A Tour of AI, with Mario Santamaría and Alex Saum

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.

The Santa Clara tour begins at 3:30 PM. Berkeley shuttle passengers depart UC Berkeley at 2:00 PM. But perhaps the tour does not end when the walking stops: at 6:00 PM, the route continues at ICA San José with a reception and conversation–a chance to gather, reflect, and continue the questions raised along the way. And because every journey needs an endpoint, return transportation to Berkeley departs at 8:00 PM.

And because bodies, unlike data, cannot be infinitely scaled, participation is limited.

Registration is required through ICA San José. Further travel instructions and secret locations will be disclosed to guests upon registration

A Tour of AI is sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Arts and Humanities division, College of Letters & Sciences, at UC Berkeley. It is part of the closing events of Hidden Layers: AI Infrastructures and Hallucinations, curated by Antonio Somanini with Hannes Bajohr and Sonja Thiel.

In conjunction with the exhibition, additional programming is developed in collaboration with Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), the San José State University and the Institute of Contemporary Art San José.