Glass Veils (2024), Paris. Still captured from performance video.
I am an experimental digital artist using emerging technologies to create artwork exploring the collapse of boundaries (or, perhaps, the expansions) between human consciousness and technology.
In recent years, I have also embraced rollerskating as a movement practice and material for my artwork. So I was excited to meet, in May 2024, artist, dancer, creative technologist and researcher Marlon Barrios Solano at Lake Studios dance residency in Berlin.
With his background in improvisational dance, Marlon is fascinated with the real-time cognitive processes that enable responsive actions. As part of his research, he programmed a JavaScript app – Duets in Latent Space – based on generative AI technology by AI company FAL, which granted Marlon access to its low-latency cloud-based platform. The app makes API calls to FAL’s models at a very rapid rate, allowing a feedback stream of near-instantaneous, simultaneous image-to-image AND text-to-image conversion. As the images are generated in real time, the resulting feed is fast enough to resemble a video.
Conceived as part of his ongoing research, Marlon uses the app to “weave together vignettes, storytelling, interfaces, software, movement scores, digital objects, and re-performances, tracing trajectories of cybernetics, lost ancestors, time travel, queer longing, recursion, and migrations with algorithmic playfulness” in such conceptual themes as Bauhaus Time Travelers.
Marlon introduced me to the app (which he’d never yet shared with another dancer) – then helped direct my movements. While I’ve worked for the last several years with AI tools in a variety projects, this was my first experience of inputting my own physical movements to AI – not to mention my first experience of image generation at lightning speed. As I moved, the AI responded with multiple images per second, creating feedback so immediate that I felt I was dancing in improvised duet with a magic mirror. The AI’s response to me changed my response to it – together we generate a unique expression that could not exist without the other.
Transient Paths (2024). Lake Studios, Berlin Puppeteering my dark angels. Programming and concept by Marlon Barrios Solano. Performance and video edit by Karen Frances Eng. Music by Marlon Barrios Solano. AI model: FAL
Bauhaus Time Travelers (2024) Lake Studios, Berlin Programming and concept by Marlon Barrios Solano. Performance and video edit by Karen Frances Eng. Music by Marlon Barrios Solano. AI model: FAL
Glass Veils (2024) Salesforce HQ, Paris, France Made during the course of a daylong demonstration performance. App programming by Marlon Barrios Solano. Concept, performance and video edit by Karen Frances Eng. Music by Alva Noto. AI model: FAL
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Marlon & Karen at Lake Studios, Berlin - May 2024. Photo: Lenara Verle