Hannah Higgins

Grids are ubiquitous in our techno-cultural landscape. Both constraining and transcendent, grids pigeonhole all they embrace yet promise infinite extension. The author shows how grids have influenced culture and technology via their structured methods since the invention of the brick, and continued with tablet, gridiron, map, musical notation, the financial ledger, the painting within a frame (screen), movable type, the manufactured box, and the net. Grids continuously regulate our built environment as well as our epistemological expression. In closing, the author asks if our grids can be augmented by fractals, seemingly more natural systems expressed by the operations of the physical world.… (mais)