Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas is an artist duo founded in Lithuania in 1997. Now living and working in Massachusetts and Vilnius, Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas participated in Taipei Biennial 2020 with installation Swamp Intelligence (2018–2020).
Inside of the wall is nested an ecosystem where natural forms organically merge with digital life forms. Swamp Intelligence is based on a NoPlace Neural Network (NNN), a variant of a conditional AI (artificial intelligence), used to unveil neural network abilities to generate novel visual imagery. The NNN has two components that work in opposition: a generator that is learning how to generate an image from a noise pattern and a discriminator that tries to guess which image is real and which is generated. In its constant balance between the real and the imagined, NNN mimics the dampening counterforce effect of a biological swamp.
The NNN works to find ways to organically combine its architectural proposals into existing landscapes. Subject to strict logic and lacking context, the machine quite paradoxically becomes less restricted in its process of imagining than the artist who sets it up, producing rather unsettling imagery for an observer to interpret.

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