Below the Cloud
Below the Cloud is a symposium and participatory workshop that examines the environmental and social infrastructures of artificial intelligence, with particular attention to water and the communities and ecologies transformed by AI’s material demands. Challenging the notion of the “cloud” as weightless and immaterial, the project makes visible the extraction, energy, water, mineral, and infrastructural networks that sustain contemporary digital technologies.
The project brings together an interdisciplinary symposium of scholars working across AI, design, landscape, and environmental studies, followed by a participatory community workshop. At the center of the workshop is a large embroidered map tracing AI’s planetary infrastructure—including data centers, mineral extraction sites, and subsea cable landing stations. Participants will collectively stitch the map, adding sites that reflect their own experiences and encounters with AI. Embroidery’s tactile, slow, and care-oriented practice offers a deliberate counterpoint to the speed, abstraction, and opacity of digital systems, creating a space for reflection, dialogue, and collective knowledge-making.
Wednesday, January 27: Symposium Kick-off Keynote Lecture, 112 Auditorium, Bauer-Wurster Hall
Thursday, January 28: Symposium All-Day Event, 10am - 4pm, Gallery, Bauer Wurster Hall (sponsored by Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, Farrand Public Education Grant)
Friday, January 29: Participatory, Community Workshop, 10 am - 2pm, BCNM Commons, Grimes Engineering Center (sponsored by BCNM Seed Grant)
About Danika Cooper
Danika Cooper is associate professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarship and applied research focus on the geopolitics of scarcity, alternative water ontologies, and resilient spatial design for global aridlands.
Arid environments have historically been under-theorized within design disciplines, frequently subjected to technocratic interventions—such as large-scale hydraulic import infrastructure—that exacerbate long-term aridification and microclimatic degradation. Cooper’s work interrogates how 19th-century Euro-Western environmental ideologies continue to shape modern development, policy, and resource exploitation in drylands. In response, her research advocates for "designing with aridity” by leveraging local thermodynamic and hydrological processes rather than attempting to forcefully transform dry ecologies. Bridging critical spatial theory with regional environmental performance, Cooper's recent work translates dryland ecological science into actionable strategies for complex infrastructure in sensitive environments. She investigates how site-scale landform manipulation, episodic stormwater capture, and localized microclimate design can mitigate thermal stress and reduce water vulnerabilities in high-density development contexts.
About Victoria Mohr
Victoria Mohr is a Chilean designer, researcher, and educator whose work interrogates the material and spatial consequences of infrastructure on the ground —and on the communities that inhabit it. Drawing on critical cartography, spatial analysis, and community-engaged design, she traces material flows that resist conventional representation: chemicals moving through soil, air, and water and the infrastructure of media systems producing geochemical transformations at planetary scale. Her practice operates at the intersection of environmental justice, critical visualization, and spatial investigation — examining how molecular-scale processes become legible as social, geopolitical, and ecological conditions.
She is currently pursuing a PhD at MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning, with a fellowship at the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. From 2023–2025, she was Designer-in-Residence at UC Berkeley's Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning. She holds an MLA from the University of California, Berkeley and a BArch from Universidad Finis Terrae, Chile.
Accessibility
BCNM events are free and open to the public. This event will be held in-person, on the UC Berkeley campus. We strive to meet all access and accommodation needs. Please contact (raphaelcohen [at] berkeley.edu) with requests or questions.
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