From Cartography to Code: Architectures of Power at the Venice Biennale 2025

19 points by bryanrasmussen 4 days ago

The visualization: https://calculatingempires.net/

I'm obviously not qualified to judge the artistic value, but one of the picture has a diagram where an arrow labeled "Perestroika" connects a box labeled "Collapse of the Soviet Union" to the word "Corporate mercantilism", which is itself inside a box containing a triangular map of the world, several other words and the flag of the European Union.

Holy shit, AWS infra diagrams make more sense.

thenthenthen - 14 hours ago

I am qualified and this purely a speculative ‘mapping’ in broadest sense. Visually rich, useful in a sense that it is useless (maps are objects of power, they want to show theyre aware of this and maybe even critique this by producing a useless map?). Anyway, I do not see this anymore than an exercise in aesthetics (in a wannabe Simon Denny-ish way) and not much more sadly.