The ubiquitous presence of the grid.

Hi, here some notes about one of the projects, I’m just copying and pasting from my word document:

Grid designs are inherent to maps, urban spaces, and agricultural tracts and the layouts of buildings, streets, and highways; the rectilinear shape of industrial products offer further evidence of the grid’s ubiquitous presence.
Rectilinear systems of spatial division, based on the shape of monitor screens and the organization of information presented on them, also increasingly determine the visual environment. The computerization of much of the world has resulted in momentous changes in how we perceive our physical surroundings. This digital remapping has meant a marked increase in the impact of grid based systems on daily life. Although many of the connections taking place through information technology are invisible, they can nevertheless be visualized in terms of the pathways along which information travels.
From morning commutes – whether in car moving along a highway, a high speed train on a magnetic rail, or even a walk through the grid of city streets – all the way to the last check of our emails at night, we involve ourselves in a limitless , overlapping network of grids, which act in obvious or hidden ways to order our movements, our work, our thoughts, our leisure time, and probably our dreams. Since most people are not pleased to see themselves locked into overlapping systems of straight lines and right angles, many grids are hidden.
The first significant impact of the design of the grid in Western civilization took place during the Italian Renaissance, with the introduction of perspectival illusion, by developing the visual convention of one or two points located at an imaginary distance, from which all subsequent renderings of space would derive. Once the grid was laid over the frontal picture plane, with objects and people located at a measurable distance between the viewer and the point on the distant horizon from which space appeared to move forward, the precise ordering of space according to tools of measurement was suddenly possible, and illusionistic perspective quickly became a universal convention.
The grid slowly evolved from a device used to aid in creating an illusion of space to a system imposed upon space itself.
The universality of the grid was matched by its relative invisibility as a tool that imposed its own priorities and values.
Avant-garde movements in Russia, The Netherlands, and France focused on the grid, so to speak of its utilitarian function. In the years prior to WW1 in particular, the grid was embraced as a symbol of the modern era.
Malevich developed a philosophy around the square, the proliferation of forms representing a kind of absolute rationality were converted into a nearly mystical system for depicting the unseen structure of the world.
The de-natured grid, removed from the context of spatial representation and transformed into a basis for artistic investigations into a new category of plastic, non referential space, defined the way most geometric abstraction was practiced during the twentieth century.

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