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 Its symbolic and historical references demand context, time and thought.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.
... continue reading