THE GRID

[sus]

BASIC GRID FORMS
+ Addition, combination, intersection (as in streets, rivers; a site of forums and fairs)
x Multiplication, tabled rows and columns
T Post-and-lintel architecture, compressive strength, the crossbeam, pier/stanchion/girder
✝ Cross & crucifix, flesh made into the shape of the grid (which kills the flesh)

COMPLEX GRID FORMS
Ladder: Tool for ascent, closer to God & Heavens, see Wittgenstein's Tractatus
Prison Bars: Confining, echoed in inmate stripes 'jamas, see also the FISH NET
Bridge: Elevated pilon-supported plane, crossing ovr chasm
Crosshair/Compass Rose: World-quartering, see also the Roman GROMA
Ribcage: Support structure for spongey internal organs

 

[sus]

There's a great and very sad bit at the start of Against the Day (Pynchon) where some of the characters fly over Chicago during the World's Fair in 1893 and observe this sort of process from above:

“Beneath the rubbernecking Chums of Chance wheeled streets and alleyways in a Cartesian grid, sketched in sepia, mile on mile. "The Great Bovine City of the World," breathed Lindsey in wonder. Indeed, the backs of cattle far outnumbered the tops of human hats. From this height it was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past, had often witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in everchanging cloudlike patterns across the Western plains, here saw that unshaped freedom being rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn through the final gate that led to the killing-floor.”​

there's a lot to be said for going outside of the grid. we all know the grid i think and it feels like it's getting more rigid than ever. more optimised. it doesn't need to be a black and white thing where you find a plan for doing it forever. maybe that would be better idk. but these little windows where you interact with the world in a different way are at a minimum fun, at maximum instructive and profound. there's a similarity with psychedelics i think. i don't think it's escapism. i think it's the opposite actually. it's very focused

there's this related thing of: what are we doing to our consiousnesses. the affects of what we spend our time doing. grid-life has to be very finely honed in most cases. getting the money and accommodation to line up, and organizing your life to be in a physical and mental state to perform at work.

radiohead are interesting in that they are grid-people and are primarily for grid-people but they hint at something outside of it

they had a thing going on for the first five albums where they were grid criticisers. they dropped all that for emotional capture and explication as time went on. turning inwards - auto-everything really. but for a while they sounded like they wanted out, or at least, that's what the music was heading towards.

 

[sus]

This is different from the OPTIMISATION thread

This is about the Taoist paradox/simultaneity in which a grid at once seems to (1) imprison and limit (2) enable and afford

A train couldn't go anywhere without its rails

But you might forgive it for feeling stuck and starting to blame the track

And we could say the same about a vine as it climbs a trellis, grasping into empty air

 

[sus]

I think I saw this attitude first in Maggie Nelson's Argonauts, when I encountered this view, back in college. That language (and 'structure' more broadly) was poisoning or corrosive. Not just a limited power, as all powers are limited. Not a capacity that enables us to do lots of stuff but is maybe sometimes inappropriately overused. But as something actively corrosive. "The fall is in language." The way we (and many others) seem to talk about e.g. smartphones here.

It seems related too to the anti-boundary, cosmic consciousness aspect of counterculture. Dissolve the borders, which are only ever oppressive. Language being in some ways "discrete" technologies, versus body language which is "continuous" and therefore does not provoke countercultural ire.

In many ways, I think this pro/anti attitude toward boundaries is the best synopsis what separates mainstream from counterculture

 

[version]

Someone once told me they felt 2C-B was a 'mathematical' drug because when they took it they saw luminous green grids everywhere. I never tried it properly, so I've always wondered whether that sort of visual was common or whether that person's particular trip was influenced by their knowing the drug was synthetic and it having a name like '2C-B' rather than acid or magic mushrooms.

They could have been bullshitting or misremembering too.

 

[version]

Can't remember whether it was Pynchon or Virilio, but one of them talked about ICBMs and satellites turning the sky into a grid.

 

[sus]

I think you can get geometrizing, compressive vision like that on many/most psychedelics, but yes

I think the key word here is compressive, ie simulated summaries, simplifications

 

[sus]

Early 20th C Italian stainedglass artists have a geometrizing eye that appeals to me. But they are complex crystalline shards that tile like tesseracts. Not the kinderschooler crosshatch.

 

[sus]

Can't remember whether it was Pynchon or Virilio, but one of them talked about ICBMs and satellites turning the sky into a grid from which you could be got at anywhere on Earth.

From a man who wrote about longitude/latitude lines, nonetheless

 

[sus]

There's a book on the design and imposition of Manhattan's grid system that is supposed to be good

The Net: something you travel across, something you're caught in. The plane of reality you exist in.

The codelike schema, translating inputs into outputs, that a legal code or bureaucracy requires.

 

[sus]

Simple cybernetic phototropism can climb a trellis, and we are that sunseeker

 

[Murphy]

Neanderthal



date unknown, Australia, def aboriginal



Early humans Australia again




Ohio, date unknown but has to be very early human population



Early-Modern Britain

https://www.discogs.com/artist/5081-The-Grid?srsltid=AfmBOopQcq7wvhyG5TXCe-HoL-uZklVX5sDKGmGY8wmI0NPGFIAJ8XnH

 

[version]

The most visible grid at present is probably the one people are viewing photos in on their phones/Insta.

 

[Murphy]

National Grid

Connecting people to the energy they use safely, reliably and efficiently.

www.nationalgrid.com

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Off+grid

 

[sus]

Grids in the ruled notebook

Grids in the topological models

Grids in the game-engine

Grids in the pixelated screen

 

[sus]

Grids in the scaffolded tower

 

[sus]

All structure that is concerned with conserving or harnessing energy (work) is infrastructure… Anyone involved in the production of structure, insofar as it is not pathological or “for its own sake”—anyone involved in the contestation of structure, the restructuring and even destructuring of structure—is concerned with managing the world’s energy flows...

Clocks and calendars—archetypal forms of temporal structure. All coordinate and synchronize—man with the natural world; man with man... Energy is saved, and energy-saving structure produced, through measurement...

Capital (structure) is built using surplus energy… As the amount of surplus energy available increases, the system’s capacity for producing structure increases in turn…

 

[sus]

Metal grid versus jungle vine seems to be a very important symbolic duo (like the snake and the eagle).

You see it in the garden trellis, or the vineyard. You see it in the postapocalyptic skyscraper.

 

[woops]

dissensus has definitely changed because once upon a time the second post in this thread would have mentioned the sequencer grid, then someone else would have brought up burial

 

[Murphy]