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 of 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
Karen Frances Eng is a multidisciplinary artist creating experimental digital art using emerging technologies such as VR, augmented reality, AI and programmable blockchain art to explore and express states of consciousness in a surreal but organic style, often bordering on psychedelic. She is interested in chance processes, the interplay between technology and human consciousness, and collaborative artmaking. She has also participated in creating mixed-reality, interactive townscale public artworks, and live-animated collaborative projections. A participant and builder in multiuser digital worlds since the mid-1990s, she also participates in the digital/cryptoart space under the name oculardelusion, and is a member of cryptoart collectives DADA and the 105 Collective. Having recently discovered roller skating as a tool for liberating movement and expression, she has begun to incorporate movement – on and off wheels – into her practice. She lives in the UK.
Marlon Barrios Solano is a Venezuelan-American interdisciplinary artist, creative technologist and researcher with a background in dance, software engineering and cognitive science working with generative AI, machine learning, creative coding and performance. Based between Berlin, Germany, and Gainesville, USA, he is starting a new position as Maker-in-Residence focused on AI, Art and Diasporas at the University of Florida on August 15th, 2024. He is currently an artist-in-residence with the Rewilding Cultures program at Radiona in Zagreb, Croatia, and at Lake Studios Berlin, Germany, where he is a founding member.
Marlon’s work investigates computational creativity and synthetic cognition designing hybrid complex systems where language and self-organizing processes generate the aesthetic experience. His artistic practice includes machine learning for embodied digital interaction, generative AI, movement and voice, creative coding and app development, generative writing, bottom-up robotics, dance improvisation and vipassana meditation. His works are deployed as dynamic browser based art, open source code, improvisational scores, sound environments, AI chatbots and video that he organizes as installations, workshops, participatory performances and lectures.