Abstract
This article argues for planetarizing artificial intelligence (AI) by re-situating its development within the terrestrial ecologies that sustain it. While dominant imaginaries frame AI as an immaterial and global technology, its infrastructures depend on geological, energetic, and social processes rooted in specific territories. Drawing on fieldwork in Penco, southern Chile—where a rare-earth mining project has sparked a complex socio-environmental controversy—we present Bajo nuestros pies, a research-creation project that develops a terrestrial cartography of AI. We propose two core operations for grounding AI: diplomacy, understood as cultivating sensitive encounters between heterogeneous temporalities and more-than-human agencies; and relationality, which interweaves geological, industrial, ecological, and social scales into a shared spatial narrative. Through these operations, our cartography exposes how the minerals enabling advanced computational systems emerge from contested ecologies and lived territories. We argue that such methods activateplanetary forms of attention, opening pathways toward a more situated and earth-oriented understanding of AI.
Keywords
Artificial Intelligence; Terrestrial Cartography; Critical Zone; Rare Earth Elements;
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2748
Citation
Tironi, M., and Garretón, M. (2026) Grounding Artificial Intelligence: Terrestrial Cartography and Rare Earths in Chile, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2748
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Grounding Artificial Intelligence: Terrestrial Cartography and Rare Earths in Chile
This article argues for planetarizing artificial intelligence (AI) by re-situating its development within the terrestrial ecologies that sustain it. While dominant imaginaries frame AI as an immaterial and global technology, its infrastructures depend on geological, energetic, and social processes rooted in specific territories. Drawing on fieldwork in Penco, southern Chile—where a rare-earth mining project has sparked a complex socio-environmental controversy—we present Bajo nuestros pies, a research-creation project that develops a terrestrial cartography of AI. We propose two core operations for grounding AI: diplomacy, understood as cultivating sensitive encounters between heterogeneous temporalities and more-than-human agencies; and relationality, which interweaves geological, industrial, ecological, and social scales into a shared spatial narrative. Through these operations, our cartography exposes how the minerals enabling advanced computational systems emerge from contested ecologies and lived territories. We argue that such methods activateplanetary forms of attention, opening pathways toward a more situated and earth-oriented understanding of AI.