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Peter Bauman: Hello everyone, and welcome to this Le Random podcast. I'm your host, Peter Bauman, the Editor-in-Chief of Le Random. And this week is a special week. It's Duo Week.
Today, we are continuing our Friday podcast episodes as a companion to our Monday editorials, our Monday written pieces. And today's very special podcast episode is with the superstar artist duo of Anna Ridler and Sofia Crespo.
Our editorial this Monday was with another superstar duo, and that is Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst. I had an amazing conversation with Holly and Mat. It took hours and could have gone on for hours more. I really encourage you to check out that conversation at Le Random Editorials.
But today, we are chatting with another wonderful duo, Anna Ridler and Sofia Crespo, about a big year for them. They released a project together this year, Long Short Term Memories. They also won the Arab Bank Switzerland Artist of the Year. We cover their early experiments with deep learning, how they both fuse natural history and machine learning, AI, and also the evolution of their now five collaborative projects together.
So I enjoyed this chat a lot. And they also told me that it was their first time being interviewed together. So that makes it even more special. Wow, what a treat. I can't wait to share. So let's begin.
Yeah, again, maybe we can go ahead and get started. So there's two main goals, and one is to talk about your earliest experiences with AI and deep learning, and then also to talk a lot about your collaboration. So maybe we can just start chronologically, at least, but talking about your first encounters with deep learning. And maybe we can start with Anna, but can you just tell us, how did you first learn and hear about deep learning? Because you two were some of the earliest to really start engaging with it artistically back in as early as 2016, I believe.
Anna Ridler: I was at the Royal College of Art when I started working with it, and I was mainly drawn to it because I was already working with large data and thinking about how to display large amounts of information and what stories were in large amounts of information and how information could be used to think about the world in a different way, or think about what is deemed important and what's not deemed important.
That all stemmed from my abiding love of language and literature and dictionaries and encyclopedias, all of which are trying to categorize and understand the world, which is what I studied originally at university.
And so the interest in large data and this boom of large data, because at that time data visualization was this big thing that people were talking about. From thinking about that and looking at that and making work with that, there isn't a massive leap to working with data sets. And from working with data sets, there's not a massive leap to working with machine learning more generally. So that's the route that I took to get into working with it.
Sofia Crespo: I think for me, it started in a very different place than Anna's. For me, it started by being fascinated with memes and net art and thinking about my browser history, basically. What is my browser exposed to on the day to day? What information am I browsing? And what would I think of myself if I only had my browser history and didn't know anything else about me.
That led me to think about, what do corporations know about me that can see my browser history? What models are they training with my data? And then that led me to think about, how could I portray myself, make a project about where you only see my browser history, basically.
I started making this project called Trauma Doll. The idea behind it was basically learning automatically to extract patterns from the information or the things that I was browsing.
Eventually, that took a completely different turn when I started thinking about extracting patterns from the things that I was observing under the microscope. Then I switched completely from being interested in the Internet as a thing of itself, like an ecosystem of itself, to looking at the natural world. And then, yeah, it kickstarted the exploration that I'm still continuing to explore today.
Anna Ridler: It's funny that you say that, Sofia, because I hadn't really realized that that was the beginning of your early work, because in many ways, some of the early work that I did was also looking... I worked a lot with things like WikiLeaks and things like autocorrect, and looking at what traces remain on the internet after a while and how corporations push different patterns onto you. I think we probably had really similar starts before coming to the world of machine learning and natural history.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. What was your first thought to go from natural history to then AI? Is there anything else you want to talk about there?
Sofia Crespo: The way that I see it is like a natural progression. Even if it seems very separate from the outside to this idea of the Internet and looking at all these information systems on the Internet, it makes perfect sense to also look back in time, and specifically with a focus on the natural world, looking at how, as humans, we have tried to make sense of the world around us. We've tried to catalog it. We've tried to understand what ecosystem we are a part of.
And in a way, there's a bit of that sense of struggle to it as well, where we can try all we want to categorize all the species in the planet, but we know that that's not enough. We'll never really know what it is like to be another species. And so there's a sense of incompleteness to it that I find very fascinating to look at. I know that it's one of the things we share, this interest in how historically, as humans, we have tried to understand the world.
Anna Ridler: Yeah, I totally agree with what Sofia was saying, because I think for me, at least, it's not about nature or working with nature. It's about working with natural history, which is different. It's humans. It's our perception of what nature is and how nature fits into a very human-centric view of the world. Because natural history, even the term natural history is a very Enlightenment term. It's a term about, as Sofia said, trying to break up and organize and order the world, which I think, again, has strong parallels with what is happening and has happened with machine learning, with the way that data sets and algorithms understand certain things through how the world has been pieced and parceled and fed to them.
And I think there's very much this thing about how with natural history, you're taking an object out of the world, out of its environment. When you're thinking about these herbariums, it's an object that is made clean and taken out of... And it's always in this perfect form. It's not decaying or rotting and found how it grows naturally. It's preserved and made clean. And the labor that goes into doing that work of finding it, pressing it, painting it, whatever, is obscured. There's all sorts, I think, of really nice parallels between how natural history has worked in the past and its function as part of science and what's going on at the moment with machine learning. That for me makes it really powerful.
I think as well, going back to what we were talking about earlier about how we were both really interested when we were starting out with the idea and the possibilities of working with machine learning, it was all about large sets of information and data in corporations. I find it really powerful to make parallels to other instances where this has occurred. Natural history just seemed like such an obvious and clear fit for that. I think it's been a really powerful one because it's something that we keep returning to again and again and again as a way of working.
“It's about working with natural history, which is different. It's humans. It's our perception of what nature is and how nature fits into a very human-centric view of the world.” — Anna Ridler 7:36
Peter Bauman: Yeah, there's such a long history of those natural history systems, and going back to Reynolds and the boids algorithms and particle systems and really trying to capture the world algorithmically and think about the world algorithmically. And then, Anna, you were talking about how natural history is this human-centric view of nature. And so, yeah, I'm wondering, the posthumanist thought that runs through both of your work, I believe, did that come before your interest in deep learning?
Sofia Crespo: At least speaking for myself, it's something that emerged naturally. It's something that, as I was exploring, was a bit like a feedback loop between what I was doing and asking myself different questions. So I would do something and then think, Oh, what about this? What about what happened back in, I don't know, this period of time? Or what about these other things? And that led me to be curious and research, dive deeper into things that I was interested in. It emerged in a natural way for me. It wasn't something that I had fully researched before I started doing this. I don't know how it was for you, Anna?
Anna Ridler: I think, I don't know. It's always really hard. I think I've always had an abiding interest in it. I remember when I was an undergrad, I wrote an essay talking about scientific phenomena when the language to talk about scientific phenomena hadn't been invented yet. How do you talk about electricity for the first time? I think there's always been this interest in how do you describe and think about the world from first principles.
I think one of the things that I do, similar to Sofia, is this looping, working and looping back and thinking and connecting. One of the ways that we both work is quite slowly and methodically and precisely and with a lot of attention. I think that gives the ability to connect these different disparate thoughts together.
I think nature in its own way, even the word nature is in a weird way difficult, because everything is natural. Everything is in the universe. But there is this distinction that has been made that something is real nature and fake nature. I think I've always been interested in it, but it's just the more that I've worked in this way, the more refined that interest has become.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, that makes sense. Both of you were in the early NeurIPS creativity workshops, and I think that's really interesting. I think those are some of the more important early AI and creativity events that took place.
Anna, your work was accepted in the first one, the first one in 2017. It was a paper that described Fall of the House of Usher. I guess I have a couple of questions. Maybe the first one is, so was it only... You were using these really early GANs for Fall of the House of Usher in 2020. I guess probably you would have started with them in 2016. So was it only Pix2Pix or was there any other GAN technology you were using?
Anna Ridler: It was only Pix2Pix in that one, in Fall of the House of Usher. I don't even remember why at the time, but I think I just liked how it was working.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. No, it was definitely really popular back then.
I'm just wondering, this early on, this was the first time that NeurIPS had a creativity workshop. I just wonder, what was it like back then? Did you feel like you were a tinkerer working with this technology in these primitive deep learning tools, or were you feeling more like an artist? What was your mindset back in those early days?
Anna Ridler: I felt more like an artist because I was more interested in how I could use the technology within a broader artistic practice, because I had just come from the RCA, doing lots of stuff with technology in an art practice, although I did a very weird degree, where it was... But I was very much like, I want to be an artist. I want to have an art practice. I don't want to be a creative technologist. I want to be an artist.
And so I was more interested in finding a way to use these technologies in a way that could echo or bring out the central concept of the piece rather than to maybe push them to their maximum ability or to make them as technically perfect as possible.
I remember I also did a keynote, not early, but at a European computer vision conference at a similar time, I think about 2018, and all of the scientists were being like, We can help you fix this and make it look better. I was like, But that's not the point. The point is that it's flawed and that it's broken and that it doesn't work. I felt very much interested in that and wanting to push that.
But I also remember at that time, there wasn't a lot of literacy in the broader world, with curators or even curators who specialized in digital art, as to what this technology was and how it could work. And so a lot of the time when I would give talks, a lot of the talk would be about what the technology is versus how I'm using it, why it's interesting. I don't know how you felt at the time, Sofia.
Sofia Crespo: For me, it was very different because I didn't have a formal art education. I didn't even think that being recognized as an artist, whatever, was a real possibility. Because I think there's something about the art education that empowers you to believe that that's a real thing. But for me, it was like a far-fetched dream in a way. Okay, I can only keep exploring this, but it doesn't mean that it's realistic.
“The point is that it's flawed and that it's broken and that it doesn't work. I felt very much interested in that and wanting to push that.” — Anna Ridler 14:51
It started as me just sharing my work online. I would explore a series and I would just make various iterations. Sometimes, even these experiments, I didn't know where I was really trying to go. I didn't know really what I was trying to do. I was figuring it out on the go.
I remember the first time that I got asked to write a statement about what I was doing. I was like, I've never had to write a statement before. I don't even know what that really means. Doing that as an exercise forced me to really reevaluate what I was doing at the meta level that I hadn't really thought about before.
As my work started getting exhibited, that gave me the confidence to continue exploring in a more planned manner, in a way that I was able to be more thinking in advance of what I want to do before I do it. And so that completely changed my way of working. Now I think about what I'm trying to do.
So it's like a fine balance because you always want to allow for unpredictable things to happen. You always want to allow to have some communication with what you're doing and be able to not be that rigid, that you're open to the process as well and where it can guide you, right? And I know that that's very alive when we work together, Anna, because it's very much like an intuitive process of figuring out what we are doing on the go. Whereas now independently, we both have practices that are very focused on what are we trying to do and the exploration of how do we get there.
Anna Ridler: Yeah, this is one of the reasons why I enjoy our collaboration so much, because it takes me back to that time when I started, which was more about, let's just do something and figure out what it is about as we're doing it. And I think it was a time when, because the technology was much smaller, it was much easier to take something and just test it and get results really quickly and just mess about with it and train something up. It does feel substantially different, I think.
Peter Bauman: I know in 2016 and 2017, you must have been, well, you mentioned Pix2Pix. Did you work with anything before that, with any DCGANs or VAEs or anything like that?
Anna Ridler: That was my first entry into deep learning. But my first experiments with AI were probably a bit earlier around language and around trying to decode speech to text algorithms and see what was going on there.
Peter Bauman: And Sofia, what was it for you?
Sofia Crespo: I think it was neural style. I mean, and it still is. I'm still running it the way that I was running it at that time, basically. It's just I have more GPU power now, so it has a better resolution. But I would dare to say it will always be neural style. I can't ever not use a GAN in my project. There's always one somewhere at some point. It's just there.
Peter Bauman: I was in touch with Leon recently, because it was the 10-year anniversary of NST. It'd be really fun to talk to Leon about that, and I hope we can figure that out. But Anna was at the 2017 NeurIPS ML creativity conference, or presented.
Anna Ridler: I did. I remember my computer science friends just being like, What poster is this? Because the entire poster was just images and a tiny little bit of text at the bottom.
Peter Bauman: Sorry, Sofia, you went in 2020, I think.
Sofia Crespo: Oh, yeah. I think this was just an exhibition then. Sorry, this was an online talk.
Peter Bauman: Oh, because it was the COVID year.
Sofia Crespo: Yeah.
Peter Bauman: Those were still definitely the early days in 2020.
Sofia Crespo: I was so nervous because I was the first speaker of the conference, and I didn't know how people would react to my work. Would they think, Oh, this is just a naive way of looking at the technologies that they're developing? Literally, the people developing the tools that I'm using are there. I was very surprised with how excited people were afterwards.
Also, to meet people that are so specialized in very niche areas of machine learning, that really shows you how diverse the field is. Whereas we think about AI as this monolithic thing. It's just this one thing. But really, it's a lot of things. It's a lot of small things. Without each of these parts of the puzzle, we wouldn't have the tools that we have.
Peter Bauman: I think it's a good opportunity to get really into the collaboration in that part of this discussion. Your first collaboration was 2023, and that was Various and Casual Occursions. But when did you two actually first meet or encounter the other's work? How did the collaboration begin?
Anna Ridler: I can't remember not knowing Sofia's work because she was always so present on the internet, and her work was and is so beautiful that I think it was always there in the background, thinking about who is doing what in this space.
But the first time we met was in 2018 at a show that was put on in Hanover. It was a really good show with lots of people who weren't at that time working with this stuff, and they flew us all out there. Sougwen was there, Sofia, you were there, Mario was there, and it was just... Matthew Plummer-Fernández was there, and I don't know, it was just a really nice opening. The vibes were really good, everyone was in a really good mood.
I just remember because it was the first time I met Sougwen, and I became really close. I really like her and I'm friends with her. And Sofia was there, and that's the first time we talked. And I met Feileacan as well. Unbeknownst to me, I met Feileacan. He was just introduced as a person who was with Sofia. It was just such a wonderful time, and we just really hit it off and became friends and then just have chatted online since then.
Sofia Crespo: Yeah, I remember Mario Klingemann was there as well. It was a really cool exhibition. I remember that I showed Trauma Doll. Back then, we took these massive blowout prints of my browser history. I remember that there were so many embarrassing things here and there, and thinking like, Oh, my God, people are going to see this and now know who the person behind it is. It was a really cool show. I wish that we could make a reunion of that show because it was a lot of fun.
Anna Ridler: Because it gave us so much space. At the time, I think it was the first time when the broader early AI art was being exhibited as artworks and not just as an explainer of how AI works. Everything was really well-produced, and it was just really, I think, a really well-done show. It was really lots of people working in really different ways, but all trying to explore critically how the thing worked.
Sofia Crespo: Yeah, absolutely. It was really ahead of its time in a way, because they were even showing sculptural pieces in a very ambitious way. There were performances. There was a performance by, I remember. But they also had Mario's piece running in real-time. It was very cool.
Anna Ridler: I think they also had some pieces that were really thinking about the ethics of algorithms, alongside people who had been working with this stuff for longer time scales. I thought it was a really interestingly curated show, especially for one that was done so early.
Peter Bauman: There's a few of these early, even it was in 2016, but yeah, '17 and '18 shows that often get overlooked today, but that were really seminal.
Then if you met in 2018, do you want to say anything more about how by 2023, you were doing a collaboration together? How did it go from you meet and then maybe you got in touch with each other from here and there? But then how did that go to a collaboration?
Anna Ridler: I don't know. It's how friendships just grow. We were never really in the same city. I mean, again, were we? Until we collaborated. I don't think we showed again because then it was COVID, and then I was out of the scene for a little bit having my babies. We just became really close. I don't know how it happened. It just clicked.
Sofia Crespo: Oh, yeah. I think because we both know Luba Elliott, and she was curating a show for Unit London. I remember that she asked both of us independently, and then we were chatting, and I remember we're both like, Oh, yeah. I'm so excited to work with Luba again. We're like, What if we do something together? Like make something really special for her? Because she was really... She was... Yeah.
Anna Ridler: Luba is a really, I think, pivotal figure in the early AI scene, and particularly living in London, the meetups that she'd put on. I probably saw you speak at one of her meetups before we became friends, because she fostered the community a lot. Both of us are like, if Luba asked us to do something, we will obviously do it. And it was just a really nice... In that particular show that she was doing, Unit was bringing together a lot of the earlier people who'd been working in the space for a while. So it was a really nice time to come together and actually make something together.
I have done collaborations in the past, and sometimes they work out incredibly well, and sometimes they are a complete disaster. I think we were both a little bit nervous deciding to make something together because you're never sure if it... It's like dating your friend. You're never sure if it's just going to turn out to be wonderful and you end up married, or if you just never speak to them again because it was a bit of a disastrous process. I think we were both a bit nervous when we decided to collaborate together, especially because doing it remotely, not being in the same city. But it ended up just being such a lovely way of working. And I think it really opened up a different part of my practice.
Sofia Crespo: Yeah, and likewise. I remember that you told me you would travel to Portugal and you came with your whole family, basically. That was something I really enjoyed about the work, that we got to make the data set together. I remember that you flew in with a ziploc bag of plants from your garden. And I was like, this is amazing. And then we just... Because I don't really have a garden, I have a little backyard and it doesn't have a lot of plants in it. So we went to a park nearby where I always go for walks, and we picked... We were even there with your baby and our partners, and we just picked plants.
That was what we ended up using in the piece. We used the combination of these plants that were part of our local environment in a way, to symbolize the first time our worlds come together to create something. So in a way, that's what ended up becoming really meaningful.
Anna Ridler: I really love that piece that we made. I think also what was really nice about it is that, as Sofia talked about it earlier, unlike our projects that we do in our individual practices, it was very fluid how it would end up. We knew that we wanted to work with certain processes, particularly around creating the data set, using the way of printing with the chlorophyll. We knew we wanted to use that, but beyond that, we weren't really sure how the piece was going to come together.
Being together in the same space, because most of our work now we just need to be together for tiny amounts of time, but it's so generative. Everything comes alive and all of our ideas just ricochet off each other and become this work really quickly. We just started off quite small with this, We're going to make something. I'll come to Lisbon. We'll see what happens. And it just happened so quickly, within a few days that we generated the work.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, not surprised that Luba was involved. I, of course, agree that she's such an important part to those early AI and creativity days, pre-2020.
Speaking of which, the work is also a celebration of women in science. Why was that important for you two for your first piece? Was that just the exhibition, or why was that something that you wanted to highlight in your first piece together?
Anna Ridler: It's about Anna Atkins, or partly inspired by Anna Atkins and the way that she would work with emerging photographic methods to document the world, which obviously has played a huge part in Sofia's practice, but also in a lesser, more low-key way in how I've been thinking about data sets and observing and attention and building.
She was a British woman who would comb the seashore to find these things, which obviously has echoes to the way that I would go and find things like the shells for my various shell projects. I think we both consider a long tail of science and who is remembered and who is not remembered, I suppose. Part of our practice, or part of my practice at least, is to think about those things and unpick it and question it and query it. I think that naturally comes through into the collaboration with Sofia because that's also there with her. It wasn't necessarily, I think, a conscious choice when we sat down to decide to collaborate, but it certainly was something that naturally just fell out when we started making this work.
Sofia Crespo: I think it's also because one thing that we shared and we discovered earlier on is that we were interested in doing data sets, but also natural history references. Anna Atkins is a big one in a way, but you would think that she is as known as others. It makes you really think, how much credit did she really get during her time? How much credit does she get today? Because her work was really pivotal. She published the first book of photographs. I mean, that's a big thing in history of photography.
The first person to publish a book of photographs was a woman that was trying to study as a botanist the natural world. And so what she did was really innovative, using this camera-less technique to create a different impression, or obtain a different impression that wasn't that of desiccating the specimens, right?
So that's something that was fascinating, that she's both doing science, creating a record of something that exists in the natural world, and that also she's doing something artistic. It was this fascinating intersection of all those worlds coming together. It felt natural to just do something that referenced her work in a way.
Peter Bauman: That's really interesting to hear more of that backstory. Then further along in 2023, you had your second collaboration. The second one happened pretty quickly after the first. That was 83 Seeds from a Vanishing Mountain. That one is more of this reflection on climate change and ontologies.
But you mentioned that nervousness about whether or not you might want to work again together, or release a second album as a band. How did you think about that? It seemed like once you had done the first one, it was really easy to think about doing the second one together. Is that right?
Sofia Crespo: I think it was partly Mimi. Mimi from Nguyen Wahed now. She asked us, Would you be open to doing something together again? And would you be open to this time producing a physical piece for this display?
We were like, Okay, well, last time we only had a chance to exhibit digitally, but we did produce physical prints with the work. I mean, the whole data set is physical. We had to scan it to be able to create the digital image, right? We thought, Okay, well, this time we could work the other way around. We could work with a digital data set but end up producing a physical piece.
In a way, the work turned into a shape of its own that we definitely didn't see coming, because we broke it up into a grid. But then it felt natural to mint each of these images of the grid separately as a token, right? It's something that made us think about the seeds spreading.
Anna Ridler: It was one of the things that we were interested in about minting each tile as a grid, which is something that also comes out in one of our later works. The Clematis piece was about reconfiguring it, because when you go on and search for it, it's not shown as the perfect image. If you go onto a marketplace, it will be reconfigured. And so thinking about things getting mixed up and jumbled, and it not existing in a perfect form, but in a way that it's still working as an artwork, and how things travel and how things are kept and saved.
I think that's something else that does also come out in different iterations of our work, that it's not necessarily, as Sofia said, a fixed thing. It can transform and transmute. Even things like, we've worked with Polaroids and we've worked with cyanotypes, that they don't last forever, that there is this inherent shifting and decay and things like that, that is embedded also in the piece.
Peter Bauman: That temporality that you mentioned seems to also be a theme of your third collaboration together. That was Snapshots: Orchids, which also seems to play on some of those themes. This piece, you seem to be encouraging the audience to reflect and to slow down and to contemplate. Another 2023 work. Again, your first three collaborations were in 2023 and happened pretty close to each other. What inspired this third work? How do you see it as an extension of maybe the previous two?
Sofia Crespo: At that point, we had worked with one technique that none of us had worked with. That was the printing on photographic paper using a camera-less technique, basically with a chlorophyll. Then we worked with a cyanotype technique, which is one that I had been working with. It felt natural to then explore one that Anna had been working with, which was the Polaroid printing. It felt like a natural progression of the works, to keep exploring things that we're both interested in, but that also reflect a little bit of our worlds coming together.
Anna Ridler: And with this one, we went through all of our archives of our photographs and combined all the pictures of orchids that we'd taken over the years. Because when you're in London, you went to Kew and you saw all of the orchids, and it was directly inspired by that.
Because I think one of the things that is really magical about working with Sofia on these projects is that it is very responsive to what we're thinking and doing and seeing when we start to work on it. It's very reactive to the moment, which is, I think, a really lovely quality that I find very nice and refreshing.
Sofia Crespo: Yeah, I remember that I was at the Kew Gardens and I sent Anna a picture of an orchid that had the color palette that we had been working with. And I was like, Wow, this is our orchid. And Anna was like, Oh, my God, I love orchids. And I have so many pictures of them. And then when Mimi asked us to work on a second piece, it felt like, Okay, let's do something about orchids, where we both find orchids fascinating, and we both have taken a lot of pictures of them. So what if we use what we have as part of the data set?
I think there's also a large element of collage in our work, too, that comes together, because all of our works are in a way like an assemblage of different things. There's a lot of that. I remember, Anna, that we had talked about the collage practice of Victorian women. That was something you were really interested in, and I thought that was really fascinating.
Anna Ridler: Yeah, because I think there's something really interesting about how collage and its relationship to photography has always been there. Although it's been this movement, particularly with scrapbooking, which again is seen or slightly dismissed as an artistic practice, where if you don't have the world that you want, you quite literally cut and reconfigure representations of the world to make something that does exist.
I think there is this slipperiness to early collage and photography, where it was viewed with a lot of suspicion because it was remaking the world. Again, there are some really nice parallels to the moment that we're in at the moment with deep fakes and AI and reconfiguring the world, and there being a real, real anxiety around whether what you see is true or false.
Sofia Crespo: I think there were also questions around that that have been asked throughout history, with photography being a medium that is so closely associated with truth. There are these ways of manipulating it, and there always have been.
Peter Bauman: I also see these parallels to what you were talking about earlier with who gets credit in science, because it seems like when men artists started working with collage, then it was accepted, when Braque does it. It's accepted as fine art, but it had historically been looked down upon.
I suppose that brings us to the fourth collaboration, which was this year, and that is Long Short Term Memories: Sketches from a Garden in Argentina. This is another dialog with Polaroids and photography and memory and reproduction. Anna, you touched on it a bit, but how is this work a reflection on how you're both thinking about how art changes now, when we're in this age of artificial reproduction? We were in the age of mechanical reproduction. Now it's the age of artificial reproduction. Was that something you were thinking about with this work?
Sofia Crespo: Yeah, I think at the time that this work took place, I was actually physically in Argentina. I remember that we started talking about what we would do. And Anna had previously traveled to Argentina as well and collected a lot of pictures.
We started thinking about how every time that we recall a memory, we are somehow rewiring that memory. So we are recreating it. And that led us to think about how every time that we work with the images of a data set that we captured at a moment in time, we are creating a new experience of that.
It fitted very well with our way of working, our way of collaging, which has a bit of memory in it as well, because we are sometimes using images on the data set that we took many years ago that we weren't thinking, Oh, this was going to become a data set. It's not necessarily something that was very polished and thought out at the moment that we captured it.
There's that element of what is instantaneous, what happened in a moment. And that's something that the Polaroid has, that it is this capture, this snapshot of something. Because the Polaroid gets printed instantly in the moment that you're taking it.
We thought about what are these artificial memories? What would it look like to bring this artificial memory of a trip to Argentina that we never did together yet? Hopefully, we will. And it started collaging some of those images. At the same time, it felt natural to create, in a way, some collaged data set as well.
So I remember Anna said, What if we show the data set and the work next to each other as part of the same work, so that people understand that we are making our own data sets as well? Because I remember around the time that we published this work, there was a lot of controversy around the Christie's auction. There was a group of artists that wrote an open letter to Christie's asking them to stop the auction.
The main concern behind it was that the artists working with AI are using stolen data from other artists. But that's not necessarily true. And not all of AI has to work that way. It just felt important for us to, in a way, respond to that by showing, Look, we are artists. We're working with this technology, but we're also working with our own data sets. That is actually possible. We did it in a subtle way. Obviously, the work itself doesn't have this controversy as a subject, but it just...
Anna Ridler: It informs it.
Sofia Crespo: Yeah, absolutely.
Peter Bauman: Maybe I can also ask about your fifth and final collaboration, which is Clematis armandii. You seem to work with each other in spurts. So 2023, you had these three collaborations, and now 2025, you have the second one. And so can you tell us more about the last project that you worked on together?
Anna Ridler: The Clematis piece that we did, which is an instance where we're thinking about how work exists online and offline and how it all fades and decays and responding to the moment. And what I really like about this project is that we made it at almost exactly the same point in the year that we made our first project. And in our first project, one of the flowers that I carried over to Lisbon in my ziploc bag is actually the clematis flower that this entire piece is blown up and made out of.
It's a flower that flowers very, very briefly at the start of spring, that I documented in various different ways, from when it started to bloom to it fading away, which happens rapidly. Then we made this work, and I really like this one because also the way that Sofia printed it, it's the traces of the weather that happened when she... It's this real... I think it very much captures this coming of spring, both in terms of plant and weather.
Sofia Crespo: Yeah, and something that was interesting about it was that as the prints were hanging outside to dry, I wasn't expecting that it would rain, because the weather forecast said that it would just be clear sky all day. And it was night time. So the printing happened during night time because that makes it easier to regulate with the light. And there are a lot of tiles. This work is actually quite large. It's more than 2 meters long. I don't remember how many tiles, but it's something like 80 or even 90 tiles, something like that.
Anna Ridler: Because I think that's another thing that ties a lot of our collaborations together is the scale, that we're taking things that are often small and overlooked and then making them into these quite large scale high-resolution pieces.
Sofia Crespo: And as these single tiles were hanging outside, it suddenly started raining. I was like, Okay, this is supposed to dry, but now everything is getting wet again. But it was just a light rain that passed. But the funny thing, the next day when I took the prints back in, I noticed that the rain had left a mark, a chemical reaction with the paper. And you can see it in the work. You can actually see the drips of the rain. This is something that's really beautiful. It made me think in a way of land art somehow, how we're interacting with the natural elements and how they're becoming part of the printing process, too.
Anna Ridler: There's something that I still really love about this work, and it's that effect of the rain being printed on the paper as well. But also the thing that this work has is it has something algorithmic to it as well, because we started thinking about what are all the possible arrangements of this artwork? What does it mean for us to make an artwork that can be displayed in an infinite, almost infinite number of ways? We chose to give this work not just the name of the species that we use for the data set, but also the formula of the amount of times you can actually display this artwork, all the possible permutations that it can have if you place the tiles in a different order.
Sofia Crespo: This is the first work for which we actually created its own dedicated website, that's running on a server that's actually rendering and delivering constantly a new permutation of the work. This is the first time we did something different that comes with this digital component as well. But also knowing that this isn't eternal. We don't know how long this server will be running, whatever might happen, taking this as a substrate in a way in which this work is being re-rendered and just temporarily it's living there as well.
“But the funny thing, the next day when I took the prints back in, I noticed that the rain had left a mark, a chemical reaction with the paper. And you can see it in the work.” — Sofia Crespo 49:46
Peter Bauman: Is there anything that you wanted to add, any final thoughts, any connective tissue between these projects and anything about the future in the last few minutes?
Anna Ridler: I hope that Sofia and I will keep collaborating, but I think one of the things that is so joyous about it is that it's just very unpredictable when it will happen. So I don't know when our next one will be or what it will be about. I hope that it will be soon, and I think that we will come up with something really interesting, because there is just so much, I think, that we have in common across our individual practices, right down to weird, very obscure horticulture that we both independently discover and make work about. We see the world, I think, in very similar ways and think about things in very similar ways. It's nice to explore this within our individual practices and to think through things, and then to come together and really rush and produce and make something respond to everything else that we've been thinking about.
Sofia Crespo: Something that I find that's really cool is that Anna and I are working on a project now as part of our ABS Prize. We can't announce very much at the moment, but next year we will have something coming up in a very different shape, something that we've never done before. So, yeah, I look forward to sharing about that when the time comes.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I got to go to that dinner and award ceremony in Basel earlier this year. So, yeah, congratulations on the award. And, yeah, very excited about what you have upcoming next year. And, yeah, thank you both so much for taking the time. And it was really interesting. I can't believe it was the first time.
Sofia Crespo: Thank you so much.
Anna Ridler: Thank you so much. And I'll speak to you later.
Peter Bauman: Thank you. Okay. Bye-bye.
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