Knowing Machines is thrilled to announce that Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s Calculating Empires has won the European Commission’s 2024 Grand Prize for artistic exploration in science, technology and the arts!

Here are a few quotes from the jury’s statement:

"Calculating Empires charts the technological present by depicting how power and technology have been intertwined since 1500. It is a codex of technology and power that shows how echoes of empires past resonate in today’s technology companies."

"With thousands of individual drawings and texts, Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler visualize these major shifts in an intricate visual manifesto about the way empires have used technology to centralize and consolidate their power. Calculating Empires gives audiences a detailed visual narrative about the relationship between humans, ecologies, and technologies…Calculating Empires challenges us to redefine our relationship with current socio-technical structures. By asking how we got where we are today, we can (re)consider where we might be going."

Calculating Empires premiered at an exhibition of Crawford and Joler’s work at Fondazione Prada in Milan in November 2023, and was then exhibited in Berlin as part of a group show at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art. It will now open at Ars Electronica in Linz in September, at the Design Museum in Barcelona in December, and at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in April 2025.