The 1860s were stellar years for the telegraph and the slaughterhouse. In 1865, Morse code became the global standard for international communication. In 1867, Chicago’s meatpacking industry installed the first system to subdivide labor by moving carcasses from one worker to another on a steam-driven pulley, a methodology that would later inspire Henry Ford’s mass-production of the Model-T.
Were these innovations related? Lacking evidence of a causal connection or constituencies in common, history books are unlikely to write about them in the same chapter. Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler have a different perspective. The researcher-artists have set the telegraph and slaughterhouse assembly line side-by-side in their new genealogy of technology and power at the Fondazione Prada, recognizing them as essential instruments of industrialized efficiency linking 19th century mechanization to 20th century automation.
Spanning the 16th century through the present, the genealogy covers two long walls of the Fondazione Prada’s Osservatorio, comprising the core of a fascinating new exhibition called Calculating Empires. Two broad themes are charted. One wall maps communication and computation, covering topics ranging from Cartesian geometry to semantic networks. The opposite wall maps control and classification, from colonialism to psyops. The slaughterhouse assembly line can also be found on that wall. The telegraph makes appearances both there and on the other chart, where it’s situated between railway infrastructure and the electric grid, anticipating the internet.
The volume of information gathered by Crawford and Joler makes for an unexpectedly immersive experience, ironically encompassing the technosphere with a minimum of technology. (No internet here.)
This irony runs deep. Only by eliminating as much technical spectacle as possible do the cartographers stand a chance of exposing the operating system of empire.
One technique they do enlist is Cartesian geometry. But instead of relying on it passively, Crawford and Joler forefront their coordinate system, making it one of the genealogy’s most effective features. Time follows the y coordinate, ascending in years as you look up. The x coordinate is more loosely organized into themes (prison, policing, borders, bureaucracy, etcetera). This layout allows visitors to explore history unfettered by established causalities or correlations. (Climbing upward, you find Westphalian sovereignty followed by the nation-state, immigration control, and forced migration. Looking sideways, you find that forced migration coincides temporally with medical records and audience research.)
Coincidence is not proof of coordination, and the generous expansiveness of the two maps
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