Exploring imaginary worlds – natural artist Sofia Crespo examines the intersection of art, AI and sustainability

In January 2024, a crowd of nearly 100,000¹ people gathered in Barcelona to witness the groundbreaking premiere of Structures of Being, a new work by Argentine visual artist Sofia Crespo.

At first sight, the nine-minute animation, which was projected onto the dramatic façade of Antoni Gaudí’s architectural masterpiece Casa Batlló, appeared to be a representation of overlapping ecosystems, with marine creatures, corals, reptiles and insects all vying for the viewers’ attention. As with much of Crespo’s work, however, the audience were soon given the uncanny feeling that what they were looking at was not quite real.

Crespo achieves this ‘almost-but-not-quite-real’ otherworldliness by employing machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and computing neural networks to re-imagine the natural world. Crucially, though, her work stays firmly rooted in nature, aiming to inspire wonder and a determination to protect biodiversity and our vital ecosystems.

We met with Crespo to explore what she sees as the intersection of art, AI, and sustainability. 

Watch our video interview with Sofia Crespo:

Technology – a window into the natural world

“We’re often told that technology distances us from the natural world,” Sofia Crespo began. “But it doesn’t do that for me. I’ve always had a fascination for microscopes. I would walk around and collect samples from leaves or ponds, and take them home and look at them under the microscope. That allowed me to have a different relationship with my environment. It made me feel closer to it. So I started thinking about how technology was helping me connect to the natural world.”

Crespo explained, the more she explores the intersection of nature and technology, the more she discovers our lack of knowledge and understanding

“I wanted to continue exploring that idea through using artificial neural networks to generate new versions of natural history that never existed, or creatures that never existed – and to think about what that means about our natural environment today.”

However, Crespo explained, the more she explores the intersection of nature and technology, the more she discovers our lack of knowledge and understanding.

“In 2022, I started researching how critically endangered species – those on the verge of going extinct in the wild – were represented on social media. We trained an AI model on millions and millions of images of open data from a catalogue of species used for scientific purposes. And when we asked that model to reconstruct certain critically endangered species, what we found is that many times we ended up with accidental, imaginary species, because the model is trying its best to reconstruct the species, but it doesn’t have enough data. So really we’re talking about the limitations of AI, not its strengths, and about the limitations of the data we have.”

Filling the data gaps

She continued, “As humans many of us have a bias towards cute-looking species. We see a red panda, for instance, and we think, ‘oh, that’s cute, let’s save the red panda.’ A large part of our brain is dedicated to reading faces. So when species don’t have a face, it’s as if we don’t connect or engage with it.”

We are creating hierarchies between species that we care about more than others

“We are creating hierarchies between species that we care about more than others. I try to make people think about how we are representing the natural world. What would happen if all our efforts go to conserving just the whales, for instance, and we forget other animals. It’s really important to remember that the natural world is a set of complex systems that we don’t fully understand. There’s something very humbling about it, about knowing that we don’t know everything.”

Read also: The regenerative power of keystone economics

Where necessary, Crespo tries to give these essential but often-overlooked species a face by filling some of these gaps herself, working with scientists and other artists, and hiking and diving to explore ecosystems and collect data, photos and videos. In some extreme cases, where sufficient data is unavailable, she even generates artificial datasets.

Reflected in her work is her particular affinity with marine environments. She has previously noted, “I can’t help but feel a strong sense of urgency and concern regarding the oceans. It’s important that we do what’s necessary to ensure this biodiversity doesn’t just vanish from the planet.”²

AI – tool or creator?

By focussing on AI, Crespo is at the forefront of the technology’s development as a tool for artists, creating work that would have otherwise been impossible. But is she concerned about AI’s potential to undermine the art world by becoming a creator in itself, or, in a fast-changing and often febrile political environment, to create potentially dangerous manipulations?

“I am fascinated by technology. I’m very curious about things that are emerging,” she explained. “But AI is just a system that tries to imitate certain things – certain elements of what a human mind can do. It’s very important to highlight that while it can do a lot of things that a human can’t do – like extract patterns from large datasets – it cannot do a lot of basic things that a human mind can do.”

“AI is not alive. It exists as software inside a computer, and it’s important to remind ourselves that it doesn’t have agency. Humans have the agency to do whatever we want with it.”

Read also: What scenarios for artificial intelligence in 2025

The AI conundrum

For Crespo, the environmental impact of AI is an added challenge. While she uses the technology to attract public attention to endangered ecosystems, at the global level AI is itself responsible for outsized environmental harms. Across the world, AI may soon use more water each year than Denmark³, a country of 6 million people, and is set to consume 1.1 petawatt hours of electricity annually,⁴ the equivalent of a quarter of total US electricity consumption⁵.

Crespo trains most of her AI models on a small scale in her studio, using only minimal hardware and energy consumption, and constantly looks for ways to reduce the immediate environmental impact of her work. She notes that the downsides of any new technologies stems from how we use them, and that it’s important to explore how they might be used responsibly so that we can uncover their capabilities while minimising any negative impact.

Artists are often the earliest adopters of new technologies and the first to interrogate their cost-benefits, and Crespo is aware that her work fosters this debate. “It’s important for artists to remain critical of new technologies, to use art as a vehicle to create a dialogue about the technology,” she told us. At the same time, there’s no doubt that in her hands AI-powered art has become a valuable tool for helping to raise awareness of the need to preserve some of our most valuable species and ecosystems. Data and scientific facts, she noted, have only limited impact to reach people on an emotional level – for that, we need culture⁶.

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At Lombard Odier, this mirrors our conviction that, despite its current environmental impact, AI has the potential to power the transition to a sustainable economy that works in harmony with nature. We believe that AI and ‘big data’ will accelerate the shift to clean energy, slashing emissions by enabling smart power grids that maximise renewable energy efficiency and storage.

AI may also be used to help devise new technologies, sustainable materials and sustainability solutions – for example, Google has already deployed DeepMind, its AI research lab, to cut by 40% the electricity demand of its own data centre cooling systems.⁷.

We are convinced that AI can overcome its environmental challenges to become an essential catalyst for the shift to a sustainable economy. Whether in energy, industry or art, it is fast-becoming a cross-cutting tool that will help build a net-zero and nature-positive future.