Hlör u fang axaxaxas mlö : Empor hinter dauerfließen mondet es : Upa tras perfluyue lunó: Upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned. [Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius]

Sofia Crespo's work is characterized by the positioning of machine learning as an extension of natural processes and parallels between AI imaging and biological pattern recognition. In Long Short Term Memories, her strategic interest meets the ideas of Anna Ridler, which she pursues around measurement and quantification and their connection to the natural world. Ridler often works with collections of information or data, especially data sets, to create new and unusual narratives.

Long Short Term Memories was created using a dataset consisting exclusively of photographs taken by the two artists on various trips to Argentina, and is translated from analog to digital format and back again using a variety of different AI models. Extensive image material has now been generated based on this process. Part of this can be seen in the exhibition—a series of Polaroids of already synthetic images that were used for training, and the resulting digital images/“clones.”

The artists believe that this iterative, AI-driven method brings them close to a process described in Borges' short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, in which copies, over time and cycles, “contain a purity of line that cannot be found in the original.” There are also parallels to the way memories are retrieved: neuroscientists have found that the same processes are activated as in the act of creating a memory—every time we remember something, a new version of it is created.

In this work, the duality of memory is represented by the blurred, unfocused nature of the Polaroids and the razor-sharp details of the digital images. At the same time, the artists create a field of tension that intertwines technical precision with poetic blurring.