Where Is the Price
This work exposes the "invisible labor" and "material exploitation" underlying artificial intelligence. Tracing AI's infrastructure from rare metal extraction and silicon refining, through chip manufacturing, data center operations, to electronic waste recycling, it maps a global and uneven division of labor. Through visual maps, sculptural forms, and animation, the project delineates the complex physical network upon which AI—often perceived as purely virtual—is built.
To articulate this central argument—that AI is a deeply material, labor-intensive system embedded in global structures of exploitation—the work employs multiple formal strategies: a north-south oriented cartographic structure, anthropomorphic AI sculptures, and animated flows of extracted materials. This polyphonic visual composition constructs a more transparent language for AI, making visible not only its algorithmic results but also the social and material costs that produce them.
Crucially, while contemporary AI research remains oriented toward technical optimization and scalability, humanistic and artistic engagement with AI is significantly marginalized. This work positions itself within that gap—as a provocation that resists the widespread de-materialized and "friendly" representations of AI in mainstream discourse. It seeks to spark broader reflection on the material and sociopolitical dimensions of AI systems, challenging the dominant abstractions that sidelining questions of labor, social cost, and ethical accountability.
Cartographic Strategy
The world map, as established by colonial geography and Cold War mapping traditions, is never neutral. Oriented horizontally with nations and borders as primary markers, it silently disciplines geographical imagination, encoding hierarchies between North and South, center and periphery. Maps are visual coding systems of power and knowledge that deeply structure how we perceive global reality.
This map employs a "de-urbanization" symbolic strategy: it intentionally removes human settlements and national borders, replacing them with supply chains and material flows. This visual stripping breaks the default geo-political narrative and creates new conditions for spatial perception—forcing viewers to detach from nation-state paradigms and reconsider the overall relations of global space through a different lens.
Within traditional North-South hierarchies—especially in globalization discourse—the Global South has been rendered invisible as a passive "resource provider." Yet in this techno-geological age, when algorithmic technology and geological materials are deeply intertwined, the South emerges as a critical node: hosting data centers, power facilities, and rare earth mineral supply chains that sustain global computing networks. The map's vertical orientation is thus a "cartographic reorientation" that makes visible what tech company narratives of "cloud services" systematically obscure—the material infrastructure and power networks concentrated in the Global South.
This is not merely a design choice. It is an act of counter-mapping that challenges the immaterialized, de-politicized language of technology itself.
