Rijksmuseum Twenthe acquires Calculating Empires, the largest contemporary art acquisition in the museum’s history
ENSCHEDE, October 2025 — Rijksmuseum Twenthe has purchased the monumental installation Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500 from the artist-researchers Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler. The 24-meter-wide cartography is the museum’s largest-ever contemporary art acquisition.
Starting from 30 November, the installation will be on exhibit in a special 15-month solo presentation.
A visual manifesto on power and technology
In Calculating Empires, Kate Crawford (Australia) and Vladan Joler (Serbia) have created a 24-meter-long fresco illustrating how power and technology have interwoven. Calculating Empires tracks the time period from 1500 to 2025, starting with the emergence of capitalism, European colonialism, and the printing press, and follows the development of key technologies and social shifts through to today with artificial intelligence and quantum.
The installation, compiled from more than 1,000 texts and hand-drawn illustrations, literally surrounds the viewer and shows how five centuries of technological development repeat the patterns of automation, militarization, and enclosure - and provokes us to think how the future could be different.
Current events
The themes addressed by Calculating Empires are more topical than ever. As artificial intelligence and Big Tech transform society before our eyes, power is being concentrated in just a handful of global technology firms. “Technology has fundamental consequences for the balance of power in society”, warned Professor Reijer Passchier in de Volkskrant earlier this year. He claims that a new aristocracy of extremely wealthy individuals is forming, comparable to the feudal system of the past, but based on data and technology as the means of production instead of land.
It is precisely that historical continuity that forms the core of Calculating Empires: Crawford and Joler show how the entanglement of technology and power is not a new phenomenon, but has shaped societies for centuries.
The artists
Kate Crawford (Australia) is an internationally renowned scholar of artificial intelligence, artist, and author. She is a Professor at USC, Senior Researcher at MSR NY, and author of the award-winning book Atlas of AI (Financial Times book of the year). She was named by TIME100 as one of the most influential people in AI. In 2025, she won the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale with Vladan Joler for Calculating Empires.
Vladan Joler (Serbia) is an academic, researcher, and artist whose work blends critical design, data investigations, and counter-cartography. He is the head of Share Lab, a data-driven research team that focuses on shining light on to the hidden infrastructures of the Internet and the power of algorithms. In 2025, he won the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale with Kate Crawford for Calculating Empires.
Kate Crawford & Vladan Joler portrait – Photo/ Patrick Toomey Neri
International recognition
Their earlier collaborative work, Anatomy of an AI System (2018), is part of the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Design Museum in London.
Calculating Empires has also accumulated an impressive record of international exhibitions. The work has been exhibited at the Biennale of Venice, where it drew considerable interest from both the press and the public.
Crawford and Joler have since received three international awards for their joint oeuvre, including the prestigious Silver Lion award from the Venice Biennale (2025), the European Commission’s Grand Prize for Artistic Exploration and the International Art Prize from the Boghossian Foundation (2024). According to the jury, “Calculating Empires challenges us to redefine our relationship to today’s socio-technological structures, to better understand where we come from and to visualise where we could go.” te herdefiniëren om te begrijpen waar we vandaan komen, en te verbeelden waar we naartoe kunnen gaan.”
Why Rijksmuseum Twenthe?
The acquisition of Calculating Empires is a perfect fit with Rijksmuseum Twenthe’s exhibition and collection policy, which directs the collection of visual arts that reflect on society. In accordance with that policy, the museum’s programme track The Tech Divide focuses on the influence of technology on our lives, our society and our values. Calculating Empires is a key work in this context: a monumental, visual analysis of five centuries of systems of power and knowledge, illustrating how world views are shaped and programmed.
The work also ties in to the museum’s previous acquisitions, such as The Fabric of Humankind (2020) by Carlijn Kingma, which identifies the social structures within societies, and New New Babylon by Jonas Staal or Jenny Holzer’s Orwell Yellow White II. Together, these works form a powerful ensemble on the themes of knowledge, power, ideology, and imagination - the core around which the Rijksmuseum Twenthe’s collection is built.
Solo exhibition
The installation will be on display from 30 November 2025 to January 2027, as a solo exhibition in the form of an ellipse. The exhibition will also feature various historic objects referred to in the chart, either from the Rijksmuseum Twenthe collection or on loan from De Museumfabriek and Twickel Castle.
Groundbreaking acquisition
There are only six editions of Calculating Empires available for collections worldwide. With this acquisition, Rijksmuseum Twenthe has gained the only edition to be included in a public collection in the Netherlands, positioning the museum as an international pioneer at the juncture of art, technology and society.
Credits: Calculating Empires is purchased with the generous support of the Mondriaan Fund, Turing Foundation, PLANETART and VriendenLoterij.
