Calculating Empires: The Intersection of AI and Art

Season 4: Episode 7

On November 23rd at Fondazione Prada in Milan, an exhibition opened, titled “Calculating Empires.” Its main gallery houses a floor to ceiling, immersive diagrammatic map, white text on a black background, which aims to contextualize the current explosion of AI by asking how did we get here?

The answer, when you start to follow the map's intricate through lines, is over the course of 500 years of human history, the technologies of communication and computation, classification and control. The history of technology is the history of empire. The history of empire is the history of us. In today’s episode, the curators Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler join to discuss this map from conception to exhibition, as well as what it can teach us about history, and the future.

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