Insight
The map we have never drawn
Mark Parsons reminds us that the exhibition is not a legacy format awaiting disruption, but rather the residue that remains after 175 years of disruption have already happened.
arlier this summer, at
E the Design Museum in Barcelona, I stood in front of Calculating Empires, Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler ' s vast visual genealogy of technology and power. It fills two walls, mapping 500 years of communication and computation against 500 years of classification and control. I wondered what it might look like drawn for the exhibition industry.
The modern exhibition was born in 1851, and in the 175 years since, it has evolved with every communication revolution and every system of commercial power. It is, in my mind, a technology for concentrating trust. So, I tried to build my first Calculating Exhibitions map. At its base sits the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace, six million visitors, the moment the exhibition became an industry rather than an inheritance, with 12 centuries of medieval fairs compressed beneath. Nothing on the map is a point.
Everything is a line that branches, merges, or persists.
Reading it slowly, six themes emerge. The traded object keeps dematerialising. The pre-modern fair traded goods. Leipzig’ s Mustermesse of 1895 traded samples, the 20th-century trade show traded leads, and today’ s most valuable output is data: the latent structure of a market made briefly visible a hall. Each dematerialisation looked like a threat. Each made the exhibition more necessary. Every communication revolution reshapes the exhibition rather than killing it. The telephone, the web, video conferencing … each carried the same prediction. The exhibition survived them all by absorbing them and shedding the functions they made redundant, concentrating around what does not compress into a data packet: trust, serendipity, embodiment. The exhibition is not a legacy format awaiting disruption. It is the residue that remains after 175 years of disruption have already happened. The exhibition has always been an instrument of power. The Great Exhibition was an empire displaying itself to the world, and the lineage runs unbroken to Expo as nation branding and states building venues as geopolitical strategy. Whoever convenes the marketplace shapes the market. The visitor has been progressively classified. A shilling ticket in 1851 became badges, barcodes, RFID and tracking technologies. Registration is now one of the most sophisticated classification systems our industry operates, and we barely notice it as such. The marketplace has been enclosed. The industry inherited something close to a commons; municipal ownership, family firms, public listing and private equity have progressively enclosed it. The question, Who does the exhibition belong to has been answered differently in every era, and the current answer is the most concentrated in history. Time is the industry’ s real infrastructure. Exhibitions are the only medium whose fundamental unit is a rhythm. The calendar is a coordination technology, and arguably the thing we actually sell: a shared moment at which a whole market agrees to pay attention simultaneously.
The map is partial, shaped by my own position. Perhaps that is the point. So, I will end with questions. Which lineage would we be most uncomfortable seeing in plain sight? And if every revolution so far has re-founded the exhibition rather than killed it, what is AI stripping away right now, and what will be left? EW
n Mark Parsons is the founder of Events Intelligence, a company focused helping exhibitions grow through deep understanding of their exhibitors, competitors, communities and industries served using large datasets, data science and AI.
36 Issue 4 2026 www. exhibitionworld. co. uk