<nettime> Mordor IA walking tour - Santa Clara, California - 3 oct

[mario santamaria via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Dear friends,
It is a pleasure to invite you to this walk

*A Tour of AI, Silicon Valley Internet Tour*
Santa Clara, California, October 3, 2026
In a collaboration with Alex Saum-Pascual

***

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.

https://bcnm.berkeley.edu/events/109/special-events/6679/a-tour-of-ai-an-in-person-journey-through-santa-clara-s-ai-infrastructure

***

The event is sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media and the Arts
and Humanities Division, College of Letters & Sciences, UC Berkeley and San
José State University, and the Institute of Contemporary Art San José.
It is part of the closing events of Hidden Layers: AI Infrastructures and
Hallucinations, curated by Antonio Somanini with Hannes Bajohr and Sonja
Thiel. Additional programming is developed in collaboration with the
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).

more info about IT
https://internetour.com/


best,


Mario Santamaría
www.mariosantamaria.net
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<http://www.mariosantamaria.net>
Tourist Guide
https://internetour.com <https://t.co/VRcqZjU2D6>
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Studio: Trama 34. L'Hospitalet, Barcelona
e: info@mariosantamaria.net  tw: @m_msanta
m: +0034 651 109 724
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<https://t.co/VRcqZjU2D6>
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