THE GRID

[version]

THE GRID feels almost like too trendy too onthenose a thematic but I am also struggling to think up specifics

I think the key questions are whether it's possible to accurately conceive of the grid from within it, whether it's entirely top down or whether we all help construct it, and whether it's too rigid and simplistic a model to really be useful in the first place.

 

[sus]

Vis-a-vis the Blake thread getting bumped

Note that Urizen is holding a carpenter's square (or architect's tool), one of his primary tools alongside the GRIDDED NET.

Note that the carpenter's square is a device for creating RIGHT ANGLES

He is usually depicted as a bearded old man; he sometimes bears architect's tools, to create and constrain the universe; or nets, with which he ensnares people in webs of law and conventional society.

 

[sus]

The carpenter's square, then, like a Roman groma:

The groma allowed projecting right angles and straight lines and thus enabling the centuriation (setting up of a rectangular grid)

The groma was used for CENTURIATON: a 10x10 space, cf @sufi's "Powers Of Ten" (Eames) reference

The surveyor first identified a central viewpoint, the umbilicus. He then took up his position there and, looking towards the west, defined the territory with the following names:

• ultra, the land he saw in front of him;
• citra, the land behind him;
• dextera, the land to his right;
• sinistra, the land to his left

He then traced the grid using an instrument known as a groma, tracing two road axes perpendicular to each other:

• the first, generally oriented east–west, was called decumanus maximus, which was traced taking as reference the place where the sun rose in order to know exactly where east was;[7]
• the second, with a north–south orientation, was called cardo maximus.

I was in Turin, early May, and the groma held: Via Garibaldi still the Decumanus

 

[sus]

Compare the quartered-world of the Inkan Empire, which is "drunken" and "asymmetrical":

"At the heart of the new [Inkan city of] Qosqo was the plaza of Awkaypata, 625 feet by 550 feet, carpeted almost in its entirety with white sand carried in from the Pacific and raked daily by the city's army of workers. Monumental villas and temples surrounded the space on three sides, their walls made from immense blocks of stone so precisely cut and fit that Pizarro's younger cousin Pedro, who accompanied the conqueror as a page, reported 'that the point of a pin could not have been inserted in one of the joints.' Across their facades ran enormous plates of polished gold. When the alpine sun filled Awkaypata, with its boldly delineated horizontal plain of white sand and sloping sheets of gold, the space became an amphitheater for the exaltation of light. In Pachakuti's grand design, Awkaypata was the center of the empire—and the cosmos. From the great plaza radiated four highways that demarcated the four asymmetrical sectors into which he divided the empire, Tawantinsuyu, 'Land of the Four Quarters... Awkaypata... was the center of the universe'."

...So too did a "drunken spiderweb" of crooked spiritual lines lead out from Qosqo's center, each leading to holy sites and shrines. "To keep track of the florid abundance of shrines and lines, [the Spanish Jesuit Bernabé] Cobo observed, the empire 'had more than a thousand men in the city of Qosqo who did nothing but remember these things.'"

Charles Mann, 1491

 

[version]

The carpenter's square looks like a Bigfin squid.

Bigfin squid - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[sus]

The basic layout for a WALLED GARDEN, or a ROMAN CAMP, is thus

a SQUARE with a CENTER

the SQUARE consists of WALLS that protect the GARDEN

there is a GATE at each cardinal direction (NEWS), that is, in the middle of each of the square's line-segments

these GATES allow two roads to cross the square and form a CROSSROADS at the GARDEN's CENTER

at the CROSSROADS is a FORUM

resources are brought in from the PERIPHERY to the CENTER, to be traded in the FORUM

they are then dispersed back to the PERIPHERY from the CENTER

 

[version]

The political compass.

 

[version]

 

[Murphy]

Nets are as archaic as stone tools

 

[woops]

paolozzi's newton at the British library

 

[woops]

captain flinders at Euston station just down the road

 

[Murphy]

more archaecore - on-land animal traps but fish weirs funnelled catch into various traps too, Mesolithic Jutland is rich in finds of the latter

grids remind me of my grans knitting (of all things, at least in the depths of memory), the tiptap of stitching lines into grids into new colours into broader schemes of hats, jumpers, scarfs, action man gear (awww) their details ie all the little licks they’d add slowly seeing cross-stitching expand into another psychedelic shape altogether, usually on a rainy holiday afternoon sat in a pub

 

[Benny Bunter]

Vis-a-vis the Blake thread getting bumped

Note that Urizen is holding a carpenter's square (or architect's tool), one of his primary tools alongside the GRIDDED NET.

Note that the carpenter's square is a device for creating RIGHT ANGLES

Note the contrast of constraining, oppressive rigid square net with the beautiful harmonic perfection of circular shapes, as in that guillen poem i posted earlier.

 

[woops]

note also the beauty of the circle described in the poem @okzharp posted the other day

 

[woops]

what surprised me in that poem was that i had heard the story of giotto drawing a circle freehand. i had to look it up but that was in the twelfth century. the poem seemed to refer to a nineteenth century episode.

???

 

[Benny Bunter]

note also the beauty of the circle described in the poem @okzharp posted the other day

You have the contrast with the rigid square there as well. Before the circle artist came, the king was "Father of order and oil and frame"

 

[woops]

We are still trying to square the circle

 

[Murphy]

 

[tobyshooters]

On nested grids, residual grids... the first one is really beautiful example, clickthrough to twitter for the video
(1) Canvas of Kings Map Maker
(2)

(3) Color streets by orientation

If you color streets by orientation, you can see how the city is built.

The direction of the road is sometimes slightly different between neighboring towns. I painted the s

mitsuchi.net

Crayon The Grids – Maps Of Street Layouts Colored By Orientation

www.datapointed.net

City Street Orientations around the World – Geoff Boeing

 

[line b]

Since you are now Chicago's leading Wake scholar, what do you think the Wake has to say about grids and schemas?

This is maybe only sort of related but there's an interest in America as sort of the spawn of The Grid vis a vis world flattening capitalism. America being the sort of infinitely dense mass creating capitals black hole sucking everything into its 'wake' and paradoxically also seemingly the one space for potential outside extant Grid