Exhibit: Hidden Layers: AI Infrastructures and Hallucinations
Organized by the Department of German and the Department of Art Practice
In neural networks, the “hidden layers” are the intermediate strata of transformation between input and output: the computational structures where data is transformed, weighted, and recombined into increasingly abstract, distributed representations that no human eye can read.
The exhibition Hidden Layers: AI Infrastructures and Hallucinations takes this term as its conceptual frame, bringing together seventeen international artists and researchers working at the intersection of contemporary art and machine learning to make visible what artificial intelligence keeps out of sight: its planetary infrastructures and computational latent spaces, its colonial and ideological underpinnings, its misrecognitions and hallucinations, its transformation of our relation with the past through the silent reprocessing of pre-existing cultural forms.
Works by Nouf Aljowaysir; Gašper and Nina Beguš & Metahaven; Grégory Chatonsky; Kate Crawford & Vladan Joler; Asma Kazmi & Jill Miller; Andrea Khôra; Occitane Lacurie & Barnabé Sauvage; Greg Niemeyer; and Mario Santamaria & Alex Saum-Pascual.
Curated by Antonio Somaini with Sonja Thiel and Hannes Bajohr and Elena Yu. The exhibition is part of the Paris–Berkeley research initiative The Latent Spaces of Culture: a collaboration between UC Berkeley, the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). An accompanying program of artist talks, a film screening at BAMPFA, a workshop, a salon, and a tour runs across September 2026.