He works with artificial intelligence but his work is inspired by biology, as he has shown in his recent mapping, projected on the facade of Casa Batlló. Or as can be seen in the illustrations of the current season of the Palau de la Música Catalana, in an explosion of artificial invertebrate flora and fauna… sometimes disturbing. The Argentinian Sofía Crespo (1991), from the artistic duo Entangled Others that she forms with her partner, the “ex-architect” Feileacan McCormick, participated this week in the ISE (Integrated Systems Europe) fair, talking about the technical challenges that involved making the mapping. “Because obviously this facade is complex, it’s full of textures and the light reflects off the ceramics, the glass… We needed to see how to work with these elements in a way that made sense,” he says.
Are you aware of the repercussion that your work can have associated with the Gaudí brand and the Barcelona brand?
No. I felt that putting my work in conversation with an incredible artist was something personal, assuming that Gaudí shared the inspirations that I also feel, the curiosity towards nature. I read about his life and what inspired him. It was important to see him as a human being, someone who had an artistic revelation at some point in his life and changed his style, his way of thinking. I didn’t think so much about the repercussion it would have, the truth; I thought more about doing the work because we only had three months to develop a project of such a scale and I dedicated myself to it. The next day I woke up with only the idea of ??continuing to edit the work until it is perfect.
But the artistic approach to nature is managed by you with artificial intelligence… How do you see the interaction between art and science?
Artificial intelligence is only a tool, not an end in itself. What I always try to mention in my work is that the message does not stay in the algorithm. For me the important thing is to share these sensations that I have, this feeling. One of the challenges of art is that one cannot force the other to feel the way one feels.
What limit would you not cross when using technology?
One thing I would never do is say that artificial intelligence has consciousness. When I first started learning about technology, I demystified it, and as an artist, I feel like I have a responsibility. Maybe this is political in a way, but I would be very saddened if technology came to have recognized rights while invertebrates do not. Invertebrates are not protected under the law in the same way that, for example, mammals are. You can do whatever you want with a jellyfish, it doesn’t have a spine, it doesn’t have a brain, but it does have a nervous system. That’s one of the things I don’t want to happen. I see it as a human ego trip to think “ah, look, let’s create something that has consciousness…”, but everything that was already here doesn’t have it. How can an artificial neural network be ascribed consciousness and an octopus, for example, which has been shown to be intelligent, not be ascribed consciousness.
The problem is what do we call intelligence?
Our definition of intelligence is very limited. Because if I do an IQ test on a plant it won’t have intelligence, and if I do it on a computer, yes, but it’s because we program in this way, it’s totally biased. Just because an algorithm can give me words it has learned doesn’t mean it has intelligence. That’s why for me the term artificial intelligence is very old fashioned and misleading.
What should we be talking about instead?
I like machine learning because it is more faithful to the algorithmic concept.
Is accelerationism the great challenge that presents itself today? This political and social idea that computer technology and aggressive capitalism should accelerate and intensify…
It is quite a strong idea that we must continue to develop technology at such a speed that the technology itself can fix all the previous mistakes we made. And that the only solution is to develop more technology. If we do this we stay in a loop. For me it is important to mention that art is not that, art does not try to be a demo of today’s technology. Many times this is what I am asked: what is the latest technology? And you feel this pressure because you work with the last. But art is not about that, nor should this pressure be placed on artists.
He leaves his home, Buenos Aires, at the age of 19 on his way to New Zealand. He then lived in Berlin and now resides in Lisbon. The itinerary of an artist who… would have wanted to study biology?
I wish you could study art, computer science and biology at the same time, I would love it, I believe in this intersection of things. I like to see microscopic structures, I have a lot of microscopes at home, and I know it’s old technology, but it amazes me to see even something that seems uninteresting, like plastic, on a microscopic scale.
He has more projects in Barcelona. He presents a piece at SónarMies.
Yes, Joan Llort, the Supercomputing oceanographer, contacted us for this project that will be presented in June at the Mies van der Rohe pavilion. And we suggested that he join a research on marine snow, which is formed by the decay of organic matter when it falls to the bottom of the sea (scales, fish food…). It is to explore the idea that the oceans are viewed horizontally but not vertically, so we study the migration from the bottom to the surface.