Polymorphism 14

A self-described “neural artist” with an interest in biology-inspired technologies, Sofia Crespo is known for using AI techniques to probe the creative, recombinant potential of organic life. For this series, Crespo created a dataset of custom collages that manifest hybrid creatures existing in a speculative liminal space between land and sea (in the case of “Polymorphism 14,” a seahorse and butterfly). The process of collaging — splicing together disparate found imagery to create a new composition — resembles the act of grafting or gene editing to produce novel chimeras in nature. When fed through a Convolutional Neural Net, new textures, shapes, and colors emerge from the AI-generated “mutations” of the dataset. The work highlights the increasingly entangled relationship between human intervention and evolution in shaping organic life.