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Lausanne – The Artificial Swissness exhibit designed by the Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) is on display at the Seoul Biennale for Architecture and Urbanism. By generating a virtually infinite number of images of Swiss Alpine cabins, it is intended to reveal the inner thoughts of an artificial intelligence machine.

The Media x Design Lab at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) is currently exhibiting a larger than life-sized design brain in the South Korean capital. The Artificial Swissness exhibit will be on display at the Seoul Biennale for Architecture and Urbanism until 31 October.

Artificial Swissness intends to extend computer science’s cognitive expertise into the cultural realm, according to the EPFL in a statement. “Our design brain is an experiment about whether machines can design structures,” said Professor Jeffrey Huang, head of the laboratory. “That is, whether they cannot just recommend music or drive cars, but also create meaningful cultural artifacts, such as architecture with distinct Swiss characteristics.” 

The statement continues that the exhibit is intended to be a continually shifting spatial interface that reveals the inner thoughts of an artificial intelligence machine trained on 10,000 images of Swiss chalets and Alpine architecture.

Frederick Kim and Mikhael Johanes, two PhD students at the EPFL, explained: “We make explicit the visual inferences in these convolutional neural network layers, progressing from a very low resolution to the final resolution. This provides a glimpse into the inner workings of our generative artificial network, or GAN, as it creates architectural images.” The two scientists had to quarantine for 14 days in order to be on site and set up the exhibit.

The installation’s digital screens show the machine-generated images of typically Swiss architecture. At the same time, the LED projection reveals the constantly evolving learning process that the machines go through as they sort through thousands of images of Alpine architecture in an effort to distill the essence of “Swissness”, writes the statement.