The Department of German and the Department of Art Practice are excited to announce the opening of Hidden Layers: AI Infrastructures and Hallucinations, curated by Antonio Somaini with Hannes Bajohr, Sonja Thiel and Elena Yu, in dialogue with the France–Berkeley research initiative The Latent Spaces of Culture, and on display at the Worth Ryder Art Gallery.
In neural networks, the “hidden layers” are the intermediate strata of transformation between input and output — the computational structures where data are 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, and its transformation of our relation to the past through the silent reprocessing of pre-existing cultural forms. The exhibition is organized in four sections: “In the Latent Spaces of Culture,” “Material Infrastructures,” “Colonial Imaginaries: From Misrecognition to Generative Slopaganda,” and “Hallucinations and Psychedelia.”
Featuring 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.
Hidden Layers is a collaboration between the Department of German and the Worth Ryder Art Gallery at the Department of Art Practice. It is part of the France–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).
Exhibition Dates: September 3 - October 3, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 3, 4-6:30pm, Worth Ryder Art Gallery Open to the public, RSVP requested
Artist Talk, Gregory Chatonsky “INFRALLUCINATION”: Thursday, September 3, 6:30-8:00pm, AAPB 285 Open to the public, RSVP required
Film Program, Push Buttons and AI: September 9, 7 pm, BAMPFA RSVP
Curatorial Tour, led by Antonio Somaini: Friday, September 11, 4:30pm, Worth Ryder Art Gallery Open to the public, no RSVP required
Workshop on Latent Space of Culture: September 10, 2pm-4pm; September 11/12, 9:30 am-4pm on both days, 470 Stephens
Berkeley AI Futures Salon: On the Subject of Art in Artificial Intelligence:September 16, 6:30pm– 9pm Apply to attend
Tour of AI: October 3 Reservations required. Information forthcoming
Closing day: October 3, 12-3pm, Worth Ryder Art Gallery Open to the public, no RSVP required
Additional events, details, and registration links to be announced. Times subject to change, please also check the campus calendar.
This exhibition is supported by the France-Berkeley Fund of the Institute of European Studies, the Department of German and the Department of Art Practice, together with the Berkeley Center for New Media, the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), Department of Rhetoric; Antikythera, the Human Technology Futures (HTF), the Pamela P. Fong and Family Distinguished Chair in China Studies, the Division of Arts & Humanities, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the School of Information, the Technology Network of the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative (BESI), and the Berkeley Art, Law, and Finance Project, hosted by the Berkeley Center for Law and Business at Berkeley Law.
In conjunction with the exhibition, additional programming is developed in collaboration with Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) and the Institute for Contemporary Art San Jose.