Artist Sofia Crespo Is Speaking To Unseen Worlds

I met Sofia Crespo on a cold evening in late January. I took the elevator up to her seventh-floor hotel room in Barcelona, just an hour before the groundbreaking premiere of her latest projection mapping work, Structures of Being. The artist’s kinetic, nine-minute animation of lustrous florals, coral reefs, and insectoids was set to illuminate the historic 100-foot facade of Antoni Gaudí's Casa Batlló, which could be seen from her balcony. The spectacle was sure to draw tens of thousands of onlookers, dutifully wielding iPhones in hand (“like Times Square on New Year’s Eve,” someone assured me earlier). But Crespo didn’t seem all that nervous. Donning all black with her round glasses, she smoothed her long hair behind one ear and invited me to make myself comfortable on the loveseat.

Crespo spent nearly a decade living and working in Berlin before relocating to Lisbon in 2022. For almost six years now, she has been working with her own custom-trained AI models to conjure other-worldly creations that feature a host of surreal biological lifeforms—cephalopods, amorphous plants, and jellyfish with vivid internal organs. A lover of math and science, Crespo never received a formal art education. Initially determined to study computer science at a public university, she pivoted as she was drawn more deeply into her artistic practice. “I saw that I had two paths in front of me that were quite different from each other,” she recounts, “I ended up choosing to do art full time, which was a huge risk.”