Tue, Oct 14, 2025
Workshop
Mario Santamaría
AI Infrastructure
Only for MAIAD students
AI Infrastructure
Like other digital technologies, the rise of AI is propped up by the myth that these systems are weightless and abstract. The fantasy of a spotless Cloud floating beyond the physical world conceals the reality: vast stretches of fiber-optic lines, sprawling data centers, and growing energy use. The workshop explores the fact that the Internet driving AI is a mesh of hidden materials and infrastructures, from anonymous city buildings to beaches where buried undersea cables link continents.
Mario Santamaría is a Barcelona-based visual artist who works with a wide range of media, frequently using photography, video, performance, websites, and online interventions.
His recent work seeks to embody protocols and processes of information distribution, performing actions such as physically travelling to his website by repeating the path of data; going for beers around the city as a Google algorithm or creating a tour operator based on the infrastructure of the Internet.
