Calculating Empires

Set against the monumental backdrop of Lux­em­bourg’s largest post-industrial site, Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500 invites visitors to trace the deep, often unseen connections between tech­no­log­i­cal progress and the structures of power that have shaped societies from the early modern period to the present day.

A 24-meter-long black wall traces the connections between tech­nolo­gies and imperialist powers across five centuries, taking the form of a giant timeline resting on water, with the remnant of a blast furnace as backdrop. These links are depicted here with unprece­dent­ed clarity, allowing each visitor to better understand their impli­ca­tions.

Socle C, Esch-Belval (Cité des sciences et de l’in­no­va­tion) 
6 Av. de la Fonte, 4361 Esch-Belval Esch-sur-Alzette
24/7
→ Free
 

The artists

Kate Crawford is an inter­na­tion­al­ly leading scholar of AI. She is a Professor at USC, a Senior Principal Researcher at MSR, and the inaugural visiting chair of AI and Justice at the École Normale Supérieure. Her award-winning book, Atlas of AI, was named a best book of the year by The Financial Times, won three inter­na­tion­al prizes, and has been translated into fourteen languages. Beyond her scholarly work, she is an award-winning artist whose work explores the themes of technology, history, and power. Her artworks have been shown in over 100 museums worldwide, including the KW Institute, Jeu de Paume, Fondazione Prada, and Mori Museum, and are in the permanent collections of MoMA, the V&A, Rijksmuseum Twenthe, among others. Her latest work with Vladan Joler, Calculating Empires, won the Silver Lion at the Venice Archi­tec­ture Biennale 2025, the Grand Prize of the European Commission for art and technology, and the Boghossian Art Prize. TIME100 named Crawford as one of the world’s most influential people in AI.

Vladan Joler is an academic, researcher and artist whose work blends critical design, data inves­ti­ga­tions, counter-cartography, inves­tiga­tive journalism, writing, data visu­al­iza­tion, and other disciplines. He explores different technical and social aspects of algorithmic trans­paren­cy, digital labour exploita­tion, invisible infra­struc­tures and other con­tem­po­rary phenomena in the inter­sec­tion between technology and society. His work has been exhibited in more than a hundred inter­na­tion­al exhibitions. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the V&A Museum, the Design Museum in London, the Ars Electronica Center, and the Rijksmuseum Twenthe. In 2018, together with Kate Crawford, they created Anatomy of an AI System, a large-scale map and long-form essay inves­ti­gat­ing the human labor, data and planetary resources required to build and operate an Amazon Echo device. Other studies that he authored, published in recent years by the independent research collective SHARE Lab, included research on information warfare, metadata analysis, browsing history exploita­tion, sur­veil­lance, and Internet architecture.

Exhibition credits

Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500
September – December 2026
Curators: Vincent Crapon and Françoise Poos
Technical direction: Thomas Schwab

Presented by Elektron, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the University of Luxembourg – Espace Cultures and Fonds Belval
 

Artworks credits 

Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500
Artists: Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler (2023)
Research and design associate: Sarah Ciston
Research assistants: Francis Corry, Edward Kang, Will Orr, and Hamsini Sridharan
Project management: Hannah Franklin and Michael Weinberg
Website production: Olivia Solis Villaverde and Milutin Marinovic