LAB: 21 – 22 July | 10-16h
PERFORMANCE: 26 July | 20h
Marlon Barrios Solano is a Venezuela-US interdisciplinary artist, creative technologist and researcher with a background in dance, software engineering and cognitive science. His works combine generative AI, machine learning, creative coding, and performance. He is currently Maker-in-Residence focused on AI, Arts and Diasporas at CAME Center for Art, Migration and Entrepreneurship at the University of Florida in Gainesville, USA. He also is an artist-in-residence with the Rewilding Cultures program at Radiona in Zagreb, Croatia, and at Lake Studios Berlin, Germany, where he is a founding member. His recent works are deployed as dynamic browser-based AI art, performance interfaces, improvisational scores, sound environments, AI chatbots and video that he organizes as installations, workshops, participatory performances, and/or lectures. All the work and code is published and distributed with an open-source license. Marlon holds an Masters in Fine Arts in Dance, Cognition and Digital Technologies from The Ohio State University.
BORN IN LATENT SPACE
LAB: 21 – 22 July | 10-16H
Born in Latent Space is a hybrid creative lab and practical workshop that introduces artists to the fundamentals of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning through the lens of performance and choreographic thinking. Over several sessions, participants will explore how generative AI systems—like large language models (LLMs), image generators, and body-tracking tools—can become creative partners in movement-based and interdisciplinary artistic processes.
Inspired by Marlon Barrios Solano’s performance-lecture of the same name, this workshop explores latent space not just as a technical concept, but as a poetic and philosophical one: a high-dimensional space where meaning is compressed, recombined, and reimagined. Here, we engage with AI as both a computational tool and an other mind, capable of improvising, interpreting, and transforming bodily and narrative expression.
Participants will work with p5.js, MediaPipe, and simple machine learning models to build interactive systems that respond to the moving body—translating gestures into visuals, sound, and language. Together, we’ll rethink how choreographic ideas such as repetition, variation, score-making, and real-time composition can be expanded through generative logic.
BORN IN LATENT SPACE
A PERFORMANCE LECTURE: 26 JULY | 20H (DOUBLE BILL with Kasia Wolińska)
This is the unseeable space in which machine learning makes its meaning. Beyond that which we are incapable of visualizing is that which we are incapable of even understanding.
— James Bridle
Born in Latent Space is a live lecture-performance that unfolds as a speculative, real-time collaboration between the artist and machine learning models. Seated before a laptop, Marlon Barrios Solano engages with generative AI systems to explore latent space—conceived not only as a technical structure, but as a realm of all possible stories.
Latent space, in machine learning, refers to a high-dimensional abstract representation of data where compressed, hidden features are encoded. In this piece, it becomes a poetic and political territory—an unstable, generative dimension where memory, desire, identity, and imagination recombine through algorithmic play.
Through gestures, voice, and code, the performer navigates a shifting audiovisual landscape shaped by real-time responses from AI: generated text, images, and sound. The work combines storytelling, re-performance, movement scores, web-based interaction, and algorithmic improvisation.
CREDITS
performance, creative coding, generative AI, sound, concept: Marlon Barrios Solano