Various and Casual Occursions

“Various and Casual Occursions” is the first collaboration between Sofia Crespo and Anna Ridler, both pioneering AI artists known for their interest in natural history. Occursions, a word that has dropped out of use, are the meetings of things together. This piece collapses the original dataset, the training and the output into one layered image, and brings together the artists’ ongoing interest in the process of making with AI, and how that relates to the natural world. How do we understand an occursion? Is this moment of collision a foundation for more complex, hybrid understandings of being in interaction, or mere happenstance? There are multiple, simultaneous occursions between the artists that are brought out in the work: from their respective practices, the alternative forms of photography, and final composition through the interaction of data and algorithms.