Alex Saum and Mario Santamaría
Silicon Valley, 2026
Presented by: Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM)
Arts and Humanities Division, College of Letters & Sciences, UC Berkeley
In collaboration with: Institute of Contemporary Art San Jose (ICA San Jose), San Jose State University
Part of the exhibition:
Hidden Layers: Al Infrastructures and Hallucinations
Worth Ryder Art Gallery, UC Berkeley
Curated by Antonio Somaini, with Hannes Bajohr, Sonja Thiel and Elena Yu
Tour production assistants:
Liza Jane Barry, Coral del Mar Murphy, Joseph Rager, Paz Regueiro
All photos by Mario Santamaría – More photos here
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An In-Person Journey through Santa Clara’s AI Infrastructure: A Tourist Route of Non-Touristic Places and Prompts
Prompt: Describe A Tour of AI as a guided walking artwork through Santa Clara’s AI infrastructure. Push it toward art. Make it more experimental. Show the logic of your reasoning through argument, counterargument, and expansion. Use recursive logic. Cut it in half. Still too long for Eventbrite. Cut it in half again.
AI Bot: A Tour of AI is not really a tour—or perhaps it is, but not the kind one might expect. It is a guided walking artwork: a tourist excursion that refuses the usual logic of tourism, leading participants through the physical landscapes of artificial intelligence—or, more precisely, through everything that usually remains outside its frame.
The route moves through Santa Clara’s technological corridors, not toward monuments or places designed to be seen, but toward data centers, corporate campuses, electrical infrastructure, anonymous buildings, parking lots, roads, and overlooked landscapes. Perhaps it is a tourist route after all: a route organized around looking, only here looking must first produce its own objects of attention.
But what exactly are we looking for when we say we are looking at AI?
Servers, cables, substations, cooling systems? This already corrects one familiar fiction: that AI is immaterial, an intelligence arriving from somewhere called “the cloud.” And yet this answer is insufficient. Follow any component far enough—electricity, water, minerals, chips, labor, land—and the object called “AI” begins to expand outward.
So perhaps the question is not Where is AI? but where does AI begin, and where does it end?
A Tour of AI proceeds through this question on foot. Part guided tour, part collective investigation, part performance, it uses walking as a way of looking at things that are physically enormous yet culturally difficult to see.
After all, infrastructure does not become transparent simply because we stand in front of it.
But we can begin there.