Calculating Empires / Kate Crawford (AU), Vladan Joler (RS), photo: Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler (2023)
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Calculating Empires

Kate Crawford (AU), Vladan Joler (RS)

Calculating Empires is a large-scale research visualization and physical installation exploring how technical and social structures co-evolved over five centuries. It traces technological patterns of colonialism, militarization, automation, and enclosure since 1500 to show how these forces still subjugate and how they might be unwound.

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.

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Calculating Empires centers on four themes: communication, computation, classification and control. The vertical axis represents time, while the horizontal axis shows systems: from algorithms to architecture, bodies to borders.

The objective is to give people a different way of seeing the current technological moment with historical depth. Calculating Empires contextualizes centuries of industrialization, imperialism, and capitalist extraction into an intricate visual manifesto in order to imagine different kinds of futures.

Bios

  • Photo: Cath Muscat

    Kate Crawford

    AU

    Kate Crawford is an internationally leading scholar of artificial intelligence. She is a professor at USC, a senior principal researcher at MSR-NY, and was the inaugural chair of AI and Justice at the Ecole Normale Superieure. Her award-winning book Atlas of AI has been translated into twelve languages. She leads the Knowing Machines Project, which studies the foundations of AI. Her artworks have been acquired by museums such as MoMA and the V&A, and received the Aryton Prize.

  • Vladan Joler

    RS

    Prof. Dr. Vladan Joler is an academic, researcher and artist whose work blends data investigations, critical cartography, investigative journalism and data visualization. He is a SHARE Foundation co-founder and professor at the New Media Department of the University of Novi Sad. Vladan Joler’s work features in the permanent collections of MoMA, the V&A Museum and the Design Museum in London, and also in the permanent exhibition of the Ars Electronica Center.

Credits

The Sloan Foundation, as part of the Knowing Machines Project (https://knowingmachines.org) and The Robert Bosch Academy (https://www.robertboschacademy.de/)
Presented in the context of the STARTS Ec(h)o project. STARTS Ec(h)o is funded by the European Union under Grant Agreement No. 101135691.