Alex Saum-Pasucal received a BCNM Faculty Seed Grant for exploring the material realities and environmental impact of digital infrastructures through an immersive, art-driven AI tour. Read about the project below!

BCNM’s 2023-2024 seed grant was instrumental in funding the 2023 iteration of my SF Internet Tour, Internet Tour: Invisible Infrastructures and AI Hallucinations. This initiative successfully bridged technology, infrastructure, environmental issues, and art through an experiential intervention that complemented my forthcoming book, Earthy Algorithms: A Materialist Reading of Digital Literature (SUNY Press). The tour provided a collective opportunity to explore the physical infrastructures underlying digital and AI technologies in the San Francisco Bay Area, exposing their material dependencies and environmental consequences.

In collaboration with artist Mario Santamaría, we conducted a guided tour in October 2023, visiting key AI and Interent infrastructure sites, including data centers and cloud facilities. The itinerary also featured stops at the Hearst Museum of Anthropology and Café Ohlone, where participants engaged in discussions about how digital systems reinforce colonial, economic, and environmental inequalities, while also exploring artistic responses to these issues.

We partnered with BCNM faculty, artists Asma Kazmi and Jill Miller, who co-created a hybrid digital monster, Carbonivore, on display at a storage facility. Additional collaborations included the Indigenous Poetics Lab at the Arts Research Center and Café Ohlone, whose interventions served as meaningful extensions of the tour’s indigenous themes. BCNM funds facilitated the rental of a touring bus and hearing guides, creating an immersive, mobile experience. Hearing guides enabled me, as the tour guide, to communicate directly with participants, enriching their engagement with the sites and discussions.

Beyond being an experiential learning activity, the tour functioned as a critical intervention in discussions surrounding digital infrastructure, informing both my scholarship and creative work. It provided essential first-hand research for Earthy Algorithms, particularly for Chapter 1 and the book’s coda, which analyze how digital infrastructures perpetuate techno-extractivism and digital feudalism—systems where access to digital environments is increasingly controlled by a select few. Observing these infrastructures firsthand and mapping them alongside participants sharpened my understanding of these dynamics.

In partnership with the Arts Research Center, the tour inspired poetic postcards created by poets from the Indigenous Poetics Lab. Additionally, we produced travel journals featuring poems and artistic interventions by Santamaría and myself, extending the tour’s impact into print publications.

Finally, the tour catalyzed broader campus conversations on critical infrastructures. I contributed to various discussions and exhibitions, sharing insights gained from the project. The tour was featured in the More than Meets AI exhibition, curated by Scott Rettberg, Eamon O’Kane, and Jill Miller, and later traveled to Bergen for its 2024
iteration. BCNM’s grant was fundamental to the tour’s initial implementation and paved the way for its continuation in 2024 through additional BCNM funding.