Below the Cloud: A Community Workshop featuring AI Systems, Ecology, and Embroidery

The Berkeley Center for New Media is proud to support Below the Cloud, a symposium and workshop that will invite viewers to shift their gaze from the sky to the ground by tracing the environmental and social costs embedded within AI infrastructures, with a particular focus on water. The two-day program will be held in Fall 2026 at Bauer-Wurster Hall, UC Berkeley. Organizers Danika Cooper and Victoria Mohr from the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning are the recipients of funds from the BCNM Faculty Seed Grant, which allows UC Berkeley faculty to catalyze new directions in media research.

While the term ‘cloud’ suggests something weightless and intangible, this symposium and workshop grounds AI in its material realities, revealing how digital infrastructures extract natural resources and reshape ecologies and communities. By highlighting these often-invisible networks, Below the Cloud brings attention to the ethical and environmental stakes of contemporary digital technologies. The event brings together 8–10 interdisciplinary scholars from around the world to think collectively about the entanglements of AI, design, and the environment.

The Faculty Seed Grant supports a participatory workshop that will take place the day after the symposium. At the center of the workshop will be a large, global embroidered map that traces key sites within AI’s planetary network—data centers, mineral extraction zones, and subsea cable landing stations, among others. Community participants will be invited to co-embroider the map, adding both existing and newly imagined sites that reflect AI’s presence in their own daily lives. The workshop frames embroidery, with its tactile slowness and care-oriented practice, as a method for reflection and dialogue as well as a critique of the speed, opacity, and abstraction often associated with AI systems.

As the map is collaboratively stitched, the organizers will facilitate conversations about how AI infrastructures impact participants’ local environments and lived experiences. These conversations will be recorded as short films and sound clips to be embedded into the map via QR codes, allowing viewers of the map to engage both visually and aurally with the spatial footprint and human stories of AI’s material presence.

For inquiries about Below the Cloud, please contact Danika Cooper. For more information about the Faculty Seed Grant, please contact BCNM Associate Director Aaron Fai.

Detail from figure mapping the global ecology of AI infrastructure.