![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Chatonsky_Hidden-Layers_by-Minoosh-Zomorodinia-2560-1024x585.jpg\")
Gr\u00e9gory Chatonsky\u2019s Readonlymemories VI (video) and Rear Objects (foreground) featured in the Hidden Layers exhibition, pair neural-network-processed cinematic imagery with 3D-printed \u201cfossils\u201d drawn from machine memory.<\/p>\nBlue-lit screens rise and tilt across the floor of UC Berkeley\u2019s Worth Ryder Art Gallery. At their center, a digital river winds through an imagined watershed. Stools surround them, each representing a different water regime, or system for governing and allocating water \u2014 from Indigenous stewardship to colonial extraction and AI-driven optimization.<\/p>\n
Sit on a stool marked \u201cKinship,\u201d and the dams and large-scale irrigation infrastructure disappear. Sit on the \u201cWater Projects\u201d stool, where the state diverts as much water as it can, and the river shrinks as dams rise. Two stools offer competing visions of AI \u2014 one that maximizes economic output and another that prioritizes long-term ecological survival. When two or more people sit stools at the same time, the regimes interact. In some combinations, the system may prosper for a time; in others, it may reach \u201cday zero,\u201d when drought or depleted groundwater leave the watershed unable to meet competing demands.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the \u2018Tech Regime,\u2019 there\u2019s going to be a whole bunch of data centers that pop up,\u201d said Greg Niemeyer, a Berkeley professor of media innovation and creator of the installation, titled Water Council. \u201cThe salmon go away and the data centers pop up, and you\u2019re like, \u2018Well, maybe we didn\u2019t want all that. Maybe we should just get off this chair now.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Gr\u00e9gory Chatonsky\u2019s Readonlymemories VI (video) and Rear Objects (foreground) featured in the Hidden Layers exhibition, pair neural-network-processed cinematic imagery with 3D-printed \u201cfossils\u201d drawn from machine memory.<\/p>\n
Minoosh Zomorodinia<\/p>\n
Niemeyer\u2019s installation is part of Hidden Layers: AI Infrastructures and Hallucinations<\/a>, a group exhibition featuring work by international artists and researchers working at the intersection of contemporary art and machine learning. Its Berkeley contributors include professors Alex Saum-Pascual of Spanish and Portuguese, Ga\u0161per Begu\u0161 of linguistics, and Asma Kazmi and Jill Miller of art practice, as well as researcher Nina Begu\u0161. Together, their works explore AI\u2019s hidden costs and consequences \u2014 from the water, energy and labor that make it possible to the biases and fabrications, or \u201challucinations,\u201d its models can produce. The exhibition was curated by Antonio Somaini, a professor at Universit\u00e9 Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, with Hannes Bajohr, an assistant professor in Berkeley\u2019s Department of German; Sonja Thiel, a Ph.D. student in the department; and Elena Yu, manager of the Worth Ryder Art Gallery.<\/p>\n Colin Baxter via Flickr<\/a><\/p>\n Niemeyer has spent much of his career making invisible systems visible. After joining Berkeley\u2019s Department of Art Practice in 2001 and then co-founding the Berkeley Center for New Media, he took on all sorts of projects that translated data into sensory experiences. He built air-quality sensors to create an alternate-reality game<\/a> that helped Los Angeles high school students investigate pollution in their own neighborhood. And he turned tomato-ripening gases into live musical compositions<\/a>, transforming plant metabolism into a playful, evolving sound environment. He also helped reconstruct the deep gongs of the world\u2019s largest bell, the 200-ton Kremlin Tsar Bell<\/a>, which cracked during a 1737 fire before it could ever ring.<\/p>\n Data on its own, says Niemeyer, can feel abstract and detached from reality; a spreadsheet of river flow rates or carbon dioxide levels may not immediately move us. But when those numbers are translated into art, that can help us feel what they mean.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you spend time with the data, you can make it really beautiful,\u201d said Niemeyer. \u201cYou can look at data with a lot of compassion and say, \u2018How many souls were affected by that data?\u2019 We\u2019re looking at how data represents the life of a creature, the life of a river. When we give it our attention, it becomes alive again.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In 2023, data took on a whole new meaning for the artist. Instead of finding the lives and stories embedded in data, he suddenly became a set of numbers himself \u2014 one that charted an uncertain future.<\/p>\n \u2018You have six months to live. How do you want to spend it?\u2019<\/p>\n It started with a cough he couldn\u2019t kick. Walking across campus to his office in Dwinelle Annex Hall left him weak. He forgot what it felt like to take a deep breath.\u00a0<\/p>\n At the hospital at UC San Francisco, Niemeyer stared at his X-ray in disbelief. Dark spots dotted his lungs. Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, the doctor called it. Or, in simpler terms: His lungs were progressively failing, and no one knew why. Once soft and spongy, they\u2019d become mottled and scarred. In six months, they would stiffen to the point where breathing became impossible.\u00a0<\/p>\n He remembers the sharp urgency of the news: \u201cIt was one of those moments where the doctor says, \u2018You have six months to live. How do you want to spend it?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n There was one option. It could save his life, but it was risky and required a lot of luck: a double-lung transplant. The procedure was rare, accounting for just 5% of all transplants in the U.S. And they were notoriously hard to come by \u2014 donor lungs would have to be viable, the right size and blood type, and compatible with Niemeyer\u2019s antibodies. Even then, the threat of rejection would be greatest in the first months after surgery and would never entirely disappear.\u00a0<\/p>\n I realized that water is not an object at all, but a circulation. And in my case, that circulation was healing. \u2026 It became a passage to a whole new way of life.<\/p>\n Not one to balk at the unknown, Niemeyer knew his decision.<\/p>\n \u201cOf course, my wife and I were like, \u2018Absolutely, we want to do this,\u2019\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n At each hospital visit, doctors would tell Niemeyer how much lung capacity he had lost: 30%, then 40%, 50%, 60%, 70%. He felt like an unwitting actor trapped inside someone else\u2019s tragedy. He began to lose hope.<\/p>\n \u201cI figured I was probably going to die,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n But then, in his fourth month of waiting \u2014 when his lung capacity had fallen to 30% \u2014 UCSF called. An organ donor had just died whose healthy lungs, remarkably, were a match. With mere hours to begin the transplant, Niemeyer and his wife raced to the hospital.\u00a0<\/p>\n Twelve hours later, he woke up from surgery.\u00a0The operation went well, the doctors told him. His new lungs were connecting to his body. Now he just had to recover, which would include about a year of intense, round-the-clock medical monitoring and physical therapy.<\/p>\n Lying in his hospital bed, Niemeyer looked down and \u201csaw what recovery meant.\u201d Tubes as thick as garden hoses protruded from his chest \u2014 four in all \u2014 draining pleural fluid from the space around his new lungs. The tubes emptied into two clear plastic canisters, each the size of a half-gallon milk jug. They would remain in place for a week, carrying several gallons of fluid out of his body.\u00a0<\/p>\n Watching them fill, he began to see his body differently. It wasn\u2019t a closed system like he\u2019d thought of it, but a vessel \u2014 one sustained by and dependent on the movement of water.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMy relationship to water changed radically,\u201d he said. \u201cI realized that water is not an object at all, but a circulation. And in my case, that circulation was healing. \u2026 It became a passage to a whole new way of life.\u201d<\/p>\n Water as life\u00a0<\/p>\n In the three years since his lung transplant, Niemeyer has found a renewed sense of purpose in his artwork, with water and the forces that disrupt its circulation \u2014 pollution, extraction, drought and flooding \u2014 driving all that he creates.<\/p>\n \u201cThe flow of water is life\u2019s enabling medium,\u201d he said at an event for the Hidden Layers exhibition earlier this month. \u201cIt comes before infrastructure, before law, before markets. And not just we but every living thing we know depends on it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t lose water because it disappears,\u201d he continued. \u201cWe lose water because we misunderstand what water really is.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Courtesy of Greg Niemeyer<\/p>\n In addition to Water Council, Niemeyer has used art, public installations and community-based research to examine water as both a source of life and a resource shaped by power. In Hidden Currencies \u2014 first displayed at Swissnex in San Francisco, and its later Berkeley iteration, Liquid Memory, at the Worth Ryder Art Gallery \u2014 he made the vast water footprint of AI server farms tangible, drawing attention to a cost of digital life that often remains out of sight.<\/p>\n His other projects include Synchronicity<\/a>, which in 2024 lit San Francisco\u2019s Salesforce Tower with regional watershed and climate data; community-driven mapping and research on water insecurity in Detroit<\/a> and displacement linked to Kenya\u2019s Thwake Dam<\/a>; and Water Futures,<\/a> a 2026 San Francisco exhibition that brought together stories of water crisis and resistance from Kenya, Oaxaca, Michigan and California.<\/p>\n Niemeyer has also turned his attention to ocean systems. For visual artist and singer-songwriter Jewel, he and NASA scientist Chelle Gentemann helped to create Heart of the Ocean, an eight-foot kinetic sculpture for Jewel\u2019s solo exhibition Matriclysm: An Archaeology of Connections Lost<\/a> in Venice. Drawing on real-time data \u2014 including wave height, salinity, sea temperature and currents \u2014 the sculpture\u2019s soundscape takes visitors on an immersive sonic dive to the deepest part of the Atlantic.<\/p>\n Aphrah Brokaw<\/p>\n At the start of the journey, viewers hear calm water and a light wind. The slow, nine-minute descent ends 27,493 feet below the surface at Milwaukee Deep, amid the sounds of the ocean\u2019s low pulse and the rumble of shifting tectonic plates. The ascent is quicker, almost dizzying. Near the surface, sounds shaped by changes in temperature, salinity and pressure begin like angels singing, then turn ominous, evoking the mythological Sirens whose songs lured sailors toward danger.<\/p>\n \u201cEverything turns to high unpredictability, to a kind of an alarm,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s the Sirens of the ocean crying out, saying things are not the way they used to be, things are changing.\u201d<\/p>\n Choosing a water future<\/p>\n After his transplant, Niemeyer learned that he has a genetic disorder that can accelerate cellular aging and cause progressive scarring in the lungs. It is one more reminder, he says, that the future is not guaranteed. Uncertainty has become central to the questions he explores in his work. Like a body, a watershed depends on circulation. It can be strained by extraction, pollution and neglect; it can also be sustained by the choices people make together.<\/p>\n Back at the Worth Ryder Art Gallery, Water Council turns that premise into an invitation \u2014 and a warning. By choosing where to sit, visitors help determine whether the imagined watershed is pushed toward \u201cday zero\u201d or given a chance to endure.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s entirely possible that AI could open the door to more equitable and sustainable ways of managing water,\u201d Niemeyer said. \u201cBut our competitive instincts often pull us the other way \u2014 toward faster extraction. Water justice may be the most hopeful outcome, but it isn\u2019t the most likely.\u201d<\/p>\n Niemeyer will join the panel discussion, \u201cWater and AI: What AI Can Learn From Water,\u201d<\/a> on Thursday, Oct. 1, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at the Worth Ryder Art Gallery. The event, sponsored by the UC Berkeley Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative<\/a>, is free and open to the public.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Kremlin-Tsar-Bell_photo-by-Colin-Baxter-via-Flickr-2000-1-819x1024.jpg\")
Though the massive Kremlin Tsar Bell cracked in 1737 without ever being rung, Niemeyer and his research collaborators used acoustic modeling to digitally simulate its sound in 2016.<\/p>\n![\"Greg](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Hidden-Currencies-show_courtesy-of-Greg-Niemeyer-2560-1024x832.jpg\")
Niemeyer explains a data visualization mapping river dynamics to gallery visitors at the Hidden Currencies exhibition in 2026.<\/p>\n![\"Greg](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/NiemeyerJewelGentemann-2560-1024x585.jpg\")
For visual artist and singer-songwriter Jewel (center), Niemeyer (left) and NASA scientist Chelle Gentemann (right) helped to create Heart of the Ocean. Drawing on real-time data \u2014 including wave height, salinity, sea temperature and currents \u2014 the sculpture\u2019s soundscape takes visitors on an immersive dive to the deepest part of the Atlantic.<\/p>\n