kate Vass Team