UC Berkeley Opens 'Hidden Layers' AI Infrastructures Show

An exhibition opening at UC Berkeley next month is worth flagging for anyone tracking how the humanities-side critique of AI is being staged by institutions with real convening power. Hidden Layers: AI Infrastructures and Hallucinations opens at the Worth Ryder Art Gallery with a reception on September 3, 2026, and runs through October 3, according to the university's event listing.

The show is curated by Antonio Somaini with Hannes Bajohr and Sonja Thiel, in dialogue with the France-Berkeley research initiative The Latent Spaces of Culture. The organizers frame it around two lenses, AI Infrastructures and AI Hallucinations, and describe the subject as 'the planetary infrastructures of extraction and computation, the often-invisible human labor, the latent vector spaces within which culture is compressed and processed, and the models' hallucinations.' A companion page from participating artist Grégory Chatonsky uses the same framing.

The reason this is more than a campus show is the roster. Listed artists include Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, alongside Nouf Aljowaysir, Chatonsky, Gašper and Nina Beguš with Metahaven, Asma Kazmi and Jill Miller, Andrea Khôra, Occitane Lacurie and Barnabé Sauvage, Greg Niemeyer, and Mario Santamaria and Alex Saum-Pascual. Programming around the opening includes an artist talk by Chatonsky on September 3, a film program at BAMPFA on September 9, a curatorial tour led by Somaini on September 10, and workshops on the Latent Spaces of Culture running September 9-11.

The honest caveat is that the listing is thin on what each artist will actually show, and the curatorial statement is thematic rather than work-level. Take the framing as the curators' argument, not a settled account of how AI infrastructure operates.

For a field spending 2026 arguing about data center siting, training data provenance, and the labor behind model tuning, having this cohort assembled in a single gallery under a Berkeley banner is a useful signal that the humanities-side critique is being institutionalized, not just published.