This is the first collection of interdisciplinary scholarship to expand on gridded modalities, with a strong affinity to the arts. It seeks to inspire new avenues of research by exploring a horizon of gridded relationships among humans, between humans and the environment, and between human and non-human actors. By bringing together philosophical themes and applied practices, the volume traces a genealogy of the "grid" as an exercise in grasping its inherent complexity and incomplete quality. A collective effort by a group of researchers, practitioners, and designers, it promotes an understanding of gridded modalities as complex networks that interact with other networks, generating new meanings and reflecting changes in thought.
Ten grids that changed the world: the emergence and evolution of the most prominent visual structure in Western culture. Emblematic of modernity, the grid is the underlying form of everything from skyscrapers and office cubicles to paintings by Mondrian and a piece of computer code. And yet, as Hannah Higgins makes clear in this engaging and evocative book, the grid has a history that long predates modernity; it is the most prominent visual structure in Western culture. In The Grid Book, Higgins examines the history of ten grids that changed the world: the brick, the tablet, the gridiron city plan, the map, musical notation, the ledger, the screen, moveable type, the manufactured box, and the net. Charting the evolution of each grid, from the Paleolithic brick of ancient Mesopotamia through the virtual connections of the Internet, Higgins demonstrates that once a grid is invented, it may bend, crumble, or shatter, but its organizing principle never disappears. The appearance of each grid was a watershed event. Brick, tablet, and city gridiron made possible sturdy housing, the standardization of language, and urban development. Maps, musical notation, financial ledgers, and moveable type promoted the organization of space, music, and time, international trade, and mass literacy. The screen of perspective painting heralded the science of the modern period, classical mechanics, and the screen arts, while the standardization of space made possible by the manufactured box suggested the purified box forms of industrial architecture and visual art. The net, the most ancient grid, made its first appearance in Stone Age Finland; today, the loose but clearly articulated networks of the World Wide Web suggest that we are in the middle of an emergent grid that is reshaping the world, as grids do, in its image.
The history of the grid, the world's largest interconnected power machine that is North America's electricity infrastructure. The North American power grid has been called the world's largest machine. The grid connects nearly every living soul on the continent; Americans rely utterly on the miracle of electrification. In this book, Julie Cohn tells the history of the grid, from early linkages in the 1890s through the grid's maturity as a networked infrastructure in the 1980s. She focuses on the strategies and technologies used to control power on the grid—in fact made up of four major networks of interconnected power systems—paying particular attention to the work of engineers and system operators who handled the everyday operations. To do so, she consulted sources that range from the pages of historical trade journals to corporate archives to the papers of her father, Nathan Cohn, who worked in the industry from 1927 to 1989—roughly the period of key power control innovations across North America. Cohn investigates major challenges and major breakthroughs but also the hidden aspects of our electricity infrastructure, both technical and human. She describes the origins of the grid and the growth of interconnection; emerging control issues, including difficulties in matching generation and demand on linked systems; collaboration and competition against the backdrop of economic depression and government infrastructure investment; the effects of World War II on electrification; postwar plans for a coast-to-coast grid; the northeast blackout of 1965 and the East-West closure of 1967; and renewed efforts at achieving stability and reliability after those two events.
Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
Take your design work to the next level with Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop (Third Edition), the essential easy-to-use guide for designers working in every medium. With over 150,000 copies in print, this new edition makes a classic text relevant to a new generation of designers. Updates include: A cross-cultural inclusive re-envisioning of design history related to the grid, including alternative approaches to layout Expanded discussion of grid use in interactive, UX/UI scenarios Greater equity in the representation of design work by women and BIPOC designers Grids are the most basic and essential forms in graphic design—and they can be the most rigid. This book shows you how to understand the rules of the grid to use them effectively, and then how to break them, resulting in phenomenal cohesive layouts. Timothy Samara explains the history of the grid and shows examples of grid basics, such as column, compound, and modular grids. He shows methods for building and using grids, and offers numerous examples of stunning design projects using a variety of imagery and typography. Pages are filled with hundreds of large, full-color layout concepts and diagrams that educate and inspire. After mastering the grid, discover how to break it using conceptual designs that deconstruct and flip the grid successfully. Split, splice, and shift; create spontaneous compositions; make narrative constructs; work on an axis; use intuitive design; and more to create unique layouts or other projects. See ideas in action with eye-catching layout examples. With this book you will: learn how grids work. be inspired to explore new concepts for using—or not using—grids. discover achievable alternatives for boring layouts. get the results you want using fresh design elements. learn designers’ processes via fascinating case studies. see numerous examples of successful layouts created with and without grids. communicate ideas effectively using visual language. This new, expanded edition presents the most comprehensive, accessible, in-depth exposition of layout concepts ever published.
[Grid Matrix] is the first publication in the Screen Arts and New Media Aesthetics series, a series of exhibitions and publications that explore the interpenetration of different screens of representation in contemporary culture--from the canvas to the computer terminal, the cinema to the television set, the video monitor to the museum wall, the book page to the cell phone display. This series probes the aesthetic uses and historical dimensions of contemporary screen culture and sheds light on how different artists make use of newer media and technologies, how the rise of the digital impacts dominant codes of art, culture, and experience, and how today's screens open alternate windows on the past, present, and future. [Grid Matrix] traces two different but closely related modes oforganizing the visible world and its aesthetic representations. In analog cultures, the notion of the grid empowers the production of images that claim universal authority. Most often static in nature, grid-like structures, spaces, and images approach the viewer as immediately recognizable and hence devoid of unwanted surprises. Digitally-based matrices, by way of contrast, set the modernist grid into motion. They have the ability to catalyze visual expressions and experiences that, in spite of their algorithmic foundations, aim at open-ended and often unpredictable transformation. Grid and matrix, as presented in this exhibition, form a central dialectic of modernist and postmodernist culture. Featuring two essays, one by each of the exhibition curators, the publication's aim is not to tell a story of linear historical progress, but to explore continuities and ruptures between the analog and the digital, between the organizational principles of older and newer media. [Grid Matrix] includes artwork by Theo van Doesburg, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Piet Mondrian, Agnes Martin, Andy Warhol, John F. Simon, Jr., Andreas Gursky, Albert Oehlen, Jeffrey Shaw, and Julius Popp, among others. Essays by co-curators Sabine Eckmann, Ph.D., director and chief curator at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, and Lutz Koepnick, Ph.D., professor of German, Film, and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
"A collection of essays examining how patterns of use and attitudes to green spaces within Penn's city plan and along the Schuylkill informed notions of place from the time of Philadelphia's founding to the formation of the modern Fairmount Park system in the mid-19th century"--Provided by publisher.
