Calculating Empires is a large-scale research visualisation and physical installation exploring how technical and social structures co-evolved over five centuries.
How can we understand the pervasive power of technology in this moment in history and its role in our lives? And what are the relationships between technology and systems of control, from policing, to borders, to education, to architecture? Calculating Empires is a large-scale installation that traces the histories, practices, and politics of technology since 1500.
The objective is to give people a different way of seeing the current technological moment with historical depth: our era is the result of centuries of industrialization, imperialism, scientific revolutions, political revolts, and capitalist extraction. Calculating Empires contextualises some of these major shifts into an intricate visual theory that depicts the myriad ways that power and technology have been intertwined over five centuries.
We have designed the map as a diptych. Each of the two maps has a central theme: one addresses Communication and Computation, the other is about Control and Classification. Taken together, these four sections form a large scale map
Prof. Kate Crawford is a leading scholar of the impacts of artificial intelligence. She is a research professor at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles, a senior principal researcher at MSR New York, and was the inaugural chair of AI and Justice at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. Her book Atlas of AI won multiple awards, was named a book of the year by Science and the Financial Times, and is translated into 12 languages. She leads the Knowing Machines Project, an international research collaboration studying the foundations of AI. Her artworks and visualisations have been widely exhibited, are in the permanent collections of MoMA, the V&A Museum, Ars Electronica, and the Design Museum, and have been recognized with the Aryton Prize. Kate was named by Time Magazine’s TIME100 as one of the most influential people in AI.
Prof. Vladan Joler is an academic, researcher, and artist whose work blends data investigations, critical cartography, investigative journalism, and data visualisation. He is SHARE Foundation co-founder and professor at the New Media Department of the University of Novi Sad. Vladan Joler's work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the V&A Museum, and the Design Museum in London, and also in the permanent exhibition of the Ars Electronica Center. His work has been exhibited in more than a hundred international exhibitions worldwide.
