Marlon Barrios Solano

Transdisciplinary Arts + AI + Creativity + Cognition

Born in Lalent Space @Submerge Festival 2025 @Lake Studios Berlin

Marlon Barrios Solano

I am Marlon Barrios Solano (Venezuela–USA), an interdisciplinary artist, creative technologist, and researcher working at the intersection of generative AI, performance, creative coding, and critical cognition.

My work is not organized as discrete projects, but as a system of dynamic, interrelated fragments—a living archive of notes, applications, performances, and conceptual nodes that can be engaged individually or navigated as an evolving network. These fragments are continuously developed, recombined, and activated across different contexts.

To access this system, I have developed an interactive network visualization through which viewers can explore the relationships between concepts, works, and tools. Many of these nodes link directly to live web applications, while the underlying code is openly shared via GitHub, extending the work as both an artistic and technical ecosystem.

Click on image to load the network visualization on my work and research

With a hybrid background spanning dance, software engineering, and cognitive science, I investigate cognitive systems and assemblages, cognitive media, and hybrid cognition as material. My work explores how perception, thought, and computation co-compose new forms of experience and understanding.

Since August 2024, I have served as Maker-in-Residence at the Center for Arts, Migration, and Entrepreneurship (CAME) at the University of Florida, where I also teach in the AI & Art Certificate Program. My role integrates research, pedagogy, and experimental practice, developing transdisciplinary frameworks that bring embodied knowledge into dialogue with artificial intelligence.

My long-term projects engage AI systems as poetic collaborators in the creation of speculative documents, web applications, interactive installations, raves, and lecture-performances. Through generative and procedural strategies, I merge machine learning and algorithmic aesthetics with contemplative and somatic practices to develop what I call knowledge dramaturgies—frameworks in which identity, memory, and cognition are remixed through embodied, queer, and diasporic lenses.

My practice unfolds as recursive architectures—spaces where cognition, code, and choreography interact as evolving systems of inquiry. Within these architectures, AI is not simply a tool, but a cognitive partner: an unstable, generative terrain through which new forms of subjectivity and collective imagination can emerge.

My work currently operates through two primary instantiations: Born in Latent Space and Unstable Landscapes. These are not separate projects, but different operational modes of a shared research inquiry into cognition, embodiment, and computational systems.

Born in Latent Space is a lecture-performance: a live, embodied encounter in which I engage generative AI systems through voice, movement, storytelling, singing, and real-time audiovisual composition. It functions as a cognitive assembly where human and machine processes co-compose thinking in real time. Structured as a constellation of concepts, stories, applications, and playlists, the work activates a navigable network of possibilities emerging during performance. It can also expand into installation formats or workshops while maintaining the intensity of a situated, performative articulation.

Unstable Landscapes is a distributed instantiation of this research. Here, the work becomes an environment for collective cognition—a spatialized system in which participants, interfaces, and computational processes form a distributed cognitive assembly. Rather than centering on a single performer, the emphasis shifts toward group dynamics, shared attention, and participatory navigation within an evolving landscape of interacting nodes or cells. While it can be presented as an installation, its core condition is relational, distributed, and emergent.

Both instantiations are grounded in an ongoing investigation of cognition as something that exceeds the individual and emerges through networks of relations between bodies, technologies, histories, and environments.

My work has been presented internationally and supported by institutions including Motion Bank, ICK Amsterdam, and the Gilles Jobin Company. I have served as a research associate at UDK/HZT Berlin and am a founding member and researcher-in-residence at Lake Studios Berlin. In 2025, I was awarded the Beyond Gravity / Decolonizing the Digital Residency at Theater im Depot in Dortmund, Germany.

I hold an MFA in Dance and Technology from The Ohio State University, completed the Software Engineering Immersion Program at General Assembly (NYC), and am a certified Mindfulness teacher (Spirit Rock Meditation Center) and Embodyoga® teacher.

Across all these modalities, I develop environments where cognition becomes experiential, distributed, and embodied—where performance, computation, and collective imagination converge into evolving systems of knowledge.