pangea_in_latent_space
Pangea in Latent Space
By the Pangea AI Collective: Marlon Barrios Solano & Maria Luisa Angulo
Pangea AI – June 2025
Pangea AI is an artistic and research collective co-founded by Maria Luisa Angulo (France/El Salvador) and Marlon Barrios Solano (USA/Venezuela). It emerges under the institutional umbrella of TRIAS CULTURE (Dakar–Paris) and with the support of the Center for Arts, Migration and Entrepreneurship (CAME) at the University of Florida (USA).
The project originates from a critical reflection on the impact of disruptive technologies—particularly Artificial Intelligence (AI)—and proposes a situated, poetic, and decolonial artistic practice.
From the experience of migrant bodies, we weave together art, technology, and critical thought as interdependent territories, with a focus on the body and the performing arts. Our work understands AI not as a neutral tool, but as a territory of symbolic, political, and epistemic struggle.
Through workshops, residencies, installations, performances, technopoetic tools, and algorithms that learn to listen, we intervene in space as a site of affect, critical creation, and collective nomadic imagination—envisioning new forms of knowledge and Re-Existence, outside hegemonic narratives of progress.
Pangea AI’s Lines of Flight
The Nomade-Lab of Pangea AI
The Nomade-Lab is an itinerant platform dedicated to experimentation, creation, research, and critical education. Operating as mobile spaces for exchange among artists and creators from various latitudes—especially from Africa and Latin America—its aim is to activate collaborative, plural, and situated processes.
From a critical perspective, the Nomade-Labs seek to transform our own creative and research processes into nomadic knowledge and to explore horizontal ways of sharing—stepping away from automated and mimetic learning models in favor of situated practices of knowledge appropriation and collective creation.
For the workshops, we collaborate with Motion Bank on the Choreographic Coding Lab series, and with the Meta-creation Lab at Simon Fraser University to offer workshops on open-source generative AI tools for artists. These collaborations enrich the program with advanced research methodologies and access to cutting-edge tools and frameworks.
Movements in Latent Space: Generative AI and Choreographic Embodiment
The practical workshop “Movements in Latent Space: Generative AI and Choreographic Embodiment” is part of the Nomade-Lab program and proposes an exploration of the creative potential of generative AI—such as large language models, sound synthesis, and image generation—from a performative and embodied perspective.
Designed for movement artists and creative technologists without coding experience, the workshop offers a multimodal space for experimentation and critical reflection. Here, the body becomes a sensitive interface, a catalyst, and a generative trigger—opening up new aesthetic possibilities that decenter dominant narratives and foreground embodied, relational, and situated practices.
Long Version
Pangea in Latent Space is a transdisciplinary project that reimagines institutional and theatrical spaces as dynamic environments for activation, dialogue, and creative exploration. Developed by the Pangea AI Collective—led by Marlon Barrios Solano (Venezuela/USA) and Maria Luisa Angulo (El Salvador/France)—the project offers a living platform where conversations and actions surrounding artificial intelligence, colonization, and the Global South unfold in real time.
The project is set to premiere at Theater im Depot in Dortmund, Germany, from October 1–5, 2025, as part of the Decolonizing the Digital residency program. This initiative is a collaboration between Theater im Depot, the Academy for Theatre and Digitality, and Kulturforum Witten, and is supported by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, the LWL-Kulturstiftung, the Cultural Office of the City of Dortmund, and the Kulturstiftung Dortmund.
Residency Activities and Conceptual Development
During a two-week residency in Gainesville, Florida, Marlon and Maria Luisa engaged in a research and ideation process that blended conceptual inquiry, embodied exploration, speculative design, and technological prototyping. This period of intensive collaboration laid the groundwork for the project’s thematic and methodological framework.
Thematic Explorations
- Speculative Cartographies: Developed concepts like all possible maps and the map is not the territory, envisioning installations such as What if Europe had not existed?, where generative AI imagines “Pangea people” from alternate cartographic histories.
- Digital Utopians: Explored the influence of California techno-utopians, the Whole Earth Catalog, and Stewart Brand, contrasting them with early epistemic architectures from the Bauhaus and Rudolf Steiner.
- Mythic Cartographies: Investigated figures like La Llorona and El Nautili as sonic, migratory entities embodying cultural memory and haunting.
Speculative Ecologies and Hybrid Cognition
- Prototyped a chatbot for speculative ecologies, drawing on the work of Lynn Margulis, mycelial symbiosis, Gaia theory, and post-humanist intelligence models.
- Utilized generative AI to imagine identities aligned with eco-techno metaphors—fungal, entangled, and migratory.
- Discussed facial recognition as choreographic algorithm, surveillance duets with drones, and real-time tracking systems as creative interventions.
Systems, Governance, and Feedback
- Inspired by CyberSyn from Allende’s Chile and Nick Bostrom’s writings, imagined governance through distributed feedback rather than centralized control.
- Explored speculative economies: strange money, economic rituals, and AI-driven value systems.
- Reimagined historical technologies such as perforated cards and punch pads as poetic and choreographic tools.
Embodied Resistance and Cultural Memory
- Centered Cumbia Rebajada—a slowed-down cumbia from Monterrey, Mexico—as an example of sonic resistance and temporal subversion.
- Developed a monologue performance referencing Guillermo Gómez-Peña, drawing from the body as archive and emotional engine.
- Explored arm knitting and textile practices as feminist, tactile gestures of care and resistance.
- Worked with the notions of cuerpos políticos and intención coreográfica rooted in Global South embodiment and migration.
Protocols, Archives, and Meta-Infrastructures
- Initiated choreographic notation via code, reviving historical systems like punch cards as speculative score systems.
- Revisited the Bauhaus as a proto-interface—a hybrid between body, architecture, and interface logic.
- Framed generative AI as an archival machine, capable of reanimating, mutating, and preserving artistic memory and epistemic complexity.
Project Formats
The project unfolds through multiple interconnected formats:
- Lecture-Performances: Merging storytelling, theory, and artistic expression.
- Immersive Installations: Interactive landscapes exploring AI, memory, and agency.
- Movement Scores: Choreographic frameworks for embodied reflection and performance.
- Cartographies & Archives: Visual mappings of AI, culture, power, and resistance.
- Workshops: Participatory formats that facilitate dialogic learning and collaboration.
- Global Dialogues: Connecting venues and artists across hemispheres, amplifying Southern perspectives on AI and coloniality.
Pangea in Latent Space is both an artwork and a method. It queers conventional formats, unearths post-geographic imaginaries, and cultivates new modes of sense-making. By fusing speculative practices, generative technologies, and decolonial methodologies, it becomes a transformative ecology—one that reimagines how we inhabit AI and how AI, in turn, inhabits us.