Grids

We are talking about the background spaces into which images are placed. In a screen-based world, many or most -- perhaps ALL -- of those spaces can be analyzed as based on the grid, the regularly-spaced or modular intersection of horizontal and vertical lines, generally at right angles, generally parallel to the sides of the frame/screen/image.

Grids are all-pervasive. Grids are literally and figuratively the fabric of civilization -- well, Western civilization, anyway. One theory: Grids are the natural evolutionary expression of the most basic post-and-lintel design for shelter construction. (Post-and-lintel: Two upright logs with a third horizontal log spanning the space between them, as we may imagine forming the doorway of in a primitive hut). This can be extended to all early construction: It is easier and more efficient to build everything in simple rectangular modules. Of course, with pre-industrial technologies, building curved walls can be relatively easy depending on the materials used, but once the village becomes a town, or a town a city, people discover that the most efficient use of the ground -- the individual plot of personal space -- comes when the maximum area is enclosed by the walls, and this happens in a gridded design of the town space.

Gridded town planning goes back at least to ancient India in the 3rd millenium BC, and is the most common plan in every Western civilization for the past 2,000 years. All things descend from this -- all the way down to the shape of the windows in our homes, the paper in our notebooks, the "windows" in our netbooks. Nowadays, the design of spaces and things, both physical and graphic, into gridded, rectangular modules seems so fundamental, that it is nearly impossible to imagine how the world would work without this basic strategy, this basic design substance. The grid is this basic backdrop against which the play of civilization, both public and private, is enacted.

Just a thought

Mannheimer