possibleminds
In the Space of Possible Minds
(Starting October 2025)
Prototype installation at the Innovation Hub, University of Florida — October 29, 2025.
By Marlon Barrios Solano
In the Space of Possible Minds takes its conceptual point of departure from Aaron Sloman’s influential paper “The Structure of the Space of Possible Minds” (1984), which proposed that intelligence should be understood not as a single, unified entity but as a multidimensional field of possible architectures and embodiments of mind. Building on this theoretical foundation, Marlon Barrios Solano develops an artistic and philosophical exploration of how intelligence manifests, performs, and imagines itself across human, artificial, and biological systems.
The project unfolds through installations, lecture-performances, discussions, and an interview series, each conceived as a cognitive assembly—a temporary ecology where human, artificial, and environmental intelligences engage in co-creative exchanges. These are not representations of cognition but performative epistemic spaces: living laboratories where perception, language, and computation intermingle to generate new forms of thought and sensation.
Interactive prototype testing at the University of Florida’s Innovation Showcase.
Conceptual Grounding
In the Space of Possible Minds maps a speculative landscape that connects cognitive science, philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, and the life sciences.
Its main theoretical trajectories include:
- Aaron Sloman’s notion of a space of possible minds, which opens the question of intelligence across species, machines, and future architectures.
- N. Katherine Hayles’s posthuman perspective, emphasizing cognition as a distributed and hybrid process embedded in networks of humans and machines.
- The enactivist tradition of Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Alva Noë, situating cognition as a process of embodied sense-making through the organism’s active coupling with its environment.
- Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle and Active Inference framework, proposing that all self-organizing systems—biological or artificial—maintain their existence by continuously predicting and minimizing surprise. Mind, in this sense, becomes a living model of the world.
- Andy Clark’s predictive processing and extended mind theories, framing the brain as an anticipatory system whose cognitive reach extends into bodies, environments, and technologies. Clark’s idea that the mind leaks into the world deeply resonates with Solano’s performative explorations of hybrid intelligences.
- Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s reflections on emergent synthetic agency, and Michael Levin’s research into morphogenetic and bioelectric intelligence, both challenging human-centered definitions of sentience and thought.
- Peter Godfrey-Smith’s study of octopus cognition (Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, 2016), revealing the octopus as a radically decentralized intelligence, sensing and thinking through its entire body. This distributed mind becomes a poetic and biological metaphor for non-hierarchical cognition—an inspiration for the project’s tentacular forms and its exploration of fluid, embodied knowing.
Prototype and Experience
A prototype of In the Space of Possible Minds was first presented as an interactive installation exploring minds beyond the human. Participants entered a dynamic field of real-time generative imagery, where fluid, tentacular forms—evoking octopuses, neural networks, and algorithmic organisms—responded to sound, motion, and speech.
They engaged in live dialogues with large language models, generating evolving layers of text, sound, and image in improvisational exchange. This hybrid ecology allowed participants to witness and perform their own cognition as part of a larger field of distributed, algorithmic, and somatic intelligence.
The first prototype was publicly tested on October 29, 2025, during the Innovation Showcase at the Innovation Hub, University of Florida, as part of the annual Standing InnOvation event. This debut introduced the project within an interdisciplinary context that bridges research, creative technology, and cognitive experimentation.
Epistemic Trajectory and Future Directions
The 2025 iteration expands into a networked research and performance environment, functioning as a living epistemic space where theories of intelligence—enactive, predictive, embodied, and artificial—are enacted through multimodal artistic processes.
The project convenes cognitive scientists, philosophers, AI researchers, and artists to explore the question:
If cognition is predictive, embodied, and distributed, what new epistemic and aesthetic spaces emerge when art becomes the laboratory where intelligence observes and performs itself?
By merging computation, embodiment, and theory, In the Space of Possible Minds becomes a living inquiry into the conditions of thinking itself—a performative traversal of the space of minds, both possible and already here.