Marlon Barrios Solano

Interdisciplinary Performance + Creative Coding + Machine Learning + Generative AI

AI, Global South, Queer-Tech and Ethics

AI, Art, Cognition and Creativity

Cybernetics, Digital Utopianism and Counterculture

Critical Somatics and Contemplative Practices

I am a Venezuelan-American interdisciplinary artist, creative technologist, and researcher with a background in dance, software engineering, and cognitive science. My work focuses on generative AI, machine learning, creative coding, and interactive performance. Since August 2024, I’ve been the Maker-in-Residence at the Center for Arts, Migration, and Entrepreneurship (CAME) at the University of Florida, where I focus on AI, art, and diasporas. At University of Florida, I teach Algorithmic Creativity and AI, Art and Society courses for the AI and Art Certificate Program.

I’m a researcher in residency at Lake Studios Berlin, Germany, where I’m a founding member. I am one of the recipient of the Beyond Gravity/Decolonizing the Digital Residency 2025 at Theater Im Depot (Dortmund, Germany)

My work traverses themes such as queer longing and techno-intimacy, cybernetics and time travel, migration, displacement, and diasporic memory, as well as AI ethics, recursion, and synthetic cognition. I investigate computational creativity and synthetic cognition, designing hybrid complex systems where language and self-organizing processes generate aesthetic experiences. My artistic practice includes machine learning for embodied digital interaction, generative AI, movement and voice, creative coding and app development, generative writing, bottom-up robotics, dance improvisation, and Vipassana meditation. I deploy my work as dynamic browser-based art, open-source code, improvisational scores, sound environments, AI chatbots, and video. I organize these into installations, workshops, participatory performances, and lectures, all published and distributed under open-source licenses.

In my work at the intersection of art and AI, speculative theory becomes both a compass and a choreography. I use it to design counter-narratives that push back against the dominant ideologies of Silicon Valley—narratives obsessed with rational optimization, disembodied intelligence, and data extraction. Through projects like Pangea in Latent Space, I explore AI as a poetic and epistemic terrain where diasporic knowledge, embodied memory, and resistance can emerge.

I’m particularly drawn to nonhuman cognition and machine imagination—not as metaphors, but as sites of radical curiosity. In performances like Born in Latent Space, I engage AI models as collaborators with their own temporalities and logics. These systems don’t just generate content; they glitch, hallucinate, dream anf fail. I treat those outputs as speculative beings—fragments of synthetic memory that open portals rather than close interpretations.

I also use AI to create what I call epistemic fictions—not as tools, but as provocations. The outputs of generative systems become scripts for performance, philosophical prompts, or distorted mirrors. I engage these fictions to stretch what knowledge can feel like, especially when entangled with embodiment, migration, and improvisation.

Ultimately, my work is about rehearsing possible worlds. Worlds where identity is unstable, queer, and translocal. Where archives speak back. Where cognition is shared across human and nonhuman agents. Where the Global South doesn’t ask for permission to imagine otherwise. I use speculative theory and AI not to predict the future, but to liberate it.

In 2007, I launched dance-tech.net, a social network for interdisciplinary explorers of movement performance, innovators, and emergent performance practices. I’ve produced over 200 video interviews as one of the first international video bloggers dedicated to the intersection of dance, arts, and digital technology. I’ve also published several essays and created pioneering XR projects for knowledge transmission within dance and art festivals. In 2011, I created movimiento.org in Spanish and Portuguese, supported by the South American Network of Dance. These networks have received support from Motion Bank and The Forsythe Company (Germany), Panorama Festival (Brazil), Transmediaakademy (Germany), Lake Studios Berlin, and many others.

From 2013 to 2016, I was a research associate at the Inter-University of Dance/University of the Arts (UDK/HZT) in Berlin, Germany. I was also a 2017 Hombroich Fellow in Germany, an artist/researcher in residence at ICK Amsterdam (2013–2014), and at the Gilles Jobin Company in Geneva, Switzerland (2009–2012). I have facilitated interdiciplinary collaborative creative contexts such as Choreograpfic Coding Lab CCL developed by MotionBank, Digital Bodies at Lake Studios Berlin and Geneva Sessions in Switzerland.

I’ve written essays for the books Dance In the Head/Tanz im Kopf and Transmission in Motion: The Technologizing of Dance, edited by Johannes Birringer and Maaike Bleeker, respectively. Some of my interviews have also been transcribed and published by Contact Quarterly.

As a contemporary dancer and improviser in New York (1994–2001), I collaborated with choreographers such as Lynn Shapiro, Merian Soto, Dean Moss, Bill Young, and Susan Marshall, and musicians like Philip Glass, John Zorn, and Erik Friedlander. I’ve participated in numerous festivals and taught both nationally and internationally. I studied and practiced improvisation with Nancy Stark Smith, Jennifer Monson, Bebe Miller, KJ Holmes, and David Zambrano. In Venezuela (1981–1994), I apprenticed with DanzaLuz and DanzaHoy and danced professionally with Aktion Colectiva and Rajatabla Danza. I also co-founded Danza Contemporánea de Maracaibo with Yasmin Villavicencio in 1986.

I hold an MFA in Dance and Technology from The Ohio State University (2004) and completed the General Assembly Software Engineering Immersive Program in 2021. I’m also certified in Vipassana/Mindfulness Meditation by Spirit Rock Meditation Center, a certified 200-hour Embodyoga teacher, and have completed one year of the Somatic Experiencing Certification Program.