From Cartography to Code: Architectures of Power at the Venice Biennale 2025

At the 19th edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by Carlo Ratti under the theme Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective, the Silver Lion for promising participation was awarded to Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500 – an urgent, masterfully researched and executed data visualisation by Prof. Kate Crawford, a leading scholar of the social and political impacts of artificial intelligence, and Prof. Vladan Joler, an academic and artist whose work blends data investigations, critical cartography and data visualisation. Housed in the Arsenale, this provocative monochromatic cartography unfolds like a networked cosmos, mapping five centuries of imperial and technological power. Built not of stone or steel, but of symbols, systems and structures of control, its spatial logic forms a visual genealogy that frames empire as both political force and technological condition. Exhibition view of Calculating Empires at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia Image: Marco Cappelletti; Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia Spanning two parallel walls, Calculating Empires traces evolving architectures of power. Time runs vertically; systems of control, communication, computation and classification extend horizontally. It visualises the historical structures that underpin contemporary technopolitics, revealing how infrastructures enclose not only time and territory, but thought itself. Visitors self-navigate by century, theme or motif, tracing connections from submarine cables to satellite networks, colonial cartographies to predictive algorithms, encountering a work that continually evolves, its meaning shifting with each act of reading and positionality. The work interrogates the politics of visualisation, revealing how flowcharts, Gantt charts, neural networks and logic gates, far from neutral, shape how knowledge is produced and power, organised. By appropriating these forms, Crawford and Joler turn diagrammatic language into both critique and methodology. In a world of speed and simplification, Calculating Empires resists the bite-sized logic of platforms and elicits a deliberate act of slow reading that insists on friction, opacity and reflection. Its symbolic and historical references demand context, time and thought. In the age of algorithmic governance, it invites us to reconsider whose histories power the systems we now call progress. Calculating Empires was awarded the Silver Lion for promising participation at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia Image: Marco Cappelletti; Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia The display glacially traces technological patterns of colonialism, militarisation, automation and enclosure since 1500 Image: Luca Capuano; Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia In conversation with STIR, we discussed the politics of mapping, the aesthetics of control and why slowing down and re-seeing is more urgent than ever. Ayesha Adonais: You describe this work as a ‘visual genealogy’. Why did you choose the diagrammatic form, and what did it allow you to reveal that other formats might not have? Kate Crawford: Every one of those diagrams is doing a form of ideological work. One of the things that has been core to the way Vladan and I have worked together for eight-plus years is thinking about the politics of diagrams – as a political form and a type of political intervention. Our earlier work, Anatomy of an AI System, mapped the single Amazon Echo and the planetary scale of extraction in space. That was really spatial [in nature]. We realised we always wanted to do a temporal version, a diagram about time. Really expanding the idea of a simple timeline to create a deep, diagrammatic mapping of politics and power, constructed in the form of a diagram, which we see as inherently political. Vladan Joler: My obsession with that form developed over the last 15 years. It began with a small investigation of a single internet packet, which gradually grew in complexity, evolving into large-scale infrastructures, data flows and power relations. I fell in love with the form because it offers possibilities that other forms do not; it’s a non-linear structure that allows people to explore, read and engage. There is no cartography without the cryptographic bias of the person creating it. I struggled with creating a space that isn’t 100 per cent accurate; it can’t be, because you're always outside the box trying to see inside. Eventually, I embraced both the good and bad sides of the medium. Drawing the map and making those relations leads you to another one. Those processes are never separate. They always go together. Research and mapping, I love it. Calculating Empires unfolds like a networked cosmos, mapping five centuries of imperial and technological power Image: Luca Capuano; Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia Ayesha: You reference visual formats like Venn diagrams, Gantt charts and logic gates, forms often seen as neutral, but which you frame as politically embedded. How did you approach using or subverting these tools when developing Calculating Empires? Vladan: Maps usually come from a position of power. They present themselves as, "look at this," "this is my kingdom," "this is my organisational chart" and you should obey this graph as some kind of ultimate truth. Once you start to engage with those visual forms of data representation, you understand that there are numerous choices that you can make that influence how people perceive those forms. I think about it from the perspective of appropriating a military technology, because maps are a form of military technology. By appropriating something that is supposed to belong to power, you can then use it to critique that power. The map itself is a space of classification. You're constantly engaging in a categorisation of everything, and at the same time doing a critique of classification. There's an internal irony in that process. Ayesha: Architecture appears throughout Calculating Empires, from cartographic tools to prisons, schools and borders. How did you approach architecture as a system of control and classification within the work, and what role does it play in your visual narrative of empire? Kate: The first important issue in the way we think about architecture is how we approach the whole project in terms of a genealogy, very much in a Foucauldian sense. We're resisting the idea that it's great men in history who take us from one step to the next, but instead, we're tracing lines of descent, rupture and confluence. We always considered architecture to be more than just buildings, and as the physical instantiation of ideologies, from Bentham's Panopticon to colonial survey systems to those of Haussmann and Paris. The built environment has long been used to spatialise power, to control the flow of communities, to sort and to discipline bodies and to enact hierarchies. Architecture is not a backdrop; it's an active agent in how societies are constructed. We were interested in showing how imperial power calcifies through construction: how prisons themselves somewhat echo the logic of data centres, and how educational institutions reproduce colonial visions through the way infrastructure is organised. In this sense, architecture can be a classifier, a container and a militarised event. Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler reviewing Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500 Image: Patrick Toomey Neri Architecture is not a backdrop; it's an active agent in how societies are constructed. It can be a classifier, a container and a militarised event. Ayesha: The visual structure of Calculating Empires is both detailed and navigable. How did you think about accessibility in designing the iconography, and was complexity part of an intentional strategy to counter reductionism in how Empire is typically visualised? Vladan: This map pushes many limits, human scale and cognitive overload. We struggled to keep ourselves inside a human-scale of readability and complexity because the number of topics and relations that we are exploring is immense. We always try not to lose the potential visitor, knowing that we can go down many rabbit holes until infinity. We achieve this by combining factual details, critical reflections, open forms of illustration and diagrammatic spaces that leave room for interpretation. Kate: When thinking about empire, we wanted to go beyond surface representations, flags, dates and borders to create our own symbolic set of meanings that lead into a more political story. That meant developing our own visual language: iconography that is meticulous and consistent. If I’m looking at that symbol, it means this is a court case. That symbol means it’s a book. [It is] a form of iconography that is both navigation and argumentation, not just guiding the viewer, but encoding a politics of knowledge developed over five years. You’ve raised something absolutely at the heart of this: for us, complexity is not a bug; it’s a feature. Part of the problem of our time is the seduction of simplicity: “Give me the explainer version.” As a species, we’re training ourselves out of the ability to contend with complexity. Yet, these are some of the most complex systems: geopolitics, climate change and AI. If we’re unable to handle complexity, we will never address these challenges. The project emerged from expanding the idea of a simple timeline into a deep, diagrammatic mapping of politics and power, constructed in the form of a diagram Image: Courtesy of Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler The complex and interconnected visualisations include factual details, critical reflections, open forms of illustration and diagrammatic spaces that leave room for interpretation Image: Courtesy of Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler Ayesha: You describe Calculating Empires as open-ended. What possibilities do you see for its future? Kate: Very few people realise it's changing. Every time it's staged, it's a little bit different. At its premiere in Milan, attendees were given handmade volumes, pens and pencils, allowing them to write back to history. History is open and incomplete. We wanted people to say, “This happened in my town,” or “This was my family's experience.” We read the notes afterwards, and people really took to it. In Venice, we have location-specific additions, like the Venetian Arsenale. It evolves. Its openness is a critical strength; it invites dialogue, contestation and different perspectives. Do you start from the 1500s and move forward? Or track a theme diagonally? It's infinitely re-readable. Vladan: Most people are obsessed with the last centimetre of the map. What's next? 2026? But for me, the more interesting question is: can it evolve down? Can we change the readings of the 16th or 17th centuries? The scale is so large that transforming it is a huge task. Just turning it into essays would take hundreds of hours. But we want to move toward a book. Each of the subsections in the 24m long display invite slow-reading, much in contrast to our age of bite-sized, condensed information Image: Courtesy of Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler Kate: We're telling you first, you get the story. We’re working on this to develop it into a book.One of the things I liked about being at the Venice Biennale was that the theme was about intelligence: artificial and collective. We were surrounded by robots and techno-utopian imaginaries. We were happy to offer something historical and critical. AI is often seen as ahistorical, perfect and beyond human. Our hope is that people seeing this work will be connected to a very different set of stories and histories. The 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia is open to the public from May 10 to November 23, 2025. Follow STIR’s coverage of Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 (Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective) as we traverse the most radical pavilions and projects at this year’s showcase in Venice.