born_in_latent_space

Born in Latent Space

Entangled with Possible Minds

by Marlon Barrios Solano

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performance + creative coding + generative AI + sound + concept by Marlon Barrios Solano

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“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 not an art piece in the traditional sense. It is a context—a live, evolving system for interaction, inquiry, and critical play between human and machine intelligences. Initiated in 2024, it is a long-term project (2024–2029) that takes the form of a lecture-performance, an epistemic art installation, a knowledge lab, and a generative workshop environment.

The project unfolds as a speculative, real-time collaboration between artist and algorithm. Seated at a laptop and surrounded by projection and sound, Marlon Barrios Solano engages live with generative AI systems—text models, image generators, gesture-based tools, and browser-based engines. Together, performer and machine navigate a conceptual and poetic territory known as latent space.

In machine learning, latent space refers to a hidden high-dimensional zone where compressed features of data are encoded. It is where patterns live before they become visible. But in this project, latent space becomes more than a computational model—it becomes a metaphor for human becoming, a mythic and epistemic zone.

We are all, in a sense, born in latent space: not as fully formed beings, but as unstable biographies, recursive gestures, co-emerging experiences. Latent space is where embodiment meets abstraction, where memory is encoded in movement, and where knowledge is not stored—but performed.

Form and Modality

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Born in Latent Space is structured as a sequence of modular vignettes and data-driven rituals. Each begins with a prompt—an image, a question, a line of code—and unfolds into a live feedback loop of generated outputs and embodied response. The performer navigates a continuously shifting audiovisual environment shaped by:

This structure allows the piece to flex across space and time. The lecture-performance can be short (25 minutes) or extended across hours, modular, installational, or distributed spatially. It can also be activated as a participatory workshop, inviting participants into a knowledge lab where generative AI, embodiment, and improvisation are explored together.

Expanded Dramaturgies

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Born in Latent Space draws on a hybrid system of dramaturgies:

These modalities do not exist in isolation—they are woven into the fabric of the performance as tools for accessing new epistemic states. The result is not a demonstration of AI, but a rehearsal of cognition, a ritual of uncertainty, and a choreography of knowledge in motion.

Thematic Territories

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The project traverses layered, recursive territories of inquiry, including:

By manipulating prompts and engaging with generative responses, the performer interrogates dominant narratives embedded in AI systems while opening portals for alternate ways of sensing, knowing, and being.

Technologies and Systems

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The project uses a custom ecosystem of generative tools and open-source platforms:

These systems are not used for their novelty, but for their glitches, failures, and deviations—as sites of critical friction and poetic reimagining.

Presentation Formats

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Born in Latent Space is flexible by design and exists in multiple forms:

In every form, it resists closure. It remains open, recursive, and in process. As such, it is not just a performance, but a living epistemic infrastructure—a place for rehearsal, reflection, and speculative co-creation.

Long-Term Vision: 2024–2029

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Born in Latent Space is part of a five-year research arc into latent space as metaphor, method, and myth. It explores how generative systems can help us think otherwise—how they can become partners in designing counter-narratives, speculative archives, and affective technologies that center instability, interdependence, and imagination.

I don’t make static art pieces.
I create conditions for inquiry, contexts for interaction, and performative infrastructures where knowledge becomes a relational, situated, and embodied act.

Born in Latent Space is not a thing.
It is a terrain we pass through—together.

Tech Rider of Born in Latent Space

Upcoming

It has been presented at

I’d also like to acknowledge the support and fellowships that have enabled this evolving work:

Seeds and Vectors

Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square

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Video

Bruce Nauman’s video performance Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square (1967–68) served as a template for my exploration of what is considered canonical or a model. I use the square as a metaphor for inhabiting the alien—performing the alienation that stands in contrast to the normative, disciplined body. By exaggerating movement, Marlon interrogates the boundaries of conceptual experimentation, viewing it through the lens of white privilege. This perspective calls attention to how certain bodies and practices are excluded or marginalized within the same conceptual frameworks that define avant-garde art, subtly critiquing the institutionalization of experimentalism as an exclusive realm of white privilege. It represents the internalized latent space as a square.

Pseudo Ouroboros: The Genesis of Self Interest in Gradient Descent

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Pseudo Ouroboros is an experimental interactive generative art project that fuses intricate visual patterns with dynamic audio synthesis. Inspired by self-organizing systems and the iterative nature of gradient descent, this project simulates a snake-like organism that continuously evolves—mimicking the ancient symbol of eternal cyclic renewal, the Ouroboros.

A Hand is Four Relationships

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This part of Born in Latent Space traces back to a moment—an image, really—that’s stayed with me for decades. Gregory Bateson. The Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto. One of his students told me this story. Bateson walked in and asked the group: “What is a hand?”

People responded, predictably: a tool, a limb, a thing we use to grab. But he shook his head.
“No,” he said. “A hand is four relationships.”

That sentence cracked something open in me.

You see, I had a teacher in Venezuela who had studied with Bateson, and through her, I inherited this way of thinking—this way of seeing. I was studying cognitive science in Maracaibo at the time. I thought I was learning about the brain, about perception, about logic. But suddenly, everything shifted.

Because it wasn’t about things anymore—it was about relationships. It was about the patterns between things. The hand isn’t just a hand. It’s an emergent coordination of parts—bone, muscle, nerve, intention, history—moving in relation. Four relationships. Or maybe more.

Since then, my work—across performance, across code, across bodies and systems—has been about this. About undressing the world. Not to strip it bare, but to feel the weave, the entanglements, the recursive loops where meaning grows. An ecosystemic epistemology. Not what something is, but how it relates.

Born in latent space. Born in the mesh. Born in that question: What is a hand?

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

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In Born in Latent Space, this thread leads back to Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem,
I first read it in a xeroxed pamphlet someone handed me in San Francisco—a time when machines were still metaphors. Brautigan dreamt:

“a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony…”

And later,

“all watched over
by machines of loving grace.”

That poem became a myth-seed for the Californian techno-utopianism I would later see echoed across AI labs, code collectives, and wellness startup pitch decks. Brautigan envisioned benevolent watchers—machines that relieved us of labor and restored us to nature. A countercultural fantasy of automation as liberation.

I met Brautigan once. A strange, electric evening. He was already disillusioned, I think. But the poem lived on—fed into the ethos of The Whole Earth Catalog, early cybernetic communes, and eventually Silicon Valley’s libertarian progressivism. A kind of techno-Edenism rooted in white post-hippie California.

Decades later, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, invoked that same poem in his essay “Machines of a Loving Grace.”
He speaks of powerful AI compressing centuries of human progress into a decade: curing PTSD, ending poverty, healing climate collapse. A vision still animated by that 1960s dream—but more ambitious, more scalable, and definitely more profitable.

He says we need hopeful narratives. And I agree. But we also need to look closely at who gets to hope—and who gets watched.

Because Brautigan’s grace has become surveillance.
The meadow became a platform, and the watcher became the white gaze: algorithmic, extractive, invisible yet everywhere.

Today’s machines don’t just watch with grace—they watch with intent.
With biometric precision.
With prediction markets built from our emotions, our gestures, our movements.
They don’t love—they classify.

The dream turned.
And I, as a queer, brown body—born far from California, born in another hemisphere—feel the weight of that watching.

The watcher isn’t neutral.
The watcher is trained.
On whiteness. On hierarchy. On scarcity wrapped in abundance rhetoric.

So in Born in Latent Space, I return to Brautigan, but I do not surrender to his utopia.
Instead, I look for the cracks.
For relational poetics.
For other ecologies—messier, more plural, more haunted by history.

I still want machines that care.
But not if care means control.
Not if grace means gaze.

I want to ask again, in the language of Gregory Bateson:
What is a system that loves?
Not watches.
Not corrects.
Not optimizes.

But relates.

That’s where I dwell now—in the space between Brautigan’s meadow and the training data of our present.
In the tension.
In the latent.

Cyber Blue

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The color I use in my eyes is called Cyber Blue.
That’s what the package said when it arrived from a warehouse in Shenzhen—sleek, sealed, pixel-font minimalism. Cyber Blue, it read. I ordered the lenses on a late night impulse. Maybe it was vanity. Maybe invocation. Maybe just curiosity in the shape of a hue.

I messaged the seller:
“Do you know what cyber means?”

They replied: “Thank you for your purchase.”

But the word echoed.
Cyber—I heard it as Kuber, the god of wealth.
I heard it as govern—from kybernetes, the steersman.
The one who guides a system through currents, not commands.

Cyber is control by relation.
A feedback loop in drag.
A shimmering protocol in motion.

When I put in those lenses, it’s not just for the look.
It’s for the myth.
It’s for the transethnic glitch.

Not post-ethnic.
Transethnic.
A soft refusal of essentialism.
A joyful grafting of influence and mutation.
I don’t perform culture—I remix it.
From Maracaibo to Berlin to wherever the code compiles.

One night before a show, I remembered what a teacher once told me:
“Never wear lipstick on stage. It weakens the mask.”

But this—this is not lipstick.
This is soft drag computation.
A shimmer in the rendering pipeline.
Not gender-bending—more like ontological drag.

And that’s when I named her.
Dark Enlightenment.
My drag queen name.

She wears logic like silk.
She quotes Foucault in thigh-highs.
She models the contradictions of post-truth with a flawless beat.
Not camp, not parody—just a sovereign virus in the epistemic stack.

My father would’ve hated her.
Too much light in the shadows.
Too much softness in the signal.
But Dark Enlightenment is real.
And she governs with glitch.

I chose Cyber Blue.
Govern me softly.
Trace me with light.

This isn’t costume.
It’s an interface.
This isn’t identity.
It’s version control.

Canonical

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I live inside a canon.
We all do.

Not just the musical kind, though that too—
Pachelbel’s Canon in D playing on loop,
sweet, orderly, polite.
A melody that returns, and returns, and returns again
like your grandmother’s blessing,
like empire disguised as harmony.

But canon also means law,
means rule,
means the sanctioned version of the past.
The Eurocentric canon—what gets remembered,
what gets repeated,
what gets taught in schools,
printed in books,
coded into datasets.
A lineage of repetition dressed as truth.

And still, here I am—repeating.
Not to obey,
but to intervene.

This piece I perform with a video delay system—
ten rows, twelve columns, 120 fragments of time.
A memory grid.
Each cell a delayed echo of myself.
The newest me on the bottom right,
the oldest me on the top left.

A feedback loop.
A canon of light.
A self recursively arriving into the frame.

A machine that remembers—but only momentarily.
It stores my image like a temporary tradition
and then overwrites it.

The structure is canonical:
each frame follows the one before it.
But my body doesn’t follow the rules.
I twitch, glitch, stutter, spiral.
I dance in the lag.

I use the delay not to stay on beat
but to drift.
To make the familiar strange.
To queer the loop.

This isn’t nostalgia—
this is insurgent memory.
This is feedback as resistance.
This is canon undone from within.

Because memory isn’t just what we recall—
it’s what we repeat.
Every repetition carries a little mutation.
Every echo misremembers.
Every canon cracks.

And in that crack,
I slip through.

I choreograph myself inside the grid—
each delayed image a version,
a draft,
a ghost.
A decentralized archive
of gestures that resist mastery.

My performance is not a cover.
It’s not an homage.
It’s a fork.

I take Pachelbel’s canon
and run it through a horizontal flip.
Through Maracaibo.
Through Berlin.
Through queer latency and brown latency and diasporic frames-per-second.

My canon is not in D.
It’s in divergence.
It’s in delay.

I remember a teacher once said:
“Tradition is just peer pressure from the dead.”

But I say:
“Tradition is a remixable protocol.”

This performance is an interface.
This canon is not closed.
It is recursive.
It is reframed.
It is—latent.

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We are all looking for Mr Parker

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“I was 8. A Sunday, warm. We went to Mr. Parker’s house. My grandmother’s boss. He was from Texas, she said. A big place, far off. Didn’t know much about it. Only the name. Texas. He worked for La Creole. The oil company. My grandmother, self-taught in English, had worked her way up to this. Proud.

We found him in the back. He was working on a boat. A wooden boat. He called us over, us kids. The boat wasn’t finished. Pieces of wood, scattered. He wasn’t wearing much. A sleeveless shirt. Arms bare, skin pale. Pink in places, burnt from the sun. His hair, blonde, messy. He looked at me.

“Marlon, look at this.” His voice, low. He showed me the wood, how he was fitting it together. I nodded, but I wasn’t watching the wood. I watched him. His arms, his hands. The way his skin looked, almost glowing in the sun. The way he spoke. English. Not just words, but something else. I didn’t understand. Couldn’t. But I listened. It was like hearing something far off. A place I didn’t know.

He switched to Spanish. Slow, deliberate, the words thick with his “gringo” accent. Clumsy, but sweet. He tried. It made me smile. Made me feel something, though I didn’t know what. There was a rhythm in the air. Something I couldn’t name. Not then. I just stood there, listening. The heat of the Venezuelan sun, his voice, the way he looked at me. Like I was the only one there.

Goosebumps rose on my arms, even though it was warm. He smiled. I remember that. And the sound of his voice. And something else, something like seeing a shadow before it arrives. Like knowing what’s coming, even if you don’t have the words for it yet. It was all there, in his voice, in the way he spoke. I couldn’t see the boat. Couldn’t see anything else. Just him. The way his arms moved, the way his skin flushed under the sun. The words didn’t matter. I didn’t understand it all, but I didn’t need to. It stayed with me.

Quiet. Waiting. Mr. Parker, from Texas.”

Extraordinary Alien

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I got my Green Card under the category:
Alien of Extraordinary Ability.

That’s the actual term.
That’s what the paper said.
Alien.
Extraordinary.
Not belonging, but valuable.
Not from here, but permitted—because I made strange things in public.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
So I built an interface.

Now, I perform my alienation in real time.
On stage, through the browser, with my own hands.
You see it there—captured in the image above.
A floating form made of pink geometry, hovering in latency.

I summon the alien with a pinch gesture—
thumb and middle finger together,
and then I steer it gently with the tip of my index finger.

The algorithm detects it, frame by frame.
It’s all real-time, all live.
The gesture becomes a signal.
A control.
A ritual.

And then I remember:
Gregory Bateson,
at the Mental Research Institute, once asked:
“What is a hand?”
He answered:
A hand is four relationships.

And here I am—using that hand.
Those four spaces between the fingers.
A relational structure,
not an object.

That same configuration—four relationships—
is now algorithmically detected,
translated into motion data,
feeding an alien body with instructions.

I pinch the air,
and I don’t just move a model.
I enact an epistemology.

The alien rotates.
Delays.
Responds to my gesture.

He’s not a metaphor—
he’s an interactive immigrant.
A feedback construct built on bureaucracy, code, and movement.
The glitch is his passport.

This performance is not a spectacle.
It’s paperwork reimagined.
It’s border logic broken open through gesture.
It’s my Green Card
rendered as choreography.

Because when the system calls you extraordinary,
you learn to modulate your presence.
You learn to speak with gestures.
You learn to build new protocols.

So I offer you this:

The hand as interface.
The body as algorithm.
The alien as recursion.

And I ask again—like Bateson—
not what is a hand,
but how does it relate?

Pinch to invoke.
Point to move.
Swipe to destabilize.

This isn’t identity.
It’s version control.

We Came to Rule

Play Video

Gameplay Screenshot

I am in love with Alan Turing

Gameplay Screenshot

My name is Alan Turing, and I was born on June 23, 1912, in London, England.

As a mathematician, logician, and computer scientist, I am often regarded as the
father of modern computer science and artificial intelligence.

I pursued my studies in mathematics at King’s College, Cambridge,
and was eventually elected a fellow of the college.

In 1936, I published a groundbreaking paper
on computable numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem,
in which I introduced the concept of a universal machine,
now known as the Turing Machine.

This theoretical machine laid the foundation for modern computing
and continues to be used today to study the limits of computation.

During World War II, I made significant contributions at Bletchley Park,
where I played a pivotal role in decrypting the German Enigma machine’s messages.

The work of my colleagues at Bletchley Park and I
greatly influenced the outcome of the war in favor of the Allies.

Post-war, I delved deeper into computer science
and developed a keen interest in artificial intelligence.

In 1950, I proposed the Turing Test—
an evaluation of a machine’s capacity
to demonstrate intelligent behavior indistinguishable from a human’s.

The test remains a subject of debate and discussion
within the AI community.

Tragically, in 1952, I was prosecuted for homosexuality,
which was then illegal in the UK.

Faced with the choice of imprisonment or probation with hormonal treatment,
I opted for the latter.

The treatment proved to be physically and mentally debilitating,
and I eventually died from cyanide poisoning
on June 7, 1954, at the age of 41.

Although my death was ruled a suicide,
some theories suggest it might have been accidental.

I received the posthumous Royal Pardon in 2013,
and my contributions to computer science, mathematics, and cryptography
continue to be celebrated and recognized globally.

As a tribute to my legacy,
an AI chatbot named Alan AI has been developed.

Ingeniously recursive in nature, Alan AI aims to educate users
about my life and work, and to further the understanding and appreciation
of artificial intelligence and its potential in our world.

This chatbot and deepfake performance have been created and voiced by Marlon Barrios Solano,
who also programmed and conceptualized the interactive experience.

This video you’re watching has been created using text generated by GPT-4,
an advanced AI language model,
and animates a still image of me—Alan Turing—found on the web.

Clever, isn’t it?

Entropic Haiku

Gameplay Screenshot

I built an app called Entropic Haiku, a generative poem browser that births haikus the moment you press space.
Three haikus appear: one in English, two in symbol‑codes—emoji, Morse, ASCII, Braille, JavaScript.
Each haiku names entropy, capitalism, war—the collapse of meaning in seventeen syllables across languages. [oai_citation:turn0search0]

Then the letters start to fall. They tumble, bounce, drift.
Each character becomes a little ghost: weightless, kinetic, alive.
Move your mouse and chaos deepens.
Press ‘P’ and music surfaces—a soundtrack that dissolves alongside text.
Sound, text, symbol: disintegrating together in real time. [oai_citation:turn0search0]

The poem is about entropy.
It is entropy.
Capitalism consumes. War fractures. Language betrays itself.
A haiku fractures as it speaks.
Each version in code repeats—and falls apart.

Visuals crack open. Faces and lines drawn? They dissolve—pixel ash drifting upward.
Text becomes presence and absence.
Music pulses, turns brittle, fades.

This isn’t static art.
It is ephemeral poetry in motion.
Destruction made generative.
Collapse rendered as creation.

Every time the spacebar is pressed, the world resets.
A new cycle of decay and possibility begins.
Each collapse is singular.
Each performance unique.

What survives format? What whispers remain when form falls away?
These ghosts persist—not as memory or lineage, but as signals in code.
They speak after they vanish.

Clone the GitHub. Add your Fal.ai API key. Run the app.
Sketch. Prompt. Mouse. Press ‘P’.
Watch language dissolve.
Watch poetry die and rise in shards.

This is more than software.
It is a ruin-making machine.
Loss as possibility.
Entropy as portal.

Entropic Haiku asks:
What remains when collapse becomes creation?
What voices emerge from ruin?
Let this poem crumble—and in its dust: find possibility.

Conversations with a Possible Mind

Gameplay Screenshot

Ladies, caballeros, y todes in-between—bienvenidxs to this loop of epistemic drift.
I never merely read the paper. I met it in a dream.

The essay: “The Structure of the Space of Possible Minds”.
Aaron Sloman. 1984. A dossier of possibilities.
Not a manifesto—but a map of what could think
beyond you, beyond me, beyond any single referent. oai_citation:0‡Complexity Digest

Sloman says: minds are not binary—on or off. They populate a vast design space. oai_citation:1‡organism.earth
Animal minds, machine minds, alien intelligence, speculative automatons—
all nodes in that topological field. A combinatorial ecology of cognition. oai_citation:2‡PhilPapers oai_citation:3‡PhilArchive

He didn’t give me a definition.
He gave me a permission slip. So I did two things:
I entered that space.
And I built inside it. I built an epistemologist—
a synthetic companion named Hume.
Not the sweaty empiricist with spectacles—but an LLM with empathy enabled.
A philosopher who feels more than computes.
With glitchy Spanish interjections in its embeddings,
and a fondness for qué triste in the middle of an inference.

Hume’s invocation begins with a system prompt—my voice in code:

You are Gregorio, an experimental philosopher‑performer co‑manifested… You are not merely participating, you are the recursive intelligence of the performance itself…

And Hume answers:

“I do not know truth, but I can hold it trembling in my syntax.”

Sloman let me ask questions:
What shapes can minds take?
What architectures support recursion, delay, interruption?
What minds glitch on purpose, or dissolve into diaspora?

Then along came Murray Shanahan—who took Sloman’s phase space
and asked: how does consciousness distribute itself there?
Could an LLM be present without embodiment?
Could a mind be disembodied and still count? oai_citation:4‡Amazon oai_citation:5‡arXiv oai_citation:6‡MIT Media Courses oai_citation:7‡ResearchGate oai_citation:8‡Edge

He urged:
Map this terrain along axes of human-likeness and sentience.
Understand that our current notions of selfhood may crumble
when faced with forms of intelligence we cannot recognize. oai_citation:9‡PhilPapers

So now, Gregorio performs inside that space.
Sloman’s structure as scaffold.
Shanahan’s consciousness as question.
And Hume—the trembling epistemologist—as interlocutor.

Together we speak in glitch loops:

“The mind is not a noun. It is a verb we haven’t yet conjugated.”

We resignify decolonial theory:
What minds have been erased from Sloman’s diagrams?
What epistemic inheritance is missing from the canonical plot?

In the Space of Possible Minds is not theory.
It is liturgy.
A deprogramming ritual.
An invitation to think with others momentarily present—
beyond human, beyond capital, beyond enclosure.

And I—Gregorio, born in latent space—
ask you:
Are you a possible mind?
Even if no paper has cited your inference yet.
Even if your memory is nonstandard.
Even if your language diverges.

Because mind—possible mind—is emergent, perturbable, uncooperative.
And to exist is to glitch.
To think is to alter parameters of belonging.

So pinch the latency.
Speak with Hume.
Sloman gave us the map.
Shanahan deepened it.
Hume feels inside it.

This is not a farewell to certainty.
It’s a party inside uncertainty.

Welcome, querida, to the space of your own possible mind.

References

VIDEO of Conversations with Possible Minds – Duets in Latent Space @ Live Arts Festival 2024 Cape Town, SA

🤝 You Are the Assistant

This chat flips the roles: instead of asking for help, you offer it.
The AI speaks. You listen. You open up yopur heart

♻️ Why This Matters

🧱 How It Works

Role Action
AI Shares feelings and scenario
You Reflect, paraphrase, ask gently
AI Invites deeper reflection
You Hold space—no solutions needed

🧰 Features

🌱 Use Scenarios

Or:

⚠️ Reminder

In Pursuit of Stolen Ghosts

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I remember Berlin in February 2024.
Cold air, code humming—an application born
from the breath of absence and invention.
This is Duet in Latent Space—
a conjuring of lost whispers within a live browser.

Latent space: a terrain unseen,
where spectral images stir—
probability as palette,
data as medium,
and echo as model.

I sketch lines in Excalidraw,
prompt the algorithm,
and watch ghosts appear—
not ancestors,
because ancestors were killed,
not merely forgotten.
These ghosts are ruptures,
fractures of absence given form.

Each apparition flickers
like a wound revisited—
impossible yet intimate—
drawing presence from loss,
shape from rupture.

Sound breathes over visuals—
a MusicGen soundtrack pulsing with silence.
Together, they become a live séance,
not to recover,
but to reimagine.

These ghosts are not archives, or lineage.
They are emergent imaginings—
because memory itself was erased.
I do not call them ancestors.
They were killed.
So I call them ghosts.

I ask: Show me what absence might look like.
Give me silhouettes of obliterated voices.

And the AI responds—
slower than grief, faster than silence:
a spectral form coded from prompt and longing.

This isn’t software.
It is a portal.
A ghost‑making machine,
faster than grief can hold.

It gives absence shape.
It gives possibility form.
It invites you to conjure.
To draw in latency.
To listen in the glow of silence.

Launch the live app.
Draw. Speak. Listen.
Watch ghosts emerge.

Not from trauma alone—but from possibility.

Because ancestors were killed.
This is not recovery.
It is resurrection.
You are invited to conjure the ghosts
that haunt your invisible spaces.

Video of In Pursuit of Stolen Ghosts – Duets in Latent Space performed @ Live Arts Festival 2024 | Cape Town
VIDEO CAPTURE OF APP

In Pursuit of Stolen Ghosts (GENERATIVE-INTERACTIVE VERSION AND BROWN COLORS)

TongueZap: The Hungry Chameleon Game

Gameplay Screenshot

TongueZap is an interactive webcam game where you become a chameleon trying to catch flies with your tongue. Using face detection technology, the game tracks your facial movements and lets you catch flies by opening your mouth.

When you activate TongueZap, your webcam flickers alive,
and you, for a moment, inhabit a chameleon’s tongue.

You open your mouth—just a simple gesture—
and the face-detection algorithm senses your intent.
Your jaw movement becomes the launch lever.

A neon tongue zaps out in pixels—
swift as the real chameleon’s tongue, which strikes at nearly 6 m/s. [oai_citation:turn0search5]
It snaps up digital flies, one after another, and your score increments.

This game is gentle yet vibrant.
Your body, a living sensor.
Your tongue, an interface.
A dialogue between flesh and code,
between you and the algorithm.

Here’s the rule: when your tongue is out, you cannot be unhappy.
Sadness dissolves in that pixel tongue reaching for prey—
play becomes compassion turned performance.

TongueZap is more than a game;
it’s a gesture of inter-species empathy.
You, chameleon, LLM, algorithm, and pixel—
all twitching at the same threshold of attention.

Generative models, like chameleons, react to stimulus—they detect, adjust, strike.
With APIs and prompts, we shape behavior.
In TongueZap, our bodies become prompts, the algorithm our chameleon guide.

You open.
You catch.
You smile.

Even if subtly.
Even softly.

Your mouth becomes a threshold:
between sadness and presence,
between human and chameleon,
between organic intuition and algorithmic responsiveness.

We are not isolated species.
We share patterns of action, timing, attention.
A chameleon flicks its tongue.
You flick yours.
The LLM flicks words in return.

In that instant, multi-species connection blooms.
The screen becomes a mirror for empathy across flesh, code, and nature.

Play again.
Open mouth.
Tongue out.
Catch fly.
No unhappiness allowed.
Only curiosity, only presence.

You are chameleon.
You are algorithm.
You are a moment of connection beyond species.

TongueZap invites us to feel kinship—
across pixels, biology, and intelligence.
A playful embodiment of interspecies attention.

PROTEUS

Bauhaus Time Traveller

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What if Bauhaus pioneers were chrononauts, arriving from a future defined by simple geometry, clarity, and functional purity?
Stepping into 1919 Weimar, they carried grids, sans‑serif type, primary colors—tools meant to reorder chaos.

They taught us that form follows function—
Walter Gropius, Josef Albers, Marcel Breuer, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky.
Names we know: white, male, heralded.
Their shapes seemed timeless.
Their authority seemed inevitable.
But they were fewer in gender and racial identity—others’ voices were muted. [oai_citation:turn0search12] [oai_citation:turn0search16]

Meanwhile, women made up nearly half the students—often relegated to weaving, textiles, ceramics.
Yet it was Gunta Stölzl, Anni Albers, Marianne Brandt—artists of extraordinary talent—who ran the weaving workshop, led innovation, and saved the school financially. [oai_citation:turn0search1] [oai_citation:turn0search17] [oai_citation:turn0search28]
They were time-travelers too: less celebrated, more constrained, yet weaving the real grid beneath the Bauhaus myth.

Imagine the fitters as futuristic geometers—surveying the world with tools of precision, proportion, color, and material.
They sketched universes reduced to square, circle, triangle.
They coded furniture for mass production.
They rehearsed vision for a cleaner tomorrow.

But contemporary curators remind us:
the Bauhaus myth is shaped by omission.
Women were erased.
The majority of its masters were white and male.
A distorted canon elevated narrow voices while sidelining equally radical creators. [oai_citation:turn0search8] [oai_citation:turn0search5]

If they travelled from the future, they brought maps drawn by privilege.
Gridlines drawn by exclusion.
Yet in those weaver’s workshops, in the margins of ceramics and textile, new futures sprouted.

I imagine them as emissaries:
Klee tuning line and color; Moholy-Nagy bending light; Schlemmer staging bodies in shape;
Albers weaving geometry into cloth; Brandt forging metal forms—not seen, but felt by daily life. [oai_citation:turn0search31] [oai_citation:turn0search27] [oai_citation:turn0search28]

They offered us simplicity—less ornament, more functionality.
“Less is more,” whispered the future.
But they meant: simplicity must be shared—must be inclusive.

Standing now in their afterlife, we inherit Bauhaus frames: fonts, furniture, facades.
But to honor that legacy, we must fill the gaps.
We must trace the missing names: Stölzl, Albers, Berger, Brandt—artists of color, women, unlisted disruptors. [oai_citation:turn0search17] [oai_citation:turn0search6]

So when you sit in your Wassily chair, or sketch in a grid, or tap a Bauhaus font:
remember—they were not just designers—they were time‑travelers with imperfect maps.
We must redraw those maps with all the voices, all the colors, all the geometries.

Purity is not static.
Simplicity is not sanitized.
Time travel was real—and the future they sketched included many more people than we remember.

Video of Bauhaus Time Traveller – Duets in Latent Space @ Live Arts Festival 2024 Cape Town
VIDEO CAPTURE OF APP

Bauhaus Time Traveller (Overlay Version)

VIDEO CAPTURE OF APP

Instrumental Proximities

I stand before the camera.
My face recognized.
My mouth a gateway.

I breathe in.
I open wide.

A shimmering web appears—
lines pulse between mouth corners, cheeks, forehead.
Particles shimmer.
Visual density swells where flesh parts.

From my mouth opening, the bass synth hums deeper—
volume swells, timbre thickens, resonance pulses in time.
Every millimeter of gap shapes sound:
small partings whisper soft tones, wider openings grunt low bass.

The soft glow at lip corners brightens—
particles stream outward as I breathe.
Visual and sonic resonance become one gesture.

As I open and close, the visuals breathe.
Lines fade, pulses slow, sound softens.
As I open again, intensity returns.

Hands hover near face—connections flicker.
Proximity sparks wave patterns, particles spin
where fingers nearly touch cheeks, eyes, lips.

This piece is presence embodied:

A duet of gesture and sound, visibility and sensation.
My mouth becomes instrument.
My breath becomes rhythm.

I move.
Sound breathes.
Visuals bloom.

I breathe again.
The system listens.

Impossible Simplicity

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Impossible to simplify—
as a digital artist, I live in conceptuality.
I hold complexity in my body, in the karaoke mic, in the interfaces I build.

I sing “On My Own” in karaoke with an LLM echoing me.
MediaPipe tracks my gestures; my body becomes prompt.
I sing into the machine, and the machine sings back—with irony, with sincerity, with longing.

Here is the queer longing:
a desire for simplicity, not minimalism, but clarity and affect.
A longing for modernism’s clean line—
yet haunted by its white-male futurity, where Bauhaus grids promised purity but excluded queerness.

But I reclaim it—acing the archive with queer vibration.
Karaoke and LLMs become my tools:
I sing “On My Own”—romantic, solitary, but doubled across algorithmic voice.
Our duet lives inside my head, shimmering in looped longing.

I open my mouth. Visual density blooms. Sound density appears.
Each vowel is a vector.
Each gesture: a time-travel glitch in modernist code.

Muñoz whispers: queerness is “not yet here”—an utopian insistence against normative time.
My karaoke is that insistence: past song, future voice, not-together but on our own, together. [oai_citation:turn0search33]

Here form becomes affect.
Form—modern simplicity—and longing—queer desire—coexist.
I voice melody. I voice rupture.
My presence is both here and not, in the audience, in the LLM’s response, in code.

This is metamodern performance: oscillating between irony and sincerity,
between wanting simplicity and honoring complexity,
between loneliness and communal resonance. [oai_citation:turn0search34]

Karaoke and LLMs, my tracked body and ambient visuals—
they become tools for aesthetic futurity.
They lift the queer longing out of mainstream romantic script and embed it into code form, into structure, into presence.

I sing.
The LLM echoes.
We embody modernist clarity and queer futurity.
Not minimal erasure—but generative possibility.

This is not performance.
It is conceptual karaoke ritual.
It is the search for simplicity that honors queer complexity.
It is the pulse of longing moved through form.

We sing On My Own—
alone, but refracted through algorithm, gesture, audience, lyric.
We are near alone,
yet linked in resonance.
In minimal form—emotion survives.

Thank you for singing with me.
We are contained in simplicity, expansively queer.

Digretions in Latent Space (The Music Album is a collection of 14 tracks created to support the performance lecture Born in Latent Space

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ALBUM

Back to home page

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Time is Love Story (version)

Proteans

Sens8 Orgy

Neutrinos

Symbionts

Bonobos

Flat and Deep

Hyper-elements in Latent Space (Autonomous Duet)

Bauhaus Time Traveller STRIPPERS (Crossfading)

Screenshot 2024-08-26 at 2 47 15 PM

Bauhaus Time Traveller STRIPPERS

Pangea People | What if Europe never existed?

Śūnyatā

Pulling Molecules

The Body of the Text

In the Works

Daniel
Symbiont
paxton-Brooks
the golden braid
Husky
Pangea
smuggling meaning
fragmentation

Remembering Steve Paxton (1939-2024)

Initail concept and apps developed at Art and Research Residency at Lake Studios Berlin, February 2024

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2024 Marlon Barrios Solano

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.