Biography
Marlon Barrios Solano is a Venezuelan-American interdisciplinary artist, creative technologist and researcher with a background in dance, software engineering and cognitive science. His works combine generative AI, machine learning, creative coding, and performance. He is currently Maker-in-Residence focused on AI, Arts and Diasporas at CAME Center for Art, Migration and Entrepreneurship at the University of Florida in Gainesville, USA.
His recent works are mainly powered by code and generative AI models and are deployed as dynamic browser-based art, performance interfaces, improvisational scores, sound environments, AI chatbots and video that he organizes as performance-lecture, workshops, participatory performances, and/or linstallations. All the work descriptions and code is published and distributed with an open source license.
Most recently, Marlon was 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. His AI visual artwork has recently been selected for the ‘Black Box: No Middle Ground’ exhibition at the Mikser Festival 2024 in Belgrade, Serbia. Marlon is also a founding member of the Meta Ficciones Collective, collaborating with peers from Mexico, Spain, and France to investigate postdramatic theater and other procedural strategies for real time composition and generative AI. Meta Ficciones explores longing, belonging, queerness, dislocation, decolonial practices for the global south and speculative stories of migration and possible emancipated yet alien futures.
He was a research associate at the Inter-University of Dance/University of The Arts (UDK/HZT) in Berlin, Germany, from 2013 to 2016; a 2017 Hombroich Fellow in Germany, an artist/researcher in residence at ICK Amsterdam, Netherlands in 2013-14; and at the Gilles Jobin Company in Geneva, Switzerland, from 2009-2012.
In 2008, he created dance-tech.net, the 1st social network of international practitioners dedicated to the interdisciplinary exploration of dance and digital technologies and with that platform, he produced and published more than 200 video interviews as one of the first international video bloggers dedicated to the intersection of dance, arts, and digital technology. Marlon has also published several essays and created pioneering XR projects for knowledge transmission within dance/art festivals. In 2011, he created movimiento.org in Spanish and Portuguese with support from the South American Network of Dance. These networks have received support from Motionbank and the Forsythe Company (Germany), Gilles Jobin Company (Switzerland), Panorama Festival (Brazil), Transmediaakademy (Germany), Lake Studios Berlin, and many others.
Marlon has written essays for the books Dance In the Head/Tanz im Kopf and Transmission in Motion: The Technologizing of Dance, edited by Johannes Birringer and Maiike Bleeker respectively. Some of his interviews have been transcribed and published by Contact Quarterly. As a contemporary dancer and improviser in New York (1994-2001), As a professional dancer dancer, Marlon has collaborated with New York choreographers such as Lynn Shapiro, Merian Soto, Dean Moss, Bill Young, and Susan Marshall, and musicians such as Philip Glass, John Zorn, and Erik Friedlander. He has participated in numerous festivals and taught both nationally and internationally. He studied and practiced improvisation with Nancy Stark Smith, Jennifer Monson, Bebe Miller, KJ Holmes, and David Zambrano. In Venezuela (1981-1994), he apprenticed with DanzaLuz, DanzaHoy, and danced professionally with Aktion Colectiva and Rajatabla Danza. He co-founded Danza Contemporánea de Maracaibo with Yasmin Villavicencio in 1986.
Marlon holds an MFA in Dance and Technology from The Ohio State University, USA (2004) and completed the General Assembly Software Engineering Immersive Program 2021. He is also certified in Vipassana/Mindfulness Meditation by Spirit Rock Meditation Center, Embodyoga, and the Somatic Experiencing Certification Program (1st year).