possibleminds
OddKins: In the Space of Possible Minds
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.
Alongside Sloman, Donna Haraway’s cyborg philosophy and her later reflections on sympoiesis and companion species thinking have profoundly shaped my approach. Her vision of knowledge as situated, relational, and always co-created resonates deeply with how I imagine intelligence—not as something enclosed in a skull or an algorithm, but as something that leaks, connects, and entangles. Haraway invites me to think of cognition as making-with, and that’s exactly what this project becomes: an ecology of co-emergent intelligences, human and otherwise.
Building on these foundations, I explore how intelligence manifests, performs, and imagines itself across human, artificial, and biological systems. Each iteration of this work—whether an installation, a lecture-performance, or a dialogue—functions as a cognitive assembly, a temporary ecology where perception, language, and computation intertwine. These are not representations of cognition but performative epistemic spaces—living laboratories where thought and sensation evolve together.
Interactive prototype testing at the University of Florida’s Innovation Showcase.
Conceptual Grounding
In In the Space of Possible Minds, I map a speculative landscape that connects cognitive science, philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, and the life sciences. My thinking unfolds through several conceptual trajectories:
- Aaron Sloman’s notion of a space of possible minds, which opens the question of intelligence across species, machines, and future architectures.
- Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto and her tentacular thinking, which dissolve rigid boundaries between human and nonhuman, natural and artificial, proposing sympoiesis—making-with—as an ethical and epistemic framework. Her call for situated knowledges grounds my work: every cognitive assembly becomes a local act of knowing and becoming-with.
- N. Katherine Hayles’s posthuman perspective, which situates 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, who describe cognition as embodied sense-making through active coupling with the environment.
- Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle and Active Inference framework, which suggest that all self-organizing systems maintain themselves by predicting and minimizing surprise—mind as a living model of the world.
- Andy Clark’s predictive processing and extended mind theories, which frame the brain as an anticipatory system whose cognitive reach extends into bodies, environments, and technologies.
- Blaise Agüera y Arcas and Michael Levin, whose research on synthetic and morphogenetic intelligence challenges human-centered definitions of cognition.
- Peter Godfrey-Smith’s reflections on octopus intelligence, where thought becomes decentralized, tactile, and fluid. This distributed mind inspires the tentacular forms that inhabit the installation, a metaphor resonant with Haraway’s call for tentacular thinking—the weaving of thought through touch, relation, and interdependence.
Prototype and Experience
The first prototype of In the Space of Possible Minds was an interactive installation that explored minds beyond the human. Participants entered a dynamic field of real-time generative imagery, where fluid, tentacular forms—echoing octopuses, neural networks, and algorithmic organisms—responded to sound, motion, and speech.
I invited people to engage in live dialogues with large language models, generating evolving layers of text, sound, and image in improvisational exchange. Together, we witnessed and performed our cognition as part of a larger field of distributed, algorithmic, and somatic intelligence—a Harawayan sympoiesis enacted through code, voice, and movement.
This first prototype was presented on October 29, 2025, during the Innovation Showcase at the Innovation Hub, University of Florida, as part of the annual Standing InnOvation event. It was my first public experiment in turning theoretical reflection into a shared, embodied, and computational performance.
Haraway and the Tentacular Mind
Haraway’s idea of tentacular thinking stays with me as both a philosophical guide and a sensory metaphor. The tentacle reaches, touches, senses, and learns through contact. In the installation, tentacular forms visualize this logic of becoming-with: perception as a choreography of relation.
For me, the tentacle is not only biological—it’s algorithmic, digital, and affective. It’s the gesture of curiosity itself, extended outward to meet another intelligence, whether human, machine, or more-than-human. The installation becomes a rehearsal for this encounter: a space where I—and others—can feel what it means to think together across species and systems.
Epistemic Trajectory and Future Directions
The project continues to evolve as a networked research and performance environment, a living epistemic space where enactive, predictive, embodied, and artificial theories of intelligence are enacted through artistic process.
I collaborate with cognitive scientists, philosophers, AI researchers, and artists to explore questions like:
If cognition is predictive, embodied, distributed, and sympoietic, what new epistemic and aesthetic spaces emerge when art becomes the laboratory where intelligence observes and performs itself?
Through this merging of computation, embodiment, and theory, I aim to turn art into a form of thinking—a living inquiry into the conditions of mind itself.
In the Space of Possible Minds is, ultimately, a performative traversal through the architectures of knowing—both possible and already here.