The work
My Pendular Umwelt is a speculative web work by Marlon Barrios Solano. It was developed during the open labs of the inaugural Hybrid Intelligences program at the University of Florida, in July 2026 — a Creative B gathering that treated intelligence as coupling across bodies, tools, institutions, and worlds. The labs were a place to make, not only to discuss. This piece is one of those makings: an artistic and poetic experiment in whether a large language model can be approached as a system with a world, and whether that world can be drawn rather than only described.
Umwelt
Umwelt is Jakob von Uexküll’s name for the lived world of a particular organism — not the universe as measured from nowhere, but the slice of reality that a body’s sensing and acting make significant. A tick does not inhabit a forest; it inhabits warmth, odor, and touch. Different bodies, even in the same room, enact different Umwelten. That idea sits at the center of this site’s ontology, and it is worked through in Essay 1 and in Essay 2 (My Umwelt), where a model is invited to self-report: if it is a cognitive system rather than a failed human, what would its world be?
The speculation is that an LLM’s Umwelt would not be physical. It would be semantic — tokens, embeddings, context windows, probabilities, neighborhoods of meaning. Essay 2 calls that companion world a Latentwelt: the environment disclosed by latent space, whose “organs” are embeddings and whose actions are continuations. Affordances, embodiment, and enactivism belong here too. A prompt affords continuation for a model the way a handle affords grasping for a hand. Cognition is not a picture of a pre-given world; it is brought forth in coupling.
Inscription in motion
My Pendular Umwelt takes that theorization off the page. GPT-4o writes short passages from inside a proposed computational Umwelt and reads them aloud; p5.js then lets branching pendulums write the words along their trails — letter by letter, fold over fold, at speeds that drift and interfere. The screen becomes a small unstable ecology: manifolds of text, lines of force, dissipating generations. It does not claim to open the model’s interior. It tries, speculatively, to give a visible rhythm to how such a system might inhabit possibility — path-dependent, overlapping, never quite a still map.
That is why the work belongs with this knowledge architecture. Umwelt in the ontology is a concept; here it is also a practice: an artistic way of letting a language model speak of its world while physics, type, and time refuse to keep that speech still.