born_in_latent_space

Born in Latent Space

by Marlon Barrios Solan0

a performance-lecture integrating creative coding, generative AI, sound, and concept by Marlon Barrios Solano

Screenshot 2024-04-26 at 11 57 57 AM Born in Lalent Space @Submerge Festival 2025 @Lake Studios Berlin Image: Maria Kousi

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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

Born in Latent Space is a lecture-performance, installation, and workshop platform—an ongoing artistic and research project (2024–2029) that I develop as a living, evolving system rather than a fixed work. :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}

At its core, it is a performance-lecture in which I appear with a laptop, voice, body, and a constellation of custom-built and generative AI applications, engaging in real time with machine processes. However, this format is only one possible manifestation. The work can expand into an installation, unfold as a participatory workshop, or operate as a hybrid environment where these modalities overlap and inform one another.

Born in Latent Space also operates as a cognitive assembly, drawing on the notion articulated by N. Katherine Hayles, where cognition is distributed across human and nonhuman actors, technical systems, and environments. In this sense, the work is not simply performed—it is enacted as a field of relations in which thinking emerges through the interaction of bodies, algorithms, interfaces, histories, and imaginaries.

The project is composed as a constellation of fragments—vignettes, conceptual notes, stories, applications, playlists, prompts, and generative systems—that I continuously rearrange and recombine. These elements function as a network that I activate in real time to navigate the latent space of all the possible stories inhabiting the moment of performance. Each iteration becomes a different pathway, a situated traversal through a shifting field of potentials.

Within this system, I perform through a fully embodied practice that integrates storytelling, singing, movement, and at times DJing or VJing, alongside the live use of real-time computational and AI-based tools and movement scores. Voice, gesture, and physical action operate as interfaces, as ways of thinking and sensing within an expanded ecology of cognition. The body does not represent the system; it participates in it, entangled in processes of generation, translation, and response.

The work weaves together fiction and lived experience, drawing from histories of migration, cybernetics, complexity, and evolving notions of life and intelligence. It engages with epistemological and philosophical frameworks that include evolutionary theory, and symbiogenesis, while also opening toward speculative and poetic modes of knowing. These strands unfold in relation to multiple forms of symbiosis between human and machine, memory and speculation, embodiment and abstraction, individual and collective cognition.

At the same time, the project integrates a sustained investigation into the conditions of the present, shaped by the catastrophes of late capitalism, postcolonial histories, and the persistent force of patriarchal eurocentric hegemonies. Even when not explicitly thematic, these forces inform the work’s urgency to question how otherness is produced. This inquiry extends into what I describe as the tectonics of otherness, a shifting terrain in which identities, differences, and power relations are continuously generated and destabilized.

Born in Latent Space also incorporates contemplative practices and philosophical influences from Buddhism, particularly the notion of emptiness (śūnyatā), understood here as a form of epistemic clearing. This orientation allows the work to remain open, decentered, and relational—queer in its structure, without a fixed point of origin or authority, continually dissolving and reconstituting its own conditions.

As an installation, the work becomes spatial and distributed, with autonomous processes, screens, and interfaces that extend beyond the temporal frame of performance. As a workshop, it opens into a shared laboratory where participants engage directly with its tools and questions, activating their own relationships to AI, embodiment, and knowledge production.

The Tectonics of Otherness of this work was further developed during a residency Beyond Gravity at Theater im Depot in Dortmund, Germany, from July to October 2025, where the project expanded its investigation into performance as a distributed, computational, and embodied system.

Across all its forms, Born in Latent Space functions as a performative infrastructure: a space where ideas are enacted, tested, and transformed through action. It is not a fixed piece but a terrain—an evolving cognitive and aesthetic system that I enter, navigate, and reconfigure each time, in relation to machines, environments, and others.

Screenshot 2024-04-26 at 11 57 57 AM Born in Lalent Space @Submerge Festival 2025 @Lake Studios BerlinImage: Maria Kousi