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.
The Blue Dot Sessions, “Three Stories,” “Lahaina"
Knowing Machines Podcast
Episode 7: “Calculating Empires”
Tamar: Here, Kate, text me a photo.
Kate: I'm doing. I'm going to send it to you right now.
Tamar: Wow. Oh, wow.
Kate: This is a visual manifesto about the fact that empires have always used technology to centralize power, and we are seeing that pattern over and over again in different ways and different locations with different communities. But that's the argument that we're making.
Tamar: From the Engelberg Center on Innovation, Law and Policy at NYU School of Law and USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. This is Knowing Machines, a podcast and research project about how we train AI systems to interpret the world. Supported by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation. I'm your host, Tamar Avishai.
Tamar: On November 23rd at Fondazione Prada in Milan, an exhibition opened. It was called Calculating Empires and it's comprised of, among many things, display cases of deconstructed devices like an Amazon Echo or the colorful minerals that were extracted to create their parts. And the exhibition's main course, so to speak, is 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, [00:02:00] the history of technology is the history of empire. The history of empire is the history of us. And here, within multiple maps that are over 12m long, we have a visual genealogy of us, of these systems of power, how they end up in your kitchen playing music, and a road map of where we might go in the future to discuss this complicated, fascinating, and kind of endless work. I spoke with the exhibition's curators, Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler. We explored where the exhibition sits at the intersection of art and AI, and at both the history of technology and art history. And we talked about what all of these histories can teach us, what we can learn from this sublime bird's eye view. Here's my conversation with Kate and Vladan.
________________
Tamar: So Vladan and Kate, thank you so much for joining me today. I have to say that as an art historian, I'm absolutely dying to learn about this project. So, Vladan, let's start with you. What is calculating empires?
Vladan: Well, I'm getting the hardest question. Okay. Calculating empires is basically a project and investigation or research that we did for the past, let's say, four years of really, really intense deep dive into history of communication, classification, computation and control. So basically it's a large scale map, maybe large scale. It's maybe not enough to say. So it's like 24. By three metres. Big. It's huge. Yeah, yeah. [00:04:00] The image of of, uh. Yeah. We collaborate on this for the last four years. We work together with, uh, many different fantastic people from, from different fields of, of science, of art, and basically as a part of knowing machine projects. So we had like premiere in Milano a few days ago, basically when we show this big map for the first time. Together with some of the projects that we did in the past, including anatomy of an AI system and other maps and investigations that we were doing together.
Kate: Yeah, I mean, it's been a gigantic project. It really feels like we've traversed through the 500 years that this map, you know, addresses in a very sort of deep and all encompassing way. The motivation for this project really comes from a frustration with the way that our contemporary moment, and particularly technologies like artificial intelligence, are being analyzed and discussed and presented publicly, often as something that is incredibly new and futuristic and the stuff of science fiction almost beyond human comprehension, without any any analysis or connection with the deep histories that brought us here. And Vlada and I, you know, were discussing years ago how the only way to really contend with the complexities of everyday technologies is to look at the histories, to really engage with the fact that the only way that you can have these gigantic, highly powerful, extremely profitable technology [00:06:00] companies is that they have built on centuries of extraction, of enclosure, of forms of technologies that centralize power. So that really proposed to us a big project, which is to look at how power and technology have been entwined for five centuries. I mean, honestly, it's it's almost a beyond human kind of scale to be contending with. And so I don't think it's a coincidence that this, you know, really kicked off for us in a big way. Uh, you know, at the start of the pandemic where, you know, everyone's grounded, where at home, no one's traveling, you know, we're basically locked down, and time is moving differently. Uh, you could really lose yourself in a project like this. You could really commit to saying, right, this month, I'm just looking at what was happening in the 1750s, you know, and that's something that, uh, doesn't normally happen, uh, in my life. Uh, so this, this project, which is about time also, I think, benefited from the fact that time itself flowed differently during those pandemic years.
Tamar: So as a viewer coming up to it, how is this map meant to be engaged with?
Vladan: So basically you are immersed into one environment, you know, so because the scale of the map is so big, so you're surrounded by the map and and we are with this map, we are giving more some kind of mosaic of, of different technologies, events, also philosophical ideas in which you basically dive into. And so we didn't want to connect all the events and technologies, you know, together. But we are leaving this to, to the viewer to, to play with. So we see this map more [00:08:00] as some kind of navigational chart that people can use however they want basically. So we are not offering some kind of, you know, meaning of life or meaning of history. We are basically giving, uh, some kind of visual and navigational tool for others to, to maybe find some answers for themselves, to try to understand this like immense complexity of, of of the presence that we live in because we, we basically I think even the, the point of this kind of new companies, technological companies and magnets, it is about to obfuscate the, you know, what is really going on behind their like shiny interfaces. And this is something that we started doing with anatomy of an AI system, kind of to maybe bring some another perspective on how to read the shiny interfaces and power that is behind those companies. And then with this map, we wanted to give this kind of another, uh, perspective is to how to to read with some kind of deep historical understanding, the power relations that are kind of appearing time to time as a patterns in the history. So we are trying to to connect all of those things together. But but still idea is to have some kind of open, uh, game not not to be closed in, in some kind of, like, deterministic. You know, historical view because any kind of attempt to, to, to write a history, it's basically wrong because we have. But here we wanted just to give toolbox or playgrounds for others to make their own conclusions.
Tamar: So it sounds kind of like the intersection of a map and a Mark Rothko.
Kate: I love that.
Tamar: I found that especially when describing something visual for audio [00:10:00] description is really, really helpful. So if I were to walk up to it and just completely, you know, kind of submerge myself, well, first of all, how close can I get to it?
Kate: Really close. You can go right up to it. You can almost touch it with your nose.
Tamar: Okay. And so if I'm standing almost nose distance away from one segment of it, what am I reading? What am I looking at?
Kate: Mhm.
Kate: So let's let's pick a moment of the map. Uh you can walk up to it and you'll see these intricate illustrations that are interwoven with short texts that are telling you stories, events and ideas that happened in a moment in time. So you might zoom in to get really close and read a story about how museums started, you know, collecting various objects from indigenous communities around the world, uh, in the late 1700s, early 1800s. And then you can tilt your head up and see how those collections started to move into data collections, and how that philosophy of capturing valuable objects and histories starts to become training data sets for artificial intelligence. That that same idea of taking from others in order to enrich yourself becomes this kind of foundational concept for, uh, technology companies. So it's, you know, that's literally just in one tilt of the head that you can start in one century and then look up from, you know, the 1750s, and now you're in, you know, the, the 20 tens. And you see these, these patterns and these kinds of resonances in the way that, you know, Mark Twain certainly rhymes. And, you know, this is a map that is a collection of rhymes, [00:12:00] rhymes and rhythms that you see rolling across centuries.
Vladan: Well, what I really like about this format, especially about the large, large, large scale maps, is basically that you are reading it with your body. You know you need to move around, you need to interact in some other way. And you are doing with, uh, when you are sitting in front of the computer and zooming in and zooming out with your, you know, mouse. So this is great because you can walk around, you can you can zoom in and zoom out. And for me, those spaces are kind of some kind of non linear storytelling devices, you know. So and every human being uh, that have that experience will read this map on their own way. So for example if you are exposed to, you know, classical geographical map, you are never reading, you know the name of each village one by one, but you are basically trying to navigate and to find the answer to what you are looking for, you know, and also what you are looking for depends on your previous knowledge on some section or some, you know, like information that you already had. So this is what I really like. It's basically personal in a way that every, uh, visitor will have its own path, its own like interest, and navigate this map on its own way. So there is no one story. It's some kind of non-linear and dimensional storytelling device.
Kate: And, you know, there are over 40,000 nodes, illustrations and stories in this enormous 24 meter map. So there are a lot of stories that you can choose from. But, you know, of course, Vladan and I have been working together for, gosh, over seven years now, and we're deeply immersed in how this type of mapping, [00:14:00] this type of critical cartography, if you will, is always itself making a political argument. All maps are political, all maps come with a viewpoint, and we are deeply attuned to the fact that this map is big enough that you can let yourself explore and discover new periods of time and new stories that you weren't familiar with. But you're also aware that. We are making an argument here that this is also a visual manifesto about the fact that empires have always used technology to centralize power, and we are seeing that pattern over and over again in different ways and different locations with different communities. But that's the argument that we're making. And it has this kind of texture of exploration. But you feel the mapmakers as well. It's you know, we're not claiming that this is a neutral map or a completely open map. This is Vladan and Kate really diving deep into history to see these kinds of problematic uses of technology for control, for classification of humans and the environment. Um, and the way that communication and computation technologies have been deeply interwoven into forms of social control and power.
Vladan: We also wanted to make this map more open, in a sense to allow other people to contribute to the map. So we created some kind of big book. It's more like a collection of maps, printed parts of the maps, when people can add their own content. So with each iteration of of this exhibition of the map will evolve and include the reflections from the previous exhibition. So it's some kind of like open ended development of, of of this [00:16:00] space and map itself
Tamar: I was going to say, you know, this idea of using your body to experience it and this idea of kind of the rhythm of history, but also the rhythm of your body, it sounds quite a bit more like a Pollock than a Rothko map.
Vladan: Yeah. I also wanted to make the same, like, uh, comment. When you say Rothko, I was thinking it's more Pollock, but...
Kate: One of the things I loved about the process of installing this work over a couple of weeks, it was a long installation, was it? We'd get to see it late at night when we'd been working all day and the lights were off and it would just quietly glow like you were looking at a constellation. It has this just thousands and thousands of points of light. Um, it was almost one of my favorite ways of looking at it in an almost completely dark space.
Tamar: So I had an idea in my head of what this map looked like. And then, Kate, you showed me some pictures and it was it was almost right. I think I pictured kind of a handwritten, almost like it was being animated right in front of you in real time, um, 18th century kind of illuminated map. And what it is, is a little bit more kind of schematic. And we'll link to pictures in the show notes. Um, but what I love here, when I look at images from the exhibition, is that you have these mundane objects that are almost kind of exposed for their beauty in a way, you know, so you have this map and then you also have these boxes like these, these exhibition display cases. And so one of them that I'm looking at right now has a deconstructed Alexa in it, or I guess I should say a deconstructed echo, you know, because it's not a person, it's a thing. And I recognize it as an echo from the holes in its cylindrical speaker. And I'm looking at how it's been laid out in this display case. And it's really beautiful. You know, you [00:18:00] can really find a kind of pattern to it. You take all these pieces and you lay it out very aesthetically in a very aesthetically pleasing way. And so suddenly this thing that I look at all the time, you know, that I use to listen to Tom petty as I'm making dinner and time the mac and cheese in the evenings, um, I'm seeing how beautiful it can be. And it's the same thing with the different elements that are required. The actual physical elements.
Tamar: You talk about extraction, and then you look at these elements individually, and they're really beautiful. They're colorful, and those colors are unexpected. And that's just what art can do. That's what exhibition can do, where you're looking at something that otherwise is just a material. And suddenly when it's put in this kind of space and when it's given this kind of elevation to be in an exhibition space, um, you see it for its beauty, and that actually makes people see it differently. And I think that that's really, really helpful. Um, you know, there was a wonderful response to Duchamp's Fountain, you know, when he took a urinal and put it sideways on an exhibition platform. And, you know, there's a perfectly complicated story there and a point that he's trying to make about ideas and what we see and what we don't see and humor and all that. But what's amazing was watching art historians who really wanted to take him seriously, you know, the contortions that they would put themselves through to find the beauty in that urinal. And I think that there's something really valuable there, too, because I think they were really on to something. When you look at the design of a urinal, and it was the art critic Calvin Tomkins who who talked about the flow of the urinal was like the Virgin Mary's headdress, that kind of fluttering fabric, nature of the flow of the porcelain. And you [00:20:00] think, yeah, there is real value in recognizing design. Design matters. You know, there's a lot of value in how the viewer thinks differently when they're made to look at something differently.
Kate: Oh I love that. It's it's interesting. Do you know Aby Warburg's Atlas.
Tamar: Oh yes. Yes of course I do.
Kate: Huge influence on us that, that the fact that he created this project that was based on. Decades of, you know, exacting scholarship. But he was also following his own intuitive sense of rhythm and pattern to create this enormous collection of of symbolic images that you could juxtapose or put in sequences that would create these these synesthetic insights about life in motion, about how people, you know, create relationships and cultures over time. And it was this chart that was it was both a kind of like a map of, of gestures in the Renaissance, but it went right through to kind of Greek symbolism to, you know, to sort of the the early modern representation of, of, of thought and production, you know, that that way that art history and philosophy also can become itself an aesthetic object. You know, it's it's it's deep research and it's, uh, historical, but it's also this, this aesthetic, beautiful collection. I mean, that that to me, you know, has been a touchpoint through this project, you know, not only because, of course, it's, you know, such an extraordinary thing, but also because it felt overwhelming also to Warburg. You know, he never finished it in his death. You know, I think it was like 19, late 1920s, like I think he died in 29. And it and it wasn't, it wasn't completed. Um, and [00:22:00] it was is that sense of a thing that maybe can't be completed is maybe bigger than what a human can do in a, in a single human life. Um, but is worth it as a process, you know, that that felt very, very important to me, just personally, as we were doing this. And as we continue to do this, of course, that this map is open now in Milan, but it, uh, then tours and it will be opening in Berlin in February.
Tamar: Yeah. And deep research to the value of deep research and deep, unconstrained thinking, you know, because Warburg wasn't just kind of a genius. He was also schizophrenic. Um, you know, his brain operated on a different frequency. And that means that he created something that would have been impossible to look at and understand where he was going. But it does provide not only a wonderful example of research, but a really wonderful example of, I think, one man's thinking. And I think when you look at something like that or, you know, Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, um, you know, something that's not meant to be an artwork on its own and also something that kind of goes off the map. It's meant to be one moment in history that we can then look at and use not only as an example of thinking, but then also as a tool. It's both of those things. And and nothing could be a more authentic snapshot of its moment. Um, but yeah, I mean, in talking about Warburg and Benjamin, when you say that kind of openness, this idea that it kind of continues beyond the page, that's really hard to do visually. You have to work really hard to make it look like you've just zoomed in on something and that the rest of it almost, you know, kind of exists beyond its borders. And so the next question that I have is, where do you start for something like this? Where do you start and where do you stop? Because [00:24:00] I can imagine that going back and back and back, you know, you do have to stop somewhere in order to start somewhere. So what was that process like for you?
Kate: It's such a good question because in telling the story of technology and power, you can go back to the beginning of records if you wish. But for us, we decided to ground it in the 1500s, that sort of very beginning of the 1500s where, you know, we see the age of sail emerging, you see the ability for, uh, colonial powers to travel far further than ever before, to capture new lands, to dominate populations. The expansion of European colonialism is a key moment for so many of the things that we see today. But at the same time, it's it's an extraordinary moment of the emergence of mass media. So you have the printing press, you have this sort of shifting in what it is to produce and share our knowledge. Uh, you see the emergence of, you know, the first moment of what was called information overload in the early 1500s when, uh, you know, people were saying there were just too many books to read. There are too many books than you could read in a lifetime. Therefore, we have hit information overload, which was fun to put on the map. Uh, it it's a moment of early global networks forming. So for us, the there were these sort of multiple threads to follow from what was called the scientific revolution, you know, what was called sort of the birth of European colonialism, but also these, these stories around how information itself was starting to pluralize and expand.
Vladan: I think the methodology of [00:26:00] how we were basically creating this map, it's more like, uh, some kind of form of visual thinking, uh, in the sense that you are not most of the timelines. Uh, you know, that you can find they're kind of linear, you know, and they just sort some events in time. And what we were trying to do here is really to think with the map as some kind of cognitive space in which dot by dot, we are connecting, uh, events and technologies together in some form of visual storytelling. And there is a lot about like creating relations. Sometimes those relations are in forms of triangles, sometimes it's in some kind of abstract, uh, visual forms. And so we are basically more thinking with the map during creation than, than, than anything else. And in that sense, in some phases there is adding things. But I think we spend like last six months or something and basically reducing information because like the problem with history is basically fractal, you know, you can go deep in, in any direction you want and there is still something beyond that, you know, and when we are creating something like this, that is a visual storytelling device. You need to reduce a lot. And so, so for us, I think the the bigger challenge in the last, I don't know, six months was like how to reduce amount of information and how to really leave something that we believe, uh, that is important and not to, you know, get lost in this like, uh, uh, unlimited, uh, amount of information.
Kate: So one of the ways we've thought about this project is that our first collaboration, anatomy of an AI system, was really about technology and space. You know, the way that you can actually map a single technology like [00:28:00] the Amazon Echo across a planetary network from the mines, where the minerals are extracted to the data servers that sort of span the globe, to the e-waste tips in places like Ghana and Pakistan. Calculating empires is a project about time and technology, so it's a very different material to be working with. So you know it. It also meant that as a project, it took more than twice as long to do. Um, and really I think pushed us to our limits. It pushed us to our cognitive limits, to our physical limits. We have worked side by side on, you know, in tiny offices in Berlin, on, you know, balconies in Montenegro, on more zoom calls than I could ever number of like we've been through. I think it's really been a physical and cognitive marathon to do this project. Quite honestly. There were moments where I just I just didn't think we could do it where we would. We would just hit a real limit. Um, so it was, again, one of those moments I was very grateful for the fact that as a collaboration, you know, we could take turns kind of hitting and hitting our limit and finding finding strength in the other person, able to just to continue on to the to the next section of the map because it's it's just such a huge undertaking.
Vladan: It was basically a marathon there. There is no easy moves, easy solutions there. No. Basically whatever you want to do on that scale, it takes time, every iteration of the map, just to go from one side of the map to the end of the map. It takes you sometime months, you know, and then when we do the turn, we we sometimes already forgot what is on the beginning of the map or is basically completely different visual style because you cannot keep. You know, same visual style, for example, for such a long time not to get [00:30:00] bored with it, you know? So in a way, like it really touched some kind of like a borders of possibility, but also in the physical scale, because, you know, when you are creating something that needs to be exhibited in the space, you need to take care about the viewer. So it cannot be bigger than, I don't know, 2.7 or 3m. So people can read when standing now. And this map is basically at the edges of possibility in, in both height and width. And we, you know, the size of the files that we were producing at the end for printing is bigger than it's possible to create in the tools that we were doing. So we needed to work in some kind of we needed to cut the map and to. It's really it was really a challenge to to on on every possible way.
Tamar: Yeah. I was going to ask, how did you know that it was done? You know, how do you know, how do you know that it's finished? You know, so much of art is is actually constrained by the size of the canvas or the size of the wall that it's going to be exhibited on. And sometimes that itself just has to be the limiting factor. And you're talking about time, which also, in its own way, has a kind of limiting factor. You know, if you're starting in the 1500s, you have to end today or tomorrow or tomorrow or tomorrow. You know, the borders are soft, but they are there. Um, did you just kind of say to yourselves, okay, we're going to take these constraints and build within them? Or did you realize the constraints only as you were making it?
Kate: It's funny, Tamar, that you think it's done. It's never...I feel like it's this project is always beckoning to me from, you know, even now when we've just opened an exhibition, you know, I still wake up in the middle of the night going, oh, I want to I want to add this to the map. You know, it's become [00:32:00] such a, a companion over the last four years, but it's it's interesting. I have to say, this is unlike any project, certainly, that I've ever done before in that it was a big trust exercise. You know, it meant that Vladan and I were just keep exploring and exploring with no sense of, well, it has to stop at this point or it we're, you know, limiting ourselves to 20m or there was no discussion where we set a parameter for years. Honestly, the first real parameter we had was the deadline for this exhibition at Fondazione Prada in Milan. You know, that meant that we had an actual deadline where we had to submit the final version and then design it in space, which is a different set of challenges altogether, because now you're working within the constraints of a gallery that has its own height and width and length that you've got to think, you know, with the dimensions of that space. But honestly, you know, it was it was a sort of almost a, um, a pure research project, if I dare say that in the sense that we didn't have external limitations for years. It was something where we could push ourselves intellectually, visually, and I think philosophically, uh, without any sense of, you know, having to make it for a specific person by a specific time.
Vladan: I think luckily, we had this deadline with the, with the exhibition because, like, who knows? Like because, you know, I don't know, I'm somewhere in between that I would like this to, to last, you know, longer. But in the same time I'm aware that that we need to to have some kind of constraints because like then we are all it's also a challenge for our minds and bodies and our understanding of the world. So I, I feel that like doing this project, I finished like several PhDs [00:34:00] extra. So yeah. And I can say that like really learned a lot because and this is what the map making is doing to you. Basically, you are forced to think even on something that maybe if you are writing a book or I don't know in any other media, you can like, put this aside and have some kind of narrative and avoid something. And when you are doing this kind of visual mapping things, you are forced to think in, in, in like categories, and then there is no space to run away from something. So even you feel like that you are completely mentally exhausted of like deep dive into history of mathematical logic. You need to finish it. You know, you need to to because you will have an empty part of the map. So it's a it's a really great exercise. Size in in staying with the trouble? No.
Tamar: So it strikes me, you know, let's let's go back to this example of an Amazon Echo. Um, you know, again, something that I have in my kitchen right now, something that we use all the time for far less noble pursuits, you know, timing mac and cheese that I'm making for my kid. Um, but the idea that this ends up in your kitchen and that it's so small when it does, and that it has this incredibly expansive tale of history, you know, going back to the 1500s and beyond. I mean, so, okay, so one of my favorite scenes in Apollo 13, which is one of my favorite movies, is when Tom Hanks is giving a tour of NASA and he says to this captive audience, can you even imagine a computer that can fit into a single room? And this is just like 1969 when he's giving this tour, maybe 1970, and it makes me think, like what this project [00:36:00] is making me think about, because you're talking about how big it is, and yet it's representing something so infinitely bigger. I think that it's actually really helpful for people to take a minute and think about expansion and contraction and expansion and contraction. The idea that something so small and seemingly mundane has such an expansive human history, and that this project itself is huge, but also constrained to its own space. This is what art is supposed to do. You know, like what we talked about to make you think, to make you look at something mundane and think more deeply about it as if you'd never seen it before. I find that really helpful for me. You know, I'm going to look at my echo now and realize that a much, much larger world in a history brought it and me to this place. But of course, you can't think about that all the time. You know, sometimes you just have to make mac and cheese. Um, but it is very comforting to know that people are doing this deep, deep, pure research into this much, much bigger idea.
Kate: That's so lovely, Tamar. And I feel like in the way that anatomy of an AI system was trying to give you that view into this expansive network that is primarily invisible to you when you're making mac and cheese. Calculating empires is is trying to give you the same experience of the deathlessness of time that is feels so. Rare right now in this moment of generative AI, when there's been a new model every week, there's been a radical transformation of an industry every month. There's been so much change in such a short period of time that it's produced almost a type of technological presentism. You know, this idea that you can only focus on the immediate present. You are, you know, essentially being dosed into, you know, only thinking about now and five [00:38:00] minutes from now. It's sort of what I've been thinking a lot in terms of this project is, you know, as a almost a relief to be able to be spending this kind of commitment of time, um, to looking at history to, to escape the overwhelming now and turn to, you know, what philosophers like Braudel called the longue durée. You know, this, you know, this scale of time, which is very different than a single human life or a human generation or even a century.
Kate: But you're also looking at slow changing geographical factors. You're looking at the relationship between the natural environment and human production and society. You're looking at these really big, slow shifts through the industrial revolution to, you know, the first emergence of, you know, the the production line through to the the forms of automation that we're seeing now with, with, you know, ChatGPT and Dall-E and, and that gives you a different perspective. It, it that's the hope in the way that anatomy allowed you to say, hey, there's an echo. I can see it differently now. Our hope is that people walk into calculating empires and they say, I can see this whole generative AI year of 2023 totally differently now. I can see it with the centuries below it that have shaped this moment. And and that's what I feel has been missing, certainly from from our lives, but from the media debates, from the scholarship, which is just been so focused on the immediate present. We lose so much with that kind of view. We lose politics. We lose these. These deep social and environmental factors. And it makes us make bad decisions because we're looking at the wrong time frame. You know, we're not thinking with history. Mm.
Vladan: For [00:40:00] me, I don't know, every time when I start to do some map, basically I don't know where I'm going to end, you know. So so I'm just diving into some topic or idea or philosophical concept and then it's a, it's a road to the unknown, you know, and, and with anatomy of an I, I really went out with some kind of like, uh, understanding the, the shapes maybe of, of this like extractivism or like complexity of different forms of extraction, extraction of human labor, extraction of nature, extraction of data. And that stayed with me for several years. And then with this project and this investigation basically was somehow I was seeing the same patterns. Unfortunately, this present day extractivism and exploitation that is based on inequality is deeply rooted in, you know, 500 years of history. And this is this is pretty sad thing for me, you know, in a sense of like. Then you understand it's not. You know, the problems of today are not design problems. It's not something that you can easily, you know, fix by some kind of like political decision or whatever. But they are rooted in a hundreds and hundreds of years of exploitation, of extraction of classification. Or basically, it's a history of wrong ideas if we look at it in that way. So in that sense, we I somehow understood by doing it that, you know, we need to think about how to change some kind of core values, you know, and if you if you think like in history of all those technologies and basically extraction, you know, we we need to somehow think how to change this kind of basic settings of the system.
Vladan: It's not about interfaces, it's not about surface. It's like deeply [00:42:00] the settings are wrong. And this is what is appearing on the map all the time. You know, like in every century, in every period, you are seeing the same patterns of exploitation, of inequality, of like extraction of and the, the segment that I was like really somehow that speak to me a lot, especially history of classification of human beings and social relations and how how all of those technologies that we are seeing more, those technologies of AI, face recognition system, emotion recognition system are based on like deep histories of wrong ideas, of like universal emotion, of recognizing, you know, faces of the criminals by how they look like or measuring their heads. So yeah, that's a sad, you know, segment of the map. It's that like those problems that are seeded long, long time ago or somehow accelerating and being embedded in the technologies that we are using today.
Kate: One of the real sources of inspiration for, for the map really came from historians of science, and we spoke to many people over the years of this project to get their perspectives on the map to, to suggest sections that we might want to add. And, you know, some people suggested a whole new lines that we should add. I can remember once when I was sitting and chatting with, uh, Professor Fred Turner, who's a dear friend and colleague, he was like, you know, you really need a line about architecture as a system of control. And we were like, hooboy another line to add to the map. But, you know, he was absolutely right. And it ends up being, you know, one of my favorite lines, really telling the story, you know, from, you know, the sort of the Gothic cathedral to housman's designs of Paris, as, you know, as a way of, you know, enforcing riot control. I mean, it, you know, takes [00:44:00] us right up through the sorts of spikes that are put on benches to prevent, you know, the unhoused from being comfortable in public parks. I mean, these little architectural moves that have made public space less and less welcoming. I mean, it was an extraordinary history to trace on the map. Um, but it you know, one of the people who I sort of read a lot during this time is the historian of science, Lorraine Daston. And she has this sort of fantastic observation that one of the uses of these kinds of historical projects is basically to unsettle us, to unsettle our certainties about the present and and really to enlarge our sense, in her words, of, of the thinkable, to expand what we think could be possible, what possible futures could be made that would be different from these these horrifying histories of extraction, exploitation, automation, classification? Can we escape them? They can feel overwhelming. But, you know, I think Dastan's work really provokes us to say that these these histories can actually reanimate our imaginations. They can push us to see the past differently and imagine the future differently.
Tamar: But of course, another pattern of history is the response to that centralized control and enclosure. You know, Haussman expanded the Parisian boulevards in order to ultimately, you know, prevent barricades. And so the revolutionaries just built bigger barricades. And I'm wondering, in looking at this kind of history, did you also see a pattern of resistance to control? And is that something that maybe can provide a little bit of hope going forward as well, not just for a better future, because we've learned lessons from the past, but because we have historical [00:46:00] precedents of people learning those lessons and and pushing back against that kind of control.
Kate: Absolutely. I mean, this map is really oriented around. A study of empire. So we're looking at the the tools, the mechanisms, the machines of empire over centuries. And you can see the forms of resistance as they've emerged over time. And then the responses to that. We discussed many times during this project that. There could be a whole different map would just be, you know, stories of, you know, revolutions and revolts and resistance. But, you know, to our minds, we felt that you can't get there until you see what you're fighting against. You know, it's important in any sort of project of decolonization to understand how colonization worked in the first place, in order to see where it is and where it's it's shaping the systems that are still around you every day and that you are participating in, you know, that's that's harder work. So for us, it was, um. It was really important that we trace these outlines of empire that I think are so often ignored. And this is particularly true in the kind of American political debates where there's this assumption that, well, we have an equal society. And, you know, everything that happens now is just innovation coming from thin air. And isn't that wonderful without again, looking at the fact that this is a profoundly unequal society, that these systems are emerging from pre-existing systems that come with their own values and their own ways of seeing built into them. So that was really the project for calculating empires was to look at how empires calculate. And in doing so, to show that we might calculate those empires. We might, in other words, [00:48:00] be able to see them and analyze them with greater clarity with, uh, in some ways a greater sense of anger and desire to resist, because you can see those mechanisms as they repeat time and time again from century to century.
Tamar: So coming out of this enormous project, how do you feel, you know, are you more helpful going forward or, you know, Vladan, you were talking about the kind of like the sadness of looking back over history and seeing the wrong decisions made over and over again, you know, almost as though that's like the human condition. And so, you know, where does this take you going forward? And actually, more, more interestingly, to my mind, where do you mean for it to take the visitor going forward?
Vladan: Personally, I feel empowered in a sense of, of like empowered in a way that maybe decisions that I will make will not be, you know, just on the surface, but will have this kind of historical reflection. So more we know about the those patterns and deep histories. There is a bigger chance that we will be able better to face them, you know? So in that sense, I feel empowered that maybe my future thoughts or my my future work will be more substantial in a way. And I hope this is something that maybe we can, you know, also give to visitors or to viewers of those maps, some kind of tool to try to understand better the implications of the, you know, like the different kinds of, like, uh, technologies that they will maybe develop in the future or to better understand what is the really some kind of core problem of the they are facing. So this is something that I hope that we will manage. It is really not easy to to get there. And uh, in a way like, um, you know, we gave our best to, you know, [00:50:00] show this in some kind of visual form. And we hope that it will communicate with the with people and that they will kind of enjoy in in every of those dots or every piece of knowledge that we embedded in this map, so that they will be able to enjoy in the same way and to discover something new.
Kate: We're releasing this map into the world at a very dark political time, and there are just moments where it just feels like the world is ending for, for so many people right now. And the map in some ways is a reminder that the end of the world just keeps happening. You know that there have been these these absolute apocalypses that just recur and recur and recur. And it's something that Lauren and I have, you know, had these moments together where, you know, over the last four years there have been some really dark political times, you know, at home and and far away. And we've had these sorts of discussions from our different cultures, you know, from Australia's, you know, genocidal pasts, whether it's indigenous populations to, you know, the stories of, of conflict and horror in Serbia that, you know, we've we've had these, these histories that we've brought and we've looked into these long pasts and and in a weird way, this is going to sound strange, but there's there's some sort of dark optimism that comes from that, that.
Tamar: Yeah. I was going to say, actually, you know, the world keeps ending and yet it keeps going.
Kate: Right. And that means that we want to think pretty carefully about how we want it to keep going. So there's like a political fire that can come from that, from seeing that and from seeing that, you know, there isn't one end, there are many ends. So it's time to write the story differently.
Vladan: But for me, I'm getting this question all the time, like almost every [00:52:00] lecture. And, you know, the first question after, it's like, okay, but what is the solution? And give us some kind of positive for me, like this. My mission, I see as just like trying to understand how that works. And then maybe some other people who have like more courage or more, you know, like strength will find a way how to organize and to go further. But the first step is to try to see and try to understand complexity, try to deep dive there and try to create a blueprint of of those systems. And in the present and also in the past, you know.
Kate: First you need a map of the palace before you can storm it.
Tamar: Well, Vladan and Kate, thank you so much for this conversation. I'm so sorry that I won't actually be able to see this exhibition in person, although it's been helpful to see it on my little screen, on my phone, which I now know has a much, much deeper history. So thank you for that.
Kate: Thank you so much, Tamar. Wonderful to talk with you.
Vladan: Thank you. This was a pleasure.
Tamar: Next time on the final episode of Knowing Machines. Our conversation about art is not over yet. I'll be speaking with a veritable salon creators, authors, performers, each examining the impact of AI on both the medium and the message. With all due respect to Marshall McLuhan and how both medium and message can push back. We'll see you then.