This is the first accessible collection of interdisciplinary scholarship that expands on gridded modalities, with a strong affinity to the arts. It strives to inspire new avenues of research by exploring a new horizon of gridded relationships among humans, between humans and the environment, and between human and non-human actors. By bringing together philosophical and more applicable themes, it illustrates how a multifaceted genealogy of the "grid" can operate as an exercise in grasping its inherent complexity and incomplete quality. Built as a collective effort made 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 that reflect a change of thought.

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.

A vibrant guide to the artistic, cultural, and social faces of the new media.

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.

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.

"This catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibition Sol LeWitt: the well-tempered grid, Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, September 15-December 9, 2012."

Agnes MartinÕs (1912Ð2004) celebrated grid paintings are widely acknowledged as a touchstone of postwar American art and have influenced many contemporary artists. MartinÕs formative years, however, have been largely overlooked. In this revelatory study of MartinÕs early artistic production, Christina Bryan Rosenberger demonstrates that the rapidly evolving creative processes and pictorial solutions Martin developed between 1940 and 1967 define all her subsequent art. Beginning with MartinÕs initiation into artistic language at the University of New Mexico and concluding with the reception of her grid paintings in New York in the early 1960s, Rosenberger offers vivid descriptions of the networks of art, artists, and information that moved between New Mexico and the creative centers of New York and California in the postwar period. She also documents MartinÕs exchanges with artists including Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, Georgia OÕKeeffe, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Rothko, among others. Rosenberger uses original analysis of MartinÕs art, as well as a rich array of archival materials, to situate MartinÕs art within the context of a dynamic historical moment. With a lively, innovative approach informed by art history and conservation, this fluidly written book makes a substantial contribution to the history of postwar American art.