Sofia Crespo’s Speculative Nature

{assemblage_9087}, from Sofia Crespo’s series “Neural Zoo,” 2018-21.

The creature appears to be, at first glance, a parrot, with bright feathers in yellow, red, green, and blue. But another look, and one sees that it’s shaped more like a duck, or perhaps two ducks melded into one. What looks like an eye might really be the wing of a butterfly. The more closely one looks at the image, the more the creature is unrecognizable; it dissolves into a strange jumble of component parts, which seem to add up to nothing, and then cohere once again into something both familiar and unknown.

This is one of the images from Sofia Crespo’s series “Neural Zoo” (2018–20). Crespo is an artist whose work combines neural network technologies and images of the natural world to generate what she calls “speculative nature.” All the images in this series have this quality of the real and unreal combined: frogs that seem to be flowers, moth wings that appear to become their own landscape, translucent jellyfish-like creatures with impossibly vivid internal organs.

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