pangea_in_latent_space
Pangea in Latent Space
By the Pangea AI Collective: Marlon Barrios Solano & Maria Luisa Angulo
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.