Sofia Crespo

Artificial Natural History is a work that poses questions around what an alternative understanding of nature might look like through the pages of a speculative natural history book. These pages depict fragmentary studies of an alternative realm of biology studiously documented. Whilst their subject matter lies in the chimerical and improbable, the sum of the pages of this tome etch out the contours of just how our view of the natural world was formed: through the precise assembly, grouping, dissection, and description of encounters with new specimens.  While the specimens depicted may never reveal their deepest logic to us, they instead mirror the structure of modern perceptions of nature and its ecosystems. The works in this series are produced by using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) together with historical, public-domain data from natural history archives.