Marlon Barrios Solano

Interdisciplinary Performance + Creative Coding + Machine Learning + Generative AI

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. I teach Algorithmic Creativity and AI, Art and Society as part of the university’s AI and Art Certificate Program.

I’m also a researcher-in-residency at Lake Studios Berlin, Germany, where I’m a founding member. In 2025, I was awarded the Beyond Gravity / Decolonizing the Digital Residency at Theater im Depot in Dortmund, where I continue to explore the speculative intersections of technology, memory, and the Global South.

My work unfolds across six interconnected areas:

Interdisciplinary Performance + Creative Coding + Machine Learning + Generative AI

AI, Art, Cognition and Creativity

AI, Global South, Queer-Tech and Ethics

Cybernetics, Digital Utopianism and Counterculture

Critical Somatics and Contemplative Practices

Through these intersecting frameworks, I explore queer longing, techno-intimacy, cybernetic feedback loops, migration, displacement, and diasporic memory. I investigate computational creativity and synthetic cognition by designing hybrid systems where language and self-organizing processes become aesthetic agents. My work incorporates generative AI, creative coding, generative writing, voice and movement interaction, bottom-up robotics, and contemplative practices such as Vipassana meditation.

I create dynamic browser-based artworks, improvisational scores, sound environments, AI chatbots, and generative video systems—organizing them into installations, participatory performances, lectures, and workshops. All are published and distributed under open-source licenses as acts of epistemic sharing and community care.

At the intersection of art and AI, I engage speculative theory as both compass and choreography. I use it to build counter-narratives that challenge Silicon Valley’s extractivist logic and disembodied optimization fantasies. In the ongoing long term project Born in Latent Space, machine learning and generative AI become a poetic and epistemic terrain for re-imagining cultural memory, resistance, and planetary futurities.

Born in Latent Space (Performance-lecture | Installations | Knowledge Lab)

I am particularly drawn to nonhuman cognition and machine imagination—not as metaphors, but as living speculative zones. In my ongoing project Born in Latent Space, a five-year exploration into synthetic memory, machine dreaming, and recursive performance, I engage AI models as collaborators with their own strange logics and temporalities. These systems hallucinate, fail, glitch, and speculate. I treat their outputs not as finished artifacts but as speculative beings—provisional fragments that generate more questions than answers.

Performing Knowing: Games as Knowledge Dramaturgies

I increasingly use performance-lectures and games and game-like structures as dramaturgies of knowledge—sites where cognition becomes participatory, unstable, and playful. These game systems function as speculative engines for improvisation, shared learning, and embodied cognition. The performances, apps, and installations I design become rehearsal spaces for possible worlds.

I create epistemic fictions—AI-generated scripts, poetic scores, and distorted prompts that serve not as tools but as provocations. These challenge dominant notions of intelligence and open up space for improvisation, fabulation, ambiguity, and embodied interpretation.

Ultimately, my work rehearses futures where identity is queer and translocal, archives speak back, cognition is distributed, and the Global South doesn’t ask for permission to imagine otherwise. I use speculative AI not to predict the future, but to liberate it, to emancipate it.

In 2007, I launched dance-tech.net, a social network for interdisciplinary explorers of performance and emergent practices. I’ve produced over 200 video interviews as one of the first international video bloggers dedicated to dance and digital technology. In 2011, I co-founded movimiento.org in Spanish and Portuguese, supported by the South American Network of Dance. These platforms have been supported by Motion Bank, The Forsythe Company, Panorama Festival, Transmediaakademie, Lake Studios Berlin, and others.

From 2013 to 2016, I served as a research associate at the Inter-University of Dance/University of the Arts (UDK/HZT) in Berlin. I was a 2017 Hombroich Fellow, and an artist/researcher in residence at ICK Amsterdam (2013–2014) and the Gilles Jobin Company in Geneva (2009–2012). I’ve facilitated several interdisciplinary initiatives including the Choreographic Coding Lab (CCL) with Motion Bank, Digital Bodies at Lake Studios Berlin, and Geneva Sessions in Switzerland.

My essays have appeared in Dance In the Head / Tanz im Kopf and Transmission in Motion: The Technologizing of Dance, edited by Johannes Birringer and Maaike Bleeker. Some of my interviews have been published in Contact Quarterly.

As a 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 performed with musicians including Philip Glass, John Zorn, and Erik Friedlander. In Venezuela (1981–1994), I apprenticed with DanzaLuz and DanzaHoy, danced with Aktion Colectiva and Rajatabla Danza, and co-founded Danza Contemporánea de Maracaibo with Yasmin Villavicencio in 1986.

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

My current focus is on creating open, transdisciplinary infrastructures for research, performance, and critical imagination—where art, code, cognition, and care are always entangled.