Three days before this Radar, the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened Full Disclosure: The Edge of Information Design, its first exhibition devoted entirely to information design. Thirty digital and analogue works — six of them recent additions to the museum’s collection — fill the free-entry, street-level gallery until 13 June 2027. One of them demands that we pause, simply because of the scale of its ambition: to represent five centuries of relations between technology and power.

Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500, by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, is the starting point for this Radar.

Against a black background, lines, figures, concepts and historical events form an extraordinarily dense cartography. In the fragment accompanying this Radar — the same one Babelia chose in 2025 to head an article by Marta Peirano — sit the rise of neoliberalism, financialisation, corporate colonialism, resource extraction, labour exploitation, privatisation, globalisation and technological capture. They do not appear as separate episodes. The drawing compels us to look for relationships, and that demand is no accident. It is the method of the entire work.

An act of translation

This lies at the heart of what Full Disclosure proposes. MoMA starts from a fundamental distinction. We live surrounded by data, but data does not in itself constitute knowledge. It has to be selected, organised and translated before we can interpret it. That mediation is precisely the territory of information design.

Algorithms, machine learning and artificial intelligence have vastly expanded what a visualisation can do. They have also made it more important to understand the decisions, categories and sources on which a visualisation is built. Context matters. Public trust in institutions and in the knowledge they produce has weakened and, for the museum, visualising information means working with truth and trust in equal measure.

Every map sets boundaries. Every diagram selects information. Every interface introduces priorities. Deciding what to show, what to connect and what to leave out of the frame is part of the knowledge we ultimately receive.

Calculating Empires takes this operation to an unusual scale. MoMA has acquired it for its collection as a digital work, but in its installed form it is, as Marta Peirano described it, a map twenty-four metres long and three metres high, made up of thousands of illustrations and texts. Organised in two great halves, one follows the transformation of communication devices, infrastructures and computational architectures. The other reconstructs histories of control and classification across dozens of domains, from time and education to bodies, biometrics, prisons and military systems.

Crawford and Joler organised this material around four main themes — communication, computation, classification and control — to trace contemporary phenomena whose roots reach back centuries. Peirano notes that the work took nine years to produce and that its authors drew inspiration from great historical frescoes and tapestries, such as the Bayeux Tapestry and Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. The piece can be read as a map, a historical atlas, a manifesto and a circuit diagram all at once.

From a speaker to an empire

Marta Peirano wrote about the project in Babelia, the cultural supplement of El País, in February 2025, when it premiered in Spain at LABoral in Gijón. She placed it within an obsession Crawford and Joler have shared for a decade: mapping the use of technology as an instrument of power, with infrastructure and political economy as its axes.

The first fruit of that collaboration was Anatomy of an AI System (2018), which is also now in MoMA’s collection. In it they traced the network of human labour, data and planetary resources required for an Amazon Echo to exist and function. A seemingly simple household object opened onto an infrastructure stretching across mines, factories, supply chains, data centres and systems of information extraction.

In Calculating Empires the field of view widens radically. The work no longer follows a single device, but a genealogy running through commercial expansion, colonialism, industrialisation, systems of classification, bureaucracies, the media, markets, computation and contemporary forms of data extraction. The starting point is not arbitrary. Crawford explains that the map begins around 1500 because of the convergence of two inventions: the printing press, which made global information networks possible, and long-distance navigation, which made it possible to colonise Indigenous peoples at far greater distances. As Crawford put it in Gijón, the power of technology today is a matter of accumulation on a vast scale.

This shift is especially fruitful from an anthropological perspective. Rather than treating technologies as isolated objects, it lets us observe them within the material, economic, institutional and cultural relations that make their existence possible. Artificial intelligence then ceases to appear solely as a succession of models and technical capabilities. It becomes part of far longer histories of classification, labour, administration, extraction and control.

One of the map’s pathways shows this with particular clarity. The capacity to measure the body and the emotions develops, through successive systems of calculation, until it becomes a set of policies of correction and subjugation. It passes through orthopaedic devices designed to straighten children’s bodies, through hysteria as a gendered category and, by the twentieth century, through emotion turned into something that is measured, classified, medicated and finally monetised. What seemed to be a human experience becomes data.

The fragment published by Babelia lets us see that method at work in another region of the map. Financialization of everything occupies one of its central zones, surrounded by cryptocurrencies, venture capital, financial deregulation and tax havens. Near Corporate colonialism sit the concentration of wealth and power, data extraction and various forms of economic domination. Further down, the rise of neoliberalism unfolds alongside deindustrialisation, outsourcing and the transformation of the welfare state.

The lines cut across the boundaries between economics, technology, politics and labour.

What a map decides to show

The result does not work as a conventional chronology. It obliges us to move around the image, to lean in, to step back and to reconstruct connections. That difficulty is itself part of what it represents. The systems Crawford and Joler map are too vast to be perceived from any single vantage point.

A digital platform may present itself as a simple interface. Behind it lie data centres, supply chains, minerals, energy, human labour, intellectual property, regulation, financial markets and systems of classification. Making those relationships visible requires us to keep shifting the level from which we look.

But the map introduces another difficulty. It does not merely reveal pre-existing relationships. It also decides which ones to show.

Choosing a historical starting point, building categories, joining two events with a line or placing them within the same visual region are all interpretive decisions. The design that makes a structure of power legible also proposes a particular way of understanding it. The authors themselves acknowledge this: they describe the work as ‘necessarily partial, subjective’ and shaped by their own positionality, they take Donna Haraway’s call to map the ‘informatics of domination’ literally, and they point out that even a Gantt chart or a logic gate carries a political structure within it.

Maps also have limits, and their authors recognise them. Speaking with Peirano in early 2025, Joler discussed the student protests in Novi Sad, the Serbian city where he teaches. He admitted that mapping the use of technology to exercise control helps to anticipate the behaviour of the police, but not the reaction of the population. That mobilisation had taken them by surprise. What a map of power cannot draw is precisely what people are able to do together.

That is why it matters that MoMA has placed Calculating Empires within an exhibition on information design rather than solely within a show about artificial intelligence. Full Disclosure brings together works that use data to make hard-to-perceive systems visible, investigate structures of power, preserve histories or represent intimate dimensions of human experience.

Information design thus emerges as a cultural problem. Who organises what we know, through which categories, and in what forms we learn to recognise a relationship as meaningful.

The fragment and the whole

The circulation of Calculating Empires itself adds another layer to this reflection.

The fragment from which this Radar sets out headed Peirano’s article, accompanied by a caption stating its origin and authorship. Detached from that caption, a crop of a twenty-four-metre work can circulate as an almost autonomous illustration. Restoring its authorship and returning the image to its context immediately changes what we see.

What looks like a standalone diagram about contemporary capitalism is in fact part of a far larger genealogy of five centuries of technology and power.

The fragment accompanying the announcement of this Radar comes from the Full Disclosure press material provided by MoMA and is reproduced with the credit specified by the museum. The complete work can also be explored online — starting, for instance, with the region devoted to neoliberalism.

That shift also says something about our visual culture. We have never had access to so many maps, charts, diagrams and visualisations. Yet rarely has it been so easy to separate them from the sources, decisions and contexts that allowed them to be built.

Calculating Empires uses that same capacity for representation to work against opacity. It connects processes that the sheer scale of technological systems tends to scatter. It draws the infrastructure behind the interface. It gives history back to what is usually presented in the language of innovation.

But it also reminds us that making something visible is never an innocent operation. Every map selects, connects and leaves something out.

Crawford finds a precedent in the artificial perspective of the Renaissance. In her view, it did to our way of seeing what artificial intelligence is doing today: changing how we see the world, how we see ourselves and how we understand others. Perhaps that is why the image is as unsettling as it is fascinating. Faced with systems designed to appear fragmented — a platform here, an algorithm there, a supply chain out of frame — Crawford and Joler place them back within the same drawing.

Power also depends on how we learn to see it. Drawing it is one way of making its connections open to question.

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