MTF Labs Aveiro 2021

Participant profile: Sofia Crespo

Sofia Crespo is an artist working with biology-inspired AI technologies and AI-generated speculative life forms.

Through her work, she explores the ways in which organic life uses artificial mechanisms to simulate itself and evolve, implying that technologies are a product of the organic life that created them and not separate from them.

How can we dream up new ecosystems? Can doing so help us understand the concept of existing always in relationship to others?

With Feileacan McCormick, Sofia founded the Entangled Others Studio. Their exhibition Beneath the Neural Waves explores biodiversity through an attempt at creating (digitally) an aquatic ecosystem as a means of attempting to engage with the very abstract concept of relationship. These dioramas of artificial life, together with the various sculptural fragments, imagery, and text, reach out towards the complex entanglement of natural life, both with itself and others.

The choice of the aquatic, specifically the coral reef, came from their belief that these ecosystems are the perfect example of how interconnectedness occurs in the natural world between life. No one creature is the core component of the reef, rather it emerges from the interwoven whole of all the individual component species.

Sofia Crespo joins a global community of artists, scientists, experts and innovators at MTF Aveiro, October 11th - 16th, 2021 to explore the theme of ‘Just Ocean’. For more information, and to apply to join us there, visit https://www.aveirotechcity.pt/pt/atividades/mtflabs

“I think a crucial part of creativity comes from iterations… exploring all of the ramifications that a single idea can have. And that’s something where assisted creativity helps a lot.”

For more about Sofia, listen to her MTF Labs podcast interview.