Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Power and Technology Since 1500
Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler
Artwork Description:
Calculating Empires is a large-scale installation and interactive website mapping five centuries of technology and power. The physical installation spans more than twenty-four meters in length and three meters in height, featuring thousands of meticulously handcrafted illustrations and texts that took over four years to complete. The work follows the evolving spectrum of communication devices, infrastructures, and computational architectures across centuries, revealing how they shape systems of social control—from bodies to borders, energy to architecture. By offering viewers a rich tapestry of historical parallels through which to read the present, it asks how empire functions today, and how it might be unwound. As a legacy futures project, the work draws on a vast genealogical archive that reframes how we understand technological time. By tracing devices, infrastructures, and computational architectures as they evolve across centuries, it reveals today's AI not as a rupture but as a continuity: the latest expression of much older imperial logics. It is also an exploration of how technical and social systems are fundamentally entwined, and how their entanglement shapes our political reality. The work is built around immersive experience both online and offline. In the physical installation, visitors move along its enormous surface, navigating dense cartographies of connection and mapping their own histories into it. Online, an interactive map with an audio guide invites users to trace individual themes or centuries, zooming across systems to discover unexpected connections between past and present.
Project Collaborators:
Sarah Ciston - Research and design associate Francis Corry, Edward Kang, Will Orr, and Hamsini Sridharan - Research assistants Hannah Franklin and Michael Weinberg - Project management Olivia Solis Villaverde and Milutin Marinovic - Website design, coding, and production
