lab_synthetic_meaning
🌟 Laboratory of Synthetic Meaning
By Marlon Barrios Solano
Starting October 2025
The Laboratory of Synthetic Meaning is a research-driven artistic ecosystem dedicated to exploring language as a living, unstable epistemic field. It brings together computational systems, generative models, and embodied artistic practices to examine how meaning arises, mutates, collapses, and reorganizes through human–machine interaction. Rather than treating language as a static repository of facts, the Laboratory approaches it as a dynamic epistemic object—one that reveals its internal logics, tensions, and architectures when activated by large language models (LLMs).
At the center of this project lies a conceptual shift: language is not retrieved but generated—not recalled but performed. LLMs expose this by revealing knowledge as a form of probabilistic choreography, in which every sentence becomes an emergent event shaped by memory, data, context, and computational inference. Meaning becomes something that can stretch, fold, resonate, decay, or slip into ambiguity. Through this lens, language is treated as a material subject to forces akin to physics—tension, gravity, drift, equilibrium, entropy—each manifesting as a semantic effect or experiential phenomenon.
Core Concept: Language as an Epistemic Object
The Laboratory begins with a central proposition:
Language is not a stable repository of knowledge.
It is an epistemic object—unfolding, self-transforming, contingent, and performative.
Within this framework:
- Meaning is generated, not retrieved.
- Knowledge appears as probabilistic choreography.
- Language becomes a material subject to tension, gravity, folding, resonance, and decay.
By collaborating with LLMs, the project exposes the instability and multiplicity embedded within language—revealing semantic drift, collapse, friction, and emergence as features of synthetic cognition.
Minimal Interfaces for Complex Meaning
The Laboratory develops minimalistic interfaces that make visible the complexity of language. Each interface acts as a distilled perceptual instrument, offering a clear surface through which the hidden mechanics of meaning can be sensed.
These interfaces explore:
Encompassing Forms
Structural containers that hold shifting semantic fields in view.
Geometries of Thought
Configurations that reveal the internal architecture of ideas and their relations.
Folding Semantic Spaces
Moments where language loops, unravels, or recompresses itself under algorithmic pressures.
Trajectories of Meaning
Paths traced by ideas as they move through latent space—arcs, spirals, collapses, divergences.
A Physics of Meaning
Dynamic behaviors in language that resemble physical principles:
- tension
- equilibrium
- drift
- resonance
- entropy
- gravity
Each appears as an aesthetic, computational, or experiential effect within the interfaces.
Applications / Micro-Laboratories
Machine Forgetting — Text + Voice
A study of algorithmic memory and erasure through spoken and written interaction.
Machine Forgetting — Only Text Version
A minimalist textual interface exploring drift, disappearance, and semantic erosion.
Semantic Tensegrities
A system that constructs dynamic, self-balancing semantic structures—akin to tensegrity sculptures but made of meaning.
Project Aim
The Laboratory of Synthetic Meaning aims to:
- Reveal the hidden architectures of language
- Expose meaning as dynamic, unstable, generative
- Build epistemic interfaces that exhibit semantic complexity through minimal design
- Explore LLMs as co-performers and epistemic collaborators
- Develop new artistic practices centered on synthetic cognition and latent space
The project stands at the intersection of philosophy, computation, performance, and speculative epistemology—using language itself as material, collaborator, and mystery.