The piece is one of 5 pieces depicting the same garden under different light conditions from my long-form project 'Once Upon A Garden' – a digital garden born from a collaboration between me and a GAN which debuted at Art X Lagos in November 2022. It is a dystopian projection of a likely outcome of global warming, that depicts a world where humans now have to live with simulated images of plants and flowers, which have all disappeared from the earth. Through collections of AI-assisted photographs of a variety of indigenous flora, native to the Sahel region of West Africa, the installation puts forward the fundamental question:

Can our contemplation of art restore our collective ability to introspect on our environment and our sense of responsibility towards preserving it?

The installation attempts to answer this through the spectacle of flora as a distant memory, to elicit a longing for what has been lost and hopefully trigger the desire to protect what has survived.

I first compiled a list of over 100+ species of flora endemic to the Sahel region and classified as endangered by IUCN's Red List of Endangered Species. I then scoured the web for images of these plants to create the database I would later use in the first round of training. I had come across some of these plants before, but many were new to me. It dawned on me that I might not get to see a majority of these plants in nature within my lifetime given the rate at which wildlife is disappearing from the earth. From this database, I then shortlisted 8 of the plants that I imagine would fit well together in a bouquet, and used the commercial AI tool DALL.E to generate a large set of variations of each plant. This allowed me to compile a second, more refined, database specifically for this installation which I used to train a GAN. I used the GAN's initial outputs of 8,000 plant images to create animations of individual plants that I then brought together in the final composition.

Each artwork is an edition of 5

PRICE: 100 XTZ per edition

I feel the pull.
It's not comfortable.
I must stretch in order to grow.
The beauty was beyond my limits.
I shall soon have new limits.

"The Pull" is a generative set of 10, made in pure code with p5js and glsl.

10 artworks as 1/1

PRICE: 0.5 ETH each

Sofia Crespo is an artist working 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. Crespo looks at the similarities between techniques of AI image formation, and the way that humans express themselves creatively and cognitively recognize their world. Her work brings into question the potential of AI in artistic practice and its ability to reshape our understandings of creativity. On the side, she is also hugely concerned with the dynamic change in the role of the artists working with machine learning techniques. She’s also the co-founder of Entangled Others Studio.

ONLY FOR EXHIBITION

The Nursery is Sputniko's first edition of 100 NFTs, a collection of time-based generative art which simulates the organic growth and emergence of life forms. Following her own recent experience of giving birth to her first child, Sputniko worked with creative coder Misaki Nakano to explore creating pieces inspired by the experience of watching her daughter grow over time. The resultant abstract, flower-like forms will slowly change their shape and form over a period of a year. One hundred of these pieces will be 'born' when minting begins at Bright Moments London.

ONLY FOR EXHIBITION