Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, 1500-2025
This is the exhibition conceived by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler for Osservatorio's headquarters in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan that maps our technological present, illustrating how power and technology have been intertwined since the 1500s.
“Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, 1500-2025” is the exhibition conceived by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler for Osservatorio’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II headquarters in Milan that maps our technological present, illustrating how power and technology have been intertwined since 1500.
The central element of the exhibition is the Calculating Empires Map Room, a dark environment in which visitors are immersed as if entering a real black box. The work, presented to the public for the first time, is a diptych of maps: one deals with themes of communication and computation, the other explores elements of control and classification.
Calculating Empires is a code of technology and power that shows how the echoes of the empires of past centuries resonate in today’s technology companies. With thousands of individually realised drawings and texts, it illustrates forms of communication, classification, computation and control spanning centuries of conflict, borders and colonisation.
Find out more about the event here.