The Arts of the Grid: Interdisciplinary Insights on Gridded Modalities in Conversation with the Arts 9783110733228, 9783110738063

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The Arts of the Grid

The Arts of the Grid Interdisciplinary Insights on Gridded Modalities in Conversation with the Arts Edited by Liora Bigon and Nava Shaked

ISBN 978-3-11-073806-3 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-073322-8 Library of Congress Control Number: 2021940903 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover illustration: Brit Shaked, “The Grid of Eden” (courtesy of the artist) Typesetting: Rüdiger Kern, Berlin Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, Fuji JetPress 750S www.degruyter.com

Content Foreword: On Grids and Networks — XI Acknowledgements — XV Liora Bigon and Nava Shaked 1 Introduction ‒ The Arts of the Grid: Interdisciplinary Insights on Gridded Modalities in Conversation with the Arts — 1 Leonie Bradbury 2 The Networked Artwork: The Grid as Dynamic Relational Form? — 22

Part I: Planting and Planning the Grid Renato Leão Rego 3 The Grid Specialized: Practical Town Planning, Artistic Features, and Natural Settings in Twentieth-Century Brazilian New Towns — 40 Shaoqian Zhang 4 Centrifugal or Processional: Divine and Mundane Power in Ancient Chinese Funeral Grids — 54 Liora Bigon and Eric Ross 5 Globalizing Senegal’s Grid-Plan Legacies in Light of Islamic Studies, World History and Urban Studies — 70

Part II: Generating Grids of Computational Arts Sagit Alkobi Fishman 6 Between Technological and Aesthetic Grids: Philosophical Challenges Posed by AI Artists — 84 Josef (Seppo) Gründler 7 Sounds in Grid: History and Development of Grid-Based Musical Interfaces and their Rooting in Sound, Interaction and Screen Design — 97 Frank Bauer 8 On Grids of Contemporary Art Production: A Convergence of Artistic, Computational, Craft and Performative Making — 109

Part III: Kinetic Grids: Bridging, Digging, Floating Francesca Orestano 9 Searching for the Grid at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century: When Art and Science Shared their Fragments — 128 Yoël Tawil 10 Depth as Grid: An Improvisational Actor’s Perspective — 143 Lara D. Nielsen 11 How to Do Things with Grids: Anarchitectures of Navigability — 157

Part IV: Grids of Learning: Linguistic, Virtual, Visual Nava Shaked 12 The Linguistics Relation in the Virtual Grid: A Digital Dialogue — 178 Tom Peeters, Kristof Timmerman, Jeroen Cluckers, Stephen Hargreaves 13 Storytelling in Virtual Reality: A Multidisciplinary and Immersive Experience using Grid Methodology for Students — 193 Debora Marchak and Inna Shvarts-Serebro 14 The Multidisciplinary Learning Grid: A Conceptual Space to Develop Neuropedagogy-based, Arts-integrated Chemistry Activities — 204 Andreas Zehetner and Liora Bigon 15 Concluding Remarks: Grids of Light, Darkness, and Intermediate Shades — 225 About the Contributors — 232 About the Participant Artists — 238

List of Illustrations Figure 1.1 Deganit Stern Schocken, Grid, silver, cotton yarn and gems, 2020 (courtesy of the artist). Figure 1.2 The poster advertised by the RATP (Aramis’s company: Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens), entitled “Darwin was right” (drawn by the editors with amendments after Latour 1996, 159). Figure 1.3 Emma Margarita Erenst, When Cyborgs Dance, A Short Movement, sewing, 3D printing, laser cutting, 2020 (courtesy of the artist). Figure 1.4 Sharon Murro, Present Absentee, imprint, 2020 (courtesy of the artist). Figure 1.5 Igor Revelis (Klone), a detail of A Study of Personal vs. Collective Memory, acrylic and spray-paint on canvas, 2020 (courtesy of the artist). Figure 2.1 Installation view. Franklin Evans, juddrules, Montserrat Gallery, 2014 (courtesy of Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA). Figure 2.2 Detail. Franklin Evans, juddrules, 2014 (courtesy of Bethany Acheson Photography, Montserrat College of Art). Figure 2.3 Detail. Franklin Evans, juddrules, 2014 (courtesy of Bethany Acheson Photography, Montserrat College of Art). Figure 2.4 Detail. Franklin Evans, juddrules, 2014 (courtesy of Bethany Acheson Photography, Montserrat College of Art). Figure 2.5 Detail. Franklin Evans, juddrules, 2014 (courtesy of Bethany Acheson Photography, Montserrat College of Art). Figure 2.6 Detail. Franklin Evans, juddrules, 2014 (courtesy of Bethany Acheson Photography, Montserrat College of Art). Figure 3.1 Regional planning and town layout in northern Paraná, 1934‒1936. From left, the cities of Rolândia, Arapongas, Cambé and Londrina (Source: Museu da Imigração do Estado de São Paulo). Figure 3.2 Layout of Tamboara, 1947, civil engineer Alexandre Gutierrez Beltrão, partially modified in 1969 (Source: Prefeitura Municipal de Tamboara). Figure 3.3 Layout of Maringá, 1945–1947, civil engineer Jorge de Macedo Vieira (Source: Museu da Bacia do Paraná). Figure 3.4 Aerial view of Ivaiporã, 1980, civil engineer Yaroslau Sessak (Source: Instituto de Terras, Cartografia e Geografia do Paraná, http://www.geo.pr.gov.br/ms4/itcg/geo.html). Figure 3.5 Layout of Angélica, 1954, architect Jorge Wilheim (Source: Casa da Arquitectura). Figure 3.6 Layout of Sinop (revised 1979), architect Alfredo Clodoaldo de Oliveira Neto (Source: Colonizadora SINOP). Figure 3.7 Aerial view of Palmas (detail, 2020), 1989, architects Luiz Fernando Cruvinel Teixeira and Walfredo Antunes de Oliveira Filho (Source: Apple Maps). Figure 4.1 Aerial view of the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum and Park in the 1930s (image in public domain). Figure 4.2 The Plan of the Changling Tomb of the Ming Dynasty. 1. Front Gate; 2. Stele Pavilion; 3. Main Gate; 4. Paper Burner; 5. Sacrificial Hall; 6. Inner Gate; 7. Pai-Lou; 8. Incense Table; 9. Square Bastion; 10. Radiant Tower; 11. Retaining Wall; 12. Tumulus (image redrawn by Feiling Jia after Liang 2011, 749). Figure 4.3 Reconstruction of the Zhou Ancestral Temple Complex for the emperor by Jiao Xun 焦循 (1763–1820), from Qunjing gongshi tu 群 經宮室圖, in Sancai tuhui 三才圖會,and copied in various other texts (ancient image in public domain). Figure 4.4 Ariel view of the Forbidden City, as example of processional grid (Google Earth image). Figure 4.5 Ariel view of the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor (Google Earth image). Figure 4.6 Tomb pit with earthenware burial army, tomb of the First Emperor of Qin (author’s photo).

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Figure 4.7 Burial site based on the Zhao-mu System with Mingtang as the center (source: Wang Zhu (997‒1057), Dili xinshu, ancient image in public domain). Figure 4.8 Plan of the Gongling, Tomb of Li Hong (653‒675) of the Tang Dynasty (618‒907). 1. Entrance Gate; 2. Funeral Site Boundaries; 3. Burial Mound and Sacrificial Altar (i.e., Survey Record of the Gongling of the Tang Dynasty), compiled by Institute of Archaeology – Henan Branch, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in Kaogu 1986, 458). Figure 4.9 The Hall of the Great Harmony in the Forbidden City (photo courtesy of Gao Tian). Figure 4.10 The Sacrificial Hall of the Changling Tomb of the Ming Dynasty (photo courtesy of Jia Bin). Figure 5.1 Current plan of Diakhao, historic capital of the Kingdom of Sine (drawn by Eric Ross based on Google Earth satellite image). Figure 5.2 Current plan of the early nineteenth-century clerical town of Ndanq in Cayor (drawn by Eric Ross based on Google Earth satellite image). Figure 5.3 Current plan of the Tijaniyya-Mahdiyya shrine-town of Tiénaba Seck (drawn by Eric Ross based on Google Earth satellite image). Figure 5.4 A streetview in the center of Tiénaba A streetview in the center of Tiénaba (photo by Liora Bigon, 2018). Figure 5.5 Engraving of Fort Saint-Joseph of Galam on the bank of the Senegal River, 1745 (in public domain). Figure 5.6 View of the orthogonal layout of old Saint Louis’ city center (photo by Liora Bigon, 2014). Figure 5.7 A streetscape from the colonial escale of Tivaouane (photo by Liora Bigon, 2018). Figure 5.8 A main artery in Fatick’s old escale (photo by Liora Bigon, 2018). Figure 5.9 View of an intersection in the colonial grid-planned African quarter of Médina in Dakar, planned in 1914 (the size of the blocks there is much smaller than in the ajascent expatriate quarter of the Plateau, and population density is much higher) (photo by Liora Bigon, 2014). Figure 5.10 Map of residential allotments in Touba, showing the old-style regular grid of Darou Khoudoss (eastern section of map) of the 1970s and the transition to the Dakar-style “H” and “T” “degenerate grid” adopted in Madiyana neighborhood (western section) in the 1980s (drawing by Eric Ross). Figure 5.11 The ancestral jujube bush on the left, in the Lebou pénc of Thieudéme, Dakar’s city center (photo by Liora Bigon, 2018). Figure 6.1 Portrait of Edmond de Belamy created by the Paris-based collective Obvious using an AI algorithm (used with permission, courtesy of Obvious). Figure 6.2 GAN’s algorithmic framework; the training phase of a discriminator and a generator (author’s drawing). Figure 6.3 A simplified schematic illustration of a reversed CNN serving as a generator and a CNN serving as a discriminator. The grids manifest partial connectivity that suffices when dealing with data consisting of visual imagery (author’s drawing). Figure 7.1 Ascii Tabulature (author’s image). Figure 7.2 MIR Control Panel (author’s image). Figure 7.3 Pure Data Help Patch (author’s image). Figure 7.4 Steinberg Pro 16 (author’s image). Figure 7.5 Ableton Live (author’s image). Figure 7.6 8x8 Monome (author’s image). Figure 8.1 Nevin Aladağ, Resonator Wind, 2019, D 80 × 80 × 100 cm, brass, bamboo cane, mouthpieces of different wind instruments, various metals (photo by Trevor Good, courtesy of Nevin Aladağ and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021). Figure 8.2 Nevin Aladağ, Table Santouri, 2017, wood, strings, Santouri mechanism, two ornamental plates in horn, D 58.5 × 77.5 cm, Music Room, Athens (photo by Trevor Good, courtesy of Nevin Aladağ and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021).

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Figure 8.3 RESONATOR_II_F, preliminary working rendering of Nevin Aladağ, Resonator Wind, 2019 by Büro Vogel Bauer GbR (courtesy of Nevin Aladağ). Figure 8.4 Interior structure of Nevin Aladağ, Resonator Wind, 2019, fabrication by Ertl und Zull GbR (courtesy of Nevin Aladağ). Figure 8.5 Mouthpiece fitting in the workshop, fabrication process of Nevin Aladağ, Resonator Wind, 2019 (courtesy of Nevin Aladağ). Figure 8.6 Mouthpiece detail of Nevin Aladağ, Resonator Wind, 2019 (photo by Trevor Good, courtesy of Nevin Aladağ and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021). Figure 8.7 Sound experiment with Nevin Aladağ, Resonator Wind, 2019, exhibition “New Work: Nevin Aladağ”, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2019‒2020 (photo by Katherine Du Thiel, courtesy of Nevin Aladağ and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2021). Figure 9.1 Plan of the Crystal Palace (image in public domain). Figure 9.2 Crystal Palace, design and plan by Joseph Paxton (image in public domain). Figure 9.3 A version of Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table (image in public domain). Figure 9.4 Paul Cézanne, Apples, 1878 (image in public domain). Figure 9.5 Altamira, bison (image in public domain). Figure 9.6 Heinrich Wölfflin, art lecture with two magic lanterns (image in public domain). Figure 10.1 Depth as grid (author’s illustration). [A] Anthropology studies; [B] Playback/ theatre basics; [C] Western psychology/mind/speech; [D] Body /biology /movement; [E] The animal world ‒ “humans as animals”; [F] Humanities (theology/ history /multiculturalism; [G] Philosophy and ethics – “humans as machines”; [H] Entrepreneurship ‒ interdisciplinary dialogue across a horizontal grid; [I] Other professions. Figure 11.1 Death by Rescue Report 1, 2017 (courtesy of Forensic Oceanography). Figure 11.2 Death by Rescue Report 2, 2017 (courtesy of Forensic Oceanography). Figure 12.1 Circles (author’s draw). Figure 12.2 Language characteristics comparison (source: author). Figure 12.3 Time line for IM platforms (source: author’s draw). Figure 12.4 Gaming terms (based on Slangit 2021, online source). Figure 12.5 Technology platforms for interaction (source: author). Figure 12.6 Types of interactive virtual dialogue – an illustration of possible qualities of different virtual entities in the virtual world (source: author). Figure 12.7 Effects of globalization on the Hebrew language (source: author). Figure 12.8 Emoji palette (source: courtesy of Shutterstock). Figure 12.9 Meme examples (images courtesy of Shutterstock and in public domain). Figure 12.10 The fusion of grids (source: author). Figure 13.1 A multidisciplinary grid (authors’ image). Figure 14.1 Schematic diagram of the three-dimensional conceptual space of the neuropedagogy-based, arts-integrating, chemistry learning grid (figure made by Debora Marchak and Inna Shvarts-Serebro). Figure 14.2 Schematic diagram of the chemistry triplet illustrating the macroscopic, submicroscopic, and symbolic levels of understanding in chemistry in relation to the combustion reaction of methane (figure made by Debora Marchak). Figure 14.3 Schematic diagram of a simplified model of information processing based on the model of David A. Sousa (figure made by Debora Marchak and Inna Shvarts-Serebro). Figure 14.4 Diagram illustrating the three-activity sequence of image appreciation and application of content and skills by one of the modalities of the “From Art to Chemistry” methodology (figure made by Debora Marchak. The figure includes: (a) a detail from Wassily Kandinsky’s artwork “Free Curve to the Point ‒ Accompanying Sound of Geometric Curves”, 1925, in public domain; (b) a representation of Beta Decay, in public domain; and (c) a shorter version of a worksheet developed by Debora Marchak and Milka Nussbaum).

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Figure 14.5 Conceptual plot depicting the version of image appreciation technique developed by the “From Art to Chemistry” methodology (figure made by Debora Marchak). Figure 14.6 Schematic diagram of the “5 3 1” modality developed by the “From Art to Chemistry” methodology (figure made by Debora Marchak. It includes Vincent van Gogh’s artwork: “The Starry Night”, 1889, in public domain). Figure 14.7 Students’ learning outcomes from the activity “The Material Museum of the Chemists” developed by the “From Chemistry to Craft” methodology (figure made by Debora Marchak, based on her photos: “Wood”, “Metal House”, “Soaps”, and “Talk Flowers”; and on photos shared by students and used with their permission: “Dinosaur”, “Metal Tree”, “Diamonds”, and “Graphite”). Figure 14.8 Schematic diagram of the three-dimensional conceptual space of the neuropedagogy-based, arts-integrating, chemistry learning grid including examples of the components of each dimension (figure made by Debora Marchak and Inna Shvarts-Serebro). Figure 15.1 Lior Ben-Gai, Hexagliders 2.0, WebGL, 2020 (courtesy of the artist). Figure 15.2 MS PowerPoint’s “Grid and Guides” menu (Microsoft PowerPoint, in public domain). Figure 15.3 The nine-dot-problem (image in public domain).

Foreword: On Grids and Networks The “grid” and the “network” have become pivotal notions in a wide variety of areas of research and creation. The present volume constitutes indisputable evidence of this trend. It is truly amazing that the same structural concepts are shared by such an abundance of fields as modern art, urban planning, the creator’s role in aesthetics, music, computer-aided design and production, acting, cinema art, verbal interaction, and virtual reality. This collection of essays will most probably challenge many researchers to fine-tune the grid aspects common to the varied multiplicity of fields, and will open new venues to promote them. It corresponds, though not directly or too strictly, with the international conference entitled “The Multidisciplinary Grid 2020” that took place in November 2020 at HIT – Holon Institute of Technology (an institution of which both the Editors and I are members). The conference, organized by the Department of Multidisciplinary Studies, was aimed at exploring the “grid” as a cross-disciplinary theme. It strove to explore a new horizon of relationships and fusion of the “grids”, and to foster a fruitful dialogue concerning gridded interpretations among researchers, practitioners, and artists.1 Although a distinction between the grid and the network may not be mandatory-and the present collection further blurs and softens the boundaries between them – it is still tempting to somewhat elaborate on potentially different emphases. These varied emphases, or focal points, may promote a better understanding of the foundations and the discovery of new potential directions, which might be of interest to experts in many diverse areas. The following remarks point to this path in conversation between exact sciences, applied science, fine arts, and humanities. As a mathematician, I admit to a slight and quite expected bias towards the first two of these areas. Mathematicians seem to have started dealing with these structures in the seventeenth century, specifically through ideas expressed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz –a world-renowned mathematician, contemporary of Isaac Newton. Many consider Leonhard Euler’s 1736 paper, “The Seven Bridges of Königsberg” (which provided a systematic solution to a popular puzzle), to be the starting point of what is presently known as “Graph Theory.” In the formal, abstract-cum-precise language of mathematics, a graph is a set of objects referred to as “vertices”, together with a prescribed set of pairs from among these vertices, referred to as “edges.” Many would realize this notion as a set of points in a plane with lines connecting a number of pairs from among those points. A “graph” is therefore an abstract notion: more than what is actually considered in a graph are the aspects that are not of issue; essentially, it has nothing to do with graphics. The location of vertices is not significant, and so are the geometrical properties – straight or curved – of the edges connecting some of them;

1 For a few more words about this conference see the next Acknowledgements section.

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only the set of vertices in itself, and the existence of edges between certain pairs of vertices, are of significance. Typical issues include the following: is there a “triangle” in the graph – namely, three vertices such that each two are connected by an edge? Or, how many triangles are there? Is there an efficient algorithm to find “cliques”, that is, sets of vertices in which every pair is connected by an edge? (Note that a triangle is a clique of three vertices). Naturally, this abstract notion of “graph” has materialized in many different familiar contexts. For example, a set of traffic junctions and the relevant connecting roads; or a set of communication switches and the direct connections between pairs; or a group of people – say, within the nobility of some historical entity – where an “edge” indicates a parent-child relation. Nevertheless, this clear terminology helps to distinguish between the different contexts of grids and networks. A network provides the environment for investigating the performance and consequences of the relations between connected elements (vertices) in the set (graph) under study. For instance, through how many intermediate switches in a communication system a signal would have to pass in order to arrive from any given switch to another? Or, for pixels within an image, under a fixed definition of color “similarity”, what is the average length of a chain of neighboring pixels in which any two consecutive ones have a “similar” color? On the other hand, a grid – although similarly consisting of a set of elements – does not address relations between these elements. Rather, it focuses on the fact that they have been selected from a much wider set, and on the manner in which they represent, in some definite sense, that specific wider set. Very often, the original set is a continuum and the selected elements form a finite sample that makes it possible to perceive, study, process, or understand said continuum by referring to the representing grid. For instance, when Thomas Alva Edison thought about presenting moving dynamic scenes to spectators away from the site, he understood that the living scene was a continuum and that he had no way of capturing it and presenting the same continuum elsewhere. Then he came across the brilliant idea that it would suffice to capture still images of the dynamic scene with a high enough frequency – say, thirty images per second – in order to present the sequence to the spectators: he understood that this finite sample of still images would suffice to create for the spectators the perception of visualizing the real dynamic scene. The finite but quite large sample of still images is a grid whose elements have been selected from a continuum in a manner that makes them an adequate representation of the original continuum scene. Similarly, an image on a computer screen is a grid consisting of a finite sample of pixels, each providing the color of a certain point in a continuous real scene – a finite collection that generates a continuous impression. The resolution of the human eye makes this grid an adequate representation of the real continuous scene. Similarly, data obtained from a well-scattered set of meteorological measuring devices forms a grid that adequately represents the synoptic status of the area under observation. Likewise, the finite number of images captured

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by a medical CT instrument hopefully provides an understanding of the body part being examined. In all these examples, the grid serves the purpose of adequately representing a continuum by cleverly selecting a finite sample out of the latter. Studying grids has mainly to do with ways to select the grid members, analyze the representation adequacy, and come up with novel ideas for applying grids to achieve new, unprecedented insights about continua as perceived from those grids. Towards the end of the nineteenth century a movement emerged among European painters (such as George Seurat, Camille Pissarro, and Paul Signac, to mention but a few) called pointillism, which examined the ability to create a rich visual impression by providing only points of color rather than filling whole areas with continuous coloring. Echoing this idea, it is interesting to point out that the grid concept has played a significant role in applied mathematics for many decades. Applied mathematicians have paid much attention to continuous natural phenomena since early times. Archimedes, in the third century BC, went quite far in understanding hydrostatic and dynamic phenomena in fluids, as exposed in his book On Floating Bodies. In the ninth century AD, al-Biruni in Khwarazm and Bukhara together with other Moslem scientists of the period thoroughly studied the physics of fluids. In the sixteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci studied turbulent flows in great detail, brilliantly applying his results in his paintings. The dynamics of gases and fluids are very challenging computationally; the corresponding differential equations are complex and essentially hopeless. Therefore, much effort has been devoted to perform calculations on representing grids. The basic idea is to represent the continuous fluid using a sufficiently dense grid of points, each of which is accompanied by a set of physical data (e.g., location, velocity, pressure, and temperature) specific to it. Once the representative grid is created, the complicated hydrodynamics of the fluid are analyzed on it. In fact, a very significant portion of the currently known and applied physical and engineering knowledge has been achieved using this approach. An important variant in this field is the application of variable grids. The idea is to increase the density of grid points in zones where phenomena are more extreme or fast-changing, which allows a more thorough investigation of said phenomena, and to return to the previous lower density when the zone becomes less hectic. The grid concept has not evaded the field of sound and music. For many decades now, sound has been transferred in communication systems not in full, but rather as a sequence of representative samples (for example, short time-intervals) taken from the original vocal flow. To illustrate this idea, suppose that every second is divided into 40 equal 25-millisecond time-segments. Subsequently, each 1-millisecond subinterval of each segment is allocated to one particular sound source – the same millisecond subinterval in each of the 40-time segments. Thus, the listener does not receive a continuous data stream, but rather 40 discrete 1-millisecond samples of the vocal information per second. Experience shows that in this way, the human ears and brain perceive the vocal information quite adequately. At the same time, this idea enables

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the transfer of 25 sound streams simultaneously on a single communication channel. The 25 sampled milliseconds actually form a grid: a finite representation of a continuum. Another grid-related realization may be found in one of the musical streams that originated at the beginning of the twentieth century: the twelve-tone music. The idea was to impose the condition that every bar in a musical composition should include each of the twelve tones of the octave exactly once, and thus create an artistic impression. Some people would argue that this is exactly the realization of a grid: within the framework of infinitely many, or at least very numerous, possible note combinations, the composer must select individual combinations out of a defined finite set of allowed ones, while still striving to create an intended emotional impression. Apparently, this direction has not yet gained wide recognition – is it because about half of the human brain cortex is dedicated to vision, whereas only about two percent are dedicated to hearing? All the above examples serve to establish the following observations: grids and networks are formal discrete structures; their members are extracted from real continuous (and therefore infinite) entities; a network serves to study the origin entity when relations among members are the main focus of interest, whereas grids are applied when the faithfulness of the representation of the original entity by the extracted sample (rather than the relations among members) is the main issue. Can this distinction be helpful in future developments in research and creation? Is there a promise in dynamical grids? Many would say that artwork, of all sorts, is a purposeful organization of a medium with the aim of evoking an emotional impression. In this respect, the following, formally stated, challenge might be proposed: to what extent can the pieces of the organized medium under discussion be segmented, and to what extent can the emotional impression be subdivided, so that the artwork accomplishes its artistic mission in full? It is quite plausible that a deeper understanding of the roles of grids and networks may enhance future developments in many intellectual endeavors through the suitable implementation of the specific strengths of these two basic notions. Adir Pridor March 2021 Herzliya & HIT ‒ Holon Institute of Technology, Israel

Acknowledgements This book is a collection of experiences, thoughts and reflections on the fusion of disciplines around and within the arts. The idea for the book and some of its contributions are connected to the international conference, inaugurated by the Department of Multidisciplinary Studies at HIT – Holon Institute of Technology, in November 2020. “The Multidisciplinary Grid 2020” conference was aimed at examining the “grid” as a cross-disciplinary theme with a multiplicity of expressions in terms of definitions, concepts, perceptions, representations, and histories. Bridging philosophical, cultural, pedagogical, and technical issues – the conference served almost as a pretext to foster a fertile discourse about the “grid” among academics, professionals and artists.1 In all, ten speakers out of the conference’s twenty-four speakers contributed to this collection, and further ten contributors were invited by us into it. Accompanying the conference event, a digital art exhibition “Gridded (Fabric)ations” was created at HIT’s Vitrina Gallery2, where prominent artists presented their perceptions of the “grid”, and also contributed several artworks to this collection. We would like to express our gratitude to all participants of these three exciting events: the conference, the art exhibition, and this collection. We greatly appreciate your vision, eloquence and courage to get out of your comfort zone. Your agility of mind and cooperation have resulted in a high quality and holistic project. Considerable work and effort have been put into making this project possible, topped with relentless teamwork under Covid-19 conditions and uncertainties. The wonderful academic, administrative and executive staff at HIT played a crucial part in making it possible – first and foremost, with our team at the Department of Multidisciplinary Studies, not forgetting the International Office, the Marketing and PR team, the IT Center team and many others. A big thank you to Vitrina Gallery for hosting the exhibition and for the wonderful curators who designed a highly accessible digital exhibition that took us on an outstanding virtual journey to the Arts. To a special colleague, Ms. Bracha Einhorn, we owe much in the way of stamina, zeal and loyalty, and for being there for both of us whenever needed. Last but not least, good ideas need believers and partnership, so kudos to HIT’s management for giving us a chance to follow our dreams and keep reaching new academic heights. Liora Bigon, Nava Shaked The Editors

1 For further details about the conference, please visit: https://www.hit.ac.il/sites/en/grid 2 For further details about the exhibition, please visit: https://www.hit.ac.il/sites/en/grid/exhibition

Liora Bigon and Nava Shaked

1 Introduction ‒ The Arts of the Grid: Interdisciplinary Insights on Gridded Modalities in Conversation with the Arts Abstract: This introductory chapter explains the aims, purpose and guiding rationale behind this collective effort. It meets the considerable challenge of spanning the rich variety of research topics, methodologies, disciplines and fields as represented in this volume; and expands about the central role of the arts in its conceptualization and theorization. Our inclusionary and multifaceted interpretation of the “grid” has been also explained, enriched with cross-disciplinary references to relevant scholarly work about gridded imaginaries. The chapter includes several inspiring artwork images borrowed from a specialized exhibition entitled “Gridded Fabric(-ations)”, presented in the HIT interdisciplinary gallery in winter 2020. This chapter concludes by outlining the structure, content and organization of this volume. Keywords: the multidisciplinary grid; gridded modalities; the arts of the grid

Introduction In her legendary essay “Grids”, the art historian Rosalind Krauss stated that “it is safe to say that no form within the whole of modern aesthetic production has sustained itself so relentlessly while at the same time being so impervious to change” (1979a, 50). As an emblem of modernity, to take further Krauss’s characterization, the “grid” has become an inclusive term, symbolizing a broad spectrum of communication, infrastructure and digital networks that mediate between physical and virtual spaces. Grid-shaped governmentality has also constituted the basis of modern disciplinary societies (Foucault 1995), in being part of universally ubiquitous “cultural techniques of ruling spaces” (Siegert 2015, 98). At the same time, the grid has a history that long predates modernity. As Hannah Higgins argued in her transdisciplinary theory of artistic form, the “grid” has operated as an underlying form of everything from the Paleolithic brick of Mesopotamia to ancient city plans and skyscrapers, from Renaissance-painting linear perspective to electric poles and pieces of computer code (2009). Within the theory of urban sociology, as considered by Manuel Castells, the growing interaction in today’s world between “space of places” (physical) and “space of flows” (virtual), has generated complex grids “that have become the predominant organizational form of every domain of human activity” (2010, xliv). Thus, there is no single essence of the grid.

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Scholars from a wide range of disciplines ‒ humanities and social sciences, life sciences, and exact sciences ‒ have therefore studied the “grid” while linking this conceptual or physical form to the variety of their respective disciplines, contexts, and situations. Much of this work, however, remains scattered in field-specific academic journals and scholarly monographs, lacking an intra-disciplinary interaction to enhance both the “grid” and the “arts” as cross-pollination themes. Picked up almost randomly, examples of single-author or single-discipline monographs are many and eclectic in their topical coverage. They can move, inter alia, from electric energy (Bakke 2016) and computing (Kim et al. 2018; Wang et al. 2017) to urban studies (Kostof 1991; Rose-Redwood and Bigon 2018); and from business management (Watkinson 2017) to sustainable lifestyle (Vannini and Tagart 2014). Such in-depth monographs are naturally limited in their scope of expertise, thematic variance, related associations and theorization, since the gridded expressions in them operate as a metaphor that is dependent on, and rooted in, a specific disciplinary context. In trying to enhance cross-pollination among researchers, it is not enough to argue that there is no single essence of the grid, or that gridded expressions merely constitute a sort of assemblage. Such an argument brings to mind the well-known Asian parable of a group of blind men who have never came across an elephant before, and who learn about the nature of the elephant by each of them touching a different part of its body and concluding about the rest of body synecdochically. While the parable illustrates that there are many inherently limited truths and different experiences of the “grid” that necessitate a multi-dimensional approach, there are still two fundamental questions that need to be addressed: first, what is it that we expect from the “grid” in this volume given its inherent variety in form and quality? And second, consequentially, what has been our aim behind the initiation of this volume in terms of conceptual quest and scholarly contribution? Looking into the first question, we have concluded that we will not target defining the “grid.” Rather, we strive to perceive the grid as a toolbox for the creation of innovative connections and networks that would refer to a spectrum of esthetical, philosophical, technological, methodological and ethical issues. Through these networks, new possibilities can be explored, together with new conjunctions, disjunctions, challenges and constraints ‒ promoting a tripartite interface between humans, environments and machines. In this way, a comprehensive conception of the “grid” is being portrayed in this volume, which is integrated yet essentially open, containing a variety of disciplines and nodes of connections between these disciplines; and yielding a tangled web of players, interactions and dependencies. As to the second question, this volume is not merely a celebration of gridded varieties. Experimental in its approach, it is rather, as far as we are aware, the first edited collection to offer cross-, inter-, intra-, multi-, and trans- disciplinary perspectives on gridded modalities in a single volume. It is a pioneer in examining the grid as both empirical and theoretical terrain; in immersing the infra-structural and meta-structural qualities of the grid;

1 Introduction 

 3

and in revisiting the multiplicity of its perceptions, configurations, applications, histories, presents, and futures. The Arts of the Grid is intended to affect effective positioning of the “grid” that is specific enough to mean something on the one hand, and that is general enough to work across the disciplines on the other. Expanding on the book’s title and subtitle can be informative at this point, in order to capture its guiding rationale and meaning. The pairing of the words “gridded modalities” in the subtitle, implies a flexible conception of the “grid” through “modalities”, that is, through qualities or states of being that are related to structure or attitude, or through particular ways of doing or experiencing something. The term “modality” is also being associated, more or less consciously, with avenues, channels, mediums, vectors, devices, methods, and approaches; that is, with qualities that constitute, and are constituted by, gridded expressions as discussed in this volume. “Interdisciplinary insights” in the book’s subtitle attests that each of the contributors has been asked to meet two criteria. The first criterion was to present the meaning of the grid in their areas of study and its character; and the second criterion was to bind together at least two different disciplines or fields of study in a manner that their intersection will directly contribute to the enhancement of the case study, the main argument, or the understanding of the grid. In this way, the assemblage of topics, perspectives, and methodologies that is represented in the collection through the varied disciplines strives to promote a discourse between and beyond the disciplines employed. The discourse generated ‒ being created either directly by the contributors and editors, or indirectly in  the readers’ minds ‒ seeks to undermine any monolithic or fixed portrayals of the “grid” in favor of a more dynamic and polyvocal understanding. And, in conformity with the general spirit of this collection, our “conversation with the arts” is inherently flexible as well. Each of the contributors has managed to enhance the understanding of the grid in their case not only by intertwining two different disciplines, but also by at least one of these disciplines embodying an “art” or being in intense conversation with the “arts.” The “arts” can be understood as “modes of expression that use skill or imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others” (Kuiper 2020, online). This includes some traditional categories such as literature, architecture, and fine and performing arts; as well as less traditional current modes of expression, such as the creation of virtual environments and entities using digital means. Within the academia the faculty of arts constituted one of the four traditional divisions, or disciplines, of the teaching bodies of medieval European universities (apart from theology, medicine and law) (Young 2010). In many universities today the arts faculty is mixed with the humanities and social sciences, and is also identified with them. More specifically, in the context of this collection, the “arts” are represented by architecture, town planning, landscape and urban design, computational and artificial intelligence art, art history, fine art, performing and media arts, music and musical instru-

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 Liora Bigon and Nava Shaked

ments making, virtual reality design, and virtual entities design. These arts appear in this collection in combination with the humanities and social sciences, namely world history, religious studies, Islamic studies, philosophy, geography, anthropology, political economy, linguistics, and transnational and cultural studies; or in combination with more exact sciences, such as instructional technologies, chemistry, and computer science. The primary rationale behind The Arts of the Grid is therefore to provide the first accessible collection of interdisciplinary scholarship devoted to in-depth excavations

Figure 1.1: Deganit Stern Schocken, Grid, silver, cotton yarn and gems, 2020. As a schematic structure with repetitive methodical principles, the “grid”, according to the artist, expresses a tension between order and anarchy, and between a prototype (the “one-off”) and mass production. Originality and uniqueness, she argues, always rest on tradition, and the urge to say sometimes that something “has started here” is inaccurate because the gridded sequence of creativity has no beginning and no end. This sequence rather renders an illusion of uniqueness that is embodied in stopping for a moment, enframing an object or idea, and then creating an artwork before going on. In this way, one can randomly stop at any given moment, frame and focus on an object or idea within the grid’s general sequence, and continue just before stopping again. The two pieces of jewelry that are seen here constitute physical incarnations of these processual thoughts about tradition and sequence on the one hand, and about stopping and enframing on the other. Hence a dynamic encounter occurs on the silver plates between a repetitive “grid” and the “one-off” prototype, representing an endless game of possibilities, situations, tonalities and variance. The very search becomes a meaning. Stern Schocken’s artifacts correspond with the atmosphere of this volume in terms of their experimental, gamified, and somewhat cryptic qualities.

1 Introduction 

 5

and projections of gridded modalities, with a strong affinity to the arts. This is in order to inspire new avenues of research and cross-fertilization, while exploring a new horizon of relationships and fusions of the “grid” as manifested among humans, between humans and the environment, and between human and non-human actors. This collection seeks to creatively entangle philosophical and more applicable themes by bringing together scholarship covering these disciplines and fields. It illustrates how a critical and multifaceted genealogy of the “grid” ‒ built as a collective effort by nineteen researchers, practitioners and designers, and spanning disciplines in conversation with the arts ‒ can operate as an exercise in grasping the inherent complexity and incomplete quality of gridded expressions. By drawing upon a rich array of studies and by fostering a fruitful dialogue among scholars and artists, this volume promotes the understanding of gridded modalities as complex networks that are weaved in other networks in ever challenging and infinite ways. This understanding combines contrasting, complementary and comparative insights into the “grid”, including “off-the grid” situations, and is constantly dynamic, worthy of revision and further exploration. It also acknowledges the value of bringing together disciplines to interact one with each other, and through the process of interaction, to generate new meanings that reflect a change of thought (Fig. 1.1).

Aramis, or the Challenge of Gridded Interchanges “Give me the state of things, and I’ll tell you what people can do ‒ this is how technologism talks. Give me the state of human beings, and I’ll tell you how they will form things ‒ this is the watchword of sociology. But both of these maxims are inapplicable!” This is part of a conversation between Norbert, a sociology professor, and a young engineer in Bruno Latour’s celebrated fiction Aramis, or the Love of Technology (1996, 213). In these words, Norbert describes the nature of “Aramis”1, an individual transport system planned for Paris, combining the flexibility of a car with the efficiency of a railway ‒ a revolutionary project that was never realized.” For the thing we are looking for is not a human thing, nor is it an inhuman thing. It offers, rather, a continuous passage, a commerce, an interchange, between what humans inscribe in it and what it prescribes to humans”, continues Norbert (p. 213). “This thing is the nonhuman version of people, it is the human version of things, twice displaced”, he concludes, “a thing that possesses body and soul indissolubly. The soul of the machines constitutes the social element. The body of the social element is constituted by machines” (p. 213. See also Latour 1993a).

1 “Aramis” is an abbreviation of “Agencement en Rames Automatisées de Modules Indépendants dans les Stations” (Arrangement in Automated Trains of Independent Modules in Stations).

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 Liora Bigon and Nava Shaked

Figure 1.2: The poster advertised by the RATP (Aramis’s company: Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens), entitled “Darwin was right”.

A pioneer in exemplifying the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in assigning a similar role and weight to human and non-human actors in the shaping of the environment, Aramis is not merely a sociological account about the relationship between technologies and people. Its content, rather, “systematically challenges taken for granted boundaries between people and things, science and art, technology and culture, rationality and passion” (Middleton 1997, 396). Playing with the boundaries of humanities and science towards an interdependent assemblage of complexities and nuances of political agendas, management policies, engineering technicalities, economic calculations, historical evolutions, future visions and the absence of any certain visionary power behind the project ‒ we cannot be sure about the reason for Aramis’s failure. But being entangled in the networked journey offered by Latour also means being far away from the anthropocentrism of the social sciences or the technocracism of engineering. In a similar way, a considerable part of the gridded journey offered by this volume is entrapped in the two-way relationship between humans and technology, and raises some key questions as to hybrid situations. One of the images in Aramis named “Darwin was right” (Fig. 1.2), which shows an “evolution” of buses is evocative in this regard: through a typology of bus models as developed through the ages, Latour creatively presents machines as biological entities that can transform them-

1 Introduction 

 7

selves in adaptation to their environment. Moreover, according to him, this confusing evolutionary mythology is testimony “for the sometimes cruel fate to which technologies are subjected” (p. 159). In this way, there is no longer a binary opposition between the arts and sciences, and Latour’s hybrid entities operate as both agents and structures, being actors and networks at the same time, hence the Actor-Network.2 In line with the multiscopic, multi-vocal and multi-actant conception of the “grid” in this collection, Latour’s accessible and well plotted Aramis conveys no hegemonic meta-narrative, nor any total narrative about the rise or fall of this public transport system (Laurier and Philo 1999). Aramis is rather made as a brilliant puzzle of simultaneous possible explanations that are affiliated with multiple agents involved in the project, representing the complex and unstable reality of modern life. Such a splintered fable of fragmented understanding, in which the fragmentation is a value in itself, characterizes Latour’s general thought. It is not only about getting entangled in the lines of the grid, it is also about thinking “off” or “beyond” its lines, if only to discover a splintered terrain again. “Electromagnetic waves may be everywhere, but I still have to have an antenna, a subscription and a decoder if I am to get CNN (Cable News Network)”, asserts Latour. “Between the lines of the network there is, strictly speaking, nothing at all: no train, no telephone, no intake pipe, no television set” (1993b, 117, 118). Such an awareness to the seemingly “nothing” that exists between the lines of the grid recalls the contemporary French writer-explorer Philippe Vasset, who had travelled on the “white” (empty) spaces in between the official cartographic lines of the Paris map no. 2314OT of the National Geographic Institute. In these white off-thegrid non-places, however, he discovered a fertile terrain of “ruins, strange ceremonies, sometimes even a whole inverted city, populated by persons who were usually invisible” (2007, 140, our translation). In many senses, this collection is inspired by these lines of thought, entangles these lines, disentangles them, traversing them, in between them, and beyond them ‒ to connect between socio-technological hybrids, mobilities and flows that compose the fabric of life. Moreover, Latour’s conversation with the arts and particularly his engagement with contemporary art should be highlighted in the context of this volume and its interdisciplinary insights. Not only has he curated two influential international exhibitions (Latour 2002; Latour and Weibel 2005) and established at Science Po in 2010 the multidisciplinary postgraduate program for scientific, artistic and pedagogical experimentation (SPEAP); and not only his own practice of philosophical enquiry and research methods could be equated with those of contemporary artists in terms of strategies to rethink the world, its structures, and relations (Halsall 2016). But also, in an interview about the affinity between science and art, Latour pointed to the blurring of the lines between the artist and the scientist. He commented on the gradual

2 We are aware of the prominent contribution of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to the ANT, but their Neo-Spinozism is of less interest to this collection in comparison to Latour’s constructivism.

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Figure 1.3: Emma Margarita Erenst, When Cyborgs Dance, A Short Movement, sewing, 3D printing, laser cutting, 2020. Thinking of the way we interact with machines or with our smartphones for example, posits the artist, we hold them close to our bodies, almost always within our reach; but our interactions with them are limited to just a few simple repetitive gestures, for instance, scroll, drag, drop, zoom in/ out. And if machines can become an extension of our bodies and lead our fingertips to move in certain ways, could our clothing, asks Erenst, which is the closest thing to our physical body, do the same? As emerging tech starts to immerse into our lives, a need arises for new wearable interaction techniques that can be used in different scenarios, spanning physiotherapy, play, sports, performance, and communication. When Cyborgs Dance, A Short Movement tries to meet the challenge of gridded interchange between humans and machines through its presentation of a cross-disciplinary wearable art installation. Intended to explore how garment structures can be used to shape body movement, the piece exemplifies how certain patterns of movement can be embedded into garments on a human scale. It can be conceptualized as an experiment in Actor Network, by integrating tools and theories derived from data visualization, fashion media, performing arts, and wearable computing.

disappearance of the avant-garde, autonomous image of the artist or the scientist as separate from real life ‒ a view rooted in the history of modernism. This is in favor of a growing connectedness between art, research, and science. “So there is a loss of autonomy in the sense that we are not interested in something which is just artistic”, he said, “but we would be very much interested in something which would use skills in design and art in order to reopen possibilities which had been closed down by the divide between art and science” (in Halsall 2012, 964). This inspiring viewpoint leads us directly to the “poetics” of the grid, or, in other words, to the thematic rationale that stands behind the structure of this volume (Fig. 1.3).

1 Introduction 

 9

Book Structure or the Poetics of the Grid Poetics, according to the American film theorist David Bordwell, consists of “any inquiry into the fundamental principles by which artifacts in any representational medium are constructed” (2008, 12). Derived from the Greek word poiesis, or active making, it includes the analysis of the organizational principles of any artistic medium including literary and other narratives in terms of structure, style, function, and effects. With the classical authority of Aristotle’s Poetics in mind as the first critical theory that analyzes the structure of the Greek tragedy, we shall expand below on the structure of the book and division into parts, accompanied by chapter synopses. The issue of form, structure, or organization is important as it allows us to understand how gridded modalities as a crossing theme that traverses this volume operate simultaneously on differing levels, and how the interdisciplinary insights in the light of the arts are weaved into it. The poetics of this volume has not so far been echoed in any other similar work that reflects on the “grid.” It not only structures this volume, but the idea of the “grid” is also being structured by the poetics as a semiotic abstraction that can be analyzed in many different ways, and through a multiplicity of disciplines, connections and connotations. The book opens with this introductory chapter, accompanied by an introductory visual essay, Chapter 2, entitled “The Networked Artwork: The Grid as Dynamic Relational Form?”, written by Leonie Bradbury. Against the background of the emergence of the gridded network as the dominant cultural paradigm across numerous fields and disciplines, constituted by a decentered, distributed, nonlinear system of nodes, plateaus, and edges that are endlessly interconnected and interdependent, Bradbury shows how contemporary artistic practices are impacted as well. In fact, she argues, works of art are uniquely situated to discover and reveal new ways of understanding social and cultural phenomena including that of the grid/network. Her visual essay contemplates several prominent questions: how do contemporary works of art relate to network culture? how do networks redefine our understanding of specific works of art? how, in turn, are these works expanding our understanding of the network? The chapter discusses the relation between artworks and networks, acknowledging the importance of the grid in modern art as a visual precursor, and highlights Rosalind Krauss’s two essays, “Grids” and “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, both from 1979 (a, b). The first essay is discussed to illustrate the documentation of the grid as the underlying structure of modernist art, and the second as a text that documents the shift away from the grid to the expanded field of postmodernist thinking. Bradbury’s reading of these essays turns our attention on how Krauss’s emphasis on the grid shapes the thinking of the artwork as network. In other words, perhaps the network is to the art of our time what the postmodernist thinking was to postmodern art and the grid was to Modern art. The book is then organized in four Parts, each of which is composed of three chapters. Arranged alternately, two Parts discuss gridded modalities within the

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 Liora Bigon and Nava Shaked

humanities, the social sciences and the arts; while the other two Parts scrutinize gridded modalities by tying together computational and instructional technologies with applied arts. This organization creates a balance between the human, non-human, and environmental agencies as represented in this volume, and stimulates associations of common and diverse themes within the Parts and between them. In this introductory chapter, the concluding chapter, and the opening page of each Part, a few images of artworks are incorporated in order to stimulate the reader’s imagination through their appearances with the text. The artworks that are represented in these images have been taken from an art exhibition entitled “Gridded ­Fabric(ations): Visual Imageries of the Grid.” This 3D digitalized exhibition inaugurated at the Holon Institute of Technology’s interdisciplinary Vitrina Gallery in November, 2020.3 The title of the exhibition, “Gridded Fabric(ations)”, implies a tripartite play of words between: (a) the idea of orthogonal lines and gridded threads that structure a “fabric”; (b) the idea of “fabrications” as ever-open-ended creative productions made through a variety of means, materials, and processes of inquiry; and (c) the dimension of illusion or invention that is inherent in the process of artistic production. In the same way, the exhibition ‒ which comprised close to twenty artworks in a variety of mediums ‒ sought to interpret the visual role of the grid in the production of both imaginary infrastructures and physical worlds. Part I, entitled “Planting and Planning the Grid”4, binds together three chapters that deal with the implementation of gridded designs in the urban planning traditions of three continents: South America, Asia and Africa. This Part bridges case study examples from Brazil, China, and Senegal over a long time-span, and thus embodies a non-Eurocentric geography, which has been still under represented in urban planning literature. This Part points to the variety of environmental, political and socio-cultural contexts through which the grid plan has been applied and interpreted throughout the ages, representing different regimes, religious philosophies, and aesthetic theories. As noted by the urbanist Peter Marcuse, “the same form can be produced by quite different interests whose conflicts result in quite different compromises”; and likewise, “similar interests can produce quite different city forms if their histories and the compromises they reach are different” (1987, 289‒290). Discussing the grid plan as a dominant form of city building conveying a range of meanings in

3 The exhibition, curated and produced by Smadar Tsook and Ofer Getz under the supervision of Vitrina Gallery’s Head, Hanan Kaminski, can be visited at: https://gridded-fabrications.s3.eu-central-1. amazonaws.com/index.htm. Two exceptions are: Latour’s based Figure 1.2; and the image shown on the opening page of Part II, which was presented by three HIT students at the Mathematical Art Galleries of the mathematics-in-arts “Bridges Conference”, 2020 (organized by Aalto University and University of Helsinki, Finland). 4 Thematically suited to Part I, we have borrowed this title from Home’s renowned book Of Planting and Planning (2013), which explores forms of British colonial urbanism throughout the Empire.

1 Introduction 

 11

these three global regions, in interdisciplinary terms, this Part strongly converses with human geography, religious studies (Chinese and Islamic) and world history. The first contribution (Chapter 3) in “Planting and Planning the Grid” is based on Renato Leão Rego’s “The Grid Specialized: Practical Town Planning, Artistic Features, and Natural Settings in Twentieth-Century Brazilian New Towns.” It argues that the orthogonality that characterizes the layout of so many cities worldwide conveys both a means to create order and a simple planning formula. The grid has been deemed an almost instinctive tool for creating new towns, for no other parceling scheme seems so easy to outline ‒ its uniform plots have also been ascribed economic attributes as the area can be easily calculated and served in terms of infrastructure. Symbolizing the perfect plan for the capitalist city and the laissez-faire economy, the grid plan is often “accused” in the West of being too rigid, technocratic, monotonous and indifferent to topography. Yet, as Rego shows through an examination of a series of new towns that had been laid out in Brazil by the mid-twentieth century, when a special context is added to the grid plan, it can gain individuality and esthetic interest. And, this plan can also correspond to the natural features of its site in terms of topography and landscape, to create an attractive urban scenery. The second contribution (Chapter 4), “Centrifugal or Processional: Divine and Mundane Power in Ancient Chinese Funeral Grids”, is written by Shaoqian Zhang. Taking an interdisciplinary approach involving Chinese religious studies and urban planning, this chapter introduces two different types of Chinese grid. The first type is organized in a radially symmetrical manner, and emphasizes the center as the representation of divine power. The second follows a bilaterally symmetrical order, and emphasizes the processual space of an urban grid along a central axis, to protect the mundane power and to spatially consolidate social hierarchies. As traditional Chinese political systems can be conceived in terms of the relationship between divine and mundane powers, ideas of hierarchical regimes with affinity to heaven constituted core concepts in regulating traditional Chinese political systems. It is through these two different types of Chinese grid that Zhang interprets the urban planning tradition of a number of ancient imperial Chinese funeral cities. By comparing the symbolic representations found in the funerary grid plan of these cities, she also looks at the changing Chinese beliefs in an afterlife, and at the organizational principles of traditional Chinese society itself. Part I ends with “Globalizing Senegal’s Grid-Plan Legacies in Light of Islamic Studies, World History and Urban Studies” (Chapter 5), authored by Liora Bigon and Eric Ross. Examining the history of the grid-plan design of Senegal in the long term, the issue has been approached from a variety of methodological and conceptual angles that are not normally brought together in a single study. The question of historic urban-design practices in Senegal requires synergy between a number of disciplines: African studies, Islamic studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, human geography, and urban (planning) history. The chapter opens with a short overview characterizing the general state-of-study tendencies in the fields of Islamic

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 Liora Bigon and Nava Shaked

Figure 1.4: Sharon Murro, Present Absentee, imprint, 2020. Corresponding with this section’s heading “the poetics of the grid”, the artwork Present Absentee visualizes our definition of “poetics” as an analysis of the organizational principles of a narrative in terms of structure, style, and effects. This piece represents a calendar, as a showcase where the grid constitutes the graphic element itself and is not merely a set of guiding lines to be removed following the organization a composition. In the absence of the enframing completed grid and its complementary typography, the artist claims, the familiar calendar becomes enigmatic. As a Present Absentee, the calendar’s grid is responsible for the meta-structure and logic but it does not necessarily convey the meaning. In the presence of the gridded structure, the calendar is understandable, common and almost banal. In the absence of this structure, the calendar turns into a system of clues. Murro’s colorful and meaningful array of squares indicates all the holidays of 2020, including Jewish and secular-Israeli ones, Muslim, Christian, Druze, international, and the artist’s personal holidays. The relationship between the squares, depending on their quantity and location within the colorful array, allows this mute map to be decoded and become an infographic that promotes a new understanding. Salient in its presence are the red-colored squares of the Ramadan month, which, according to the artist, stands at the center of the year’s gravity and operates as an anchor from which one can draw conclusions about the rest of the holidays.

Studies, World History and Urban Studies, in respect to sub-Saharan Africa and its urban traditions. In this interdisciplinary historiography, Africa generally features a triple shortcoming: lacking an urban past, an urban settlement-design culture, and particularly, an indigenous practice of grid-planning. It is against this background that indigenous grid-pattern settlements in Senegal are analyzed, stressing past and contemporary important urban centers, mostly Sufi. The authors show that this type of plan emerged independently in Senegal, before European colonization, and has existed in parallel with the French colonial grid-plan settlements. Shifting the discussion from morphological essentialism regarding the genealogy of the grid (e.g. “indigenous grid” versus “French grid”) ‒ a more interactive approach is offered, reflecting today’s hybrid spatialities (Fig. 1.4). Counterbalancing the previous humanities-based Part by putting more weight on technology, Part II brings together three chapters that deal with computational

1 Introduction 

 13

technologies and the arts. Entitled “Generating Grids of Computational Arts”, Part II is preoccupied with a common fundamental question that traverses its chapters. That is, what is the character of relations, or gridded interfaces, between art created by humans and computer-generated art regarding design practices and ethics? Dealing with computational art production in terms of fine art, electronic music and musical-instrument making respectively, each of the three contributors is motivated by a curiosity that translates into an experimental approach. This approach challenges our culturally-structured, single-discipline-dependent conceptions by blurring the traditional division between the disciplines and by posing some key philosophical questions. Such questions contribute to a better understanding of how the artistic creation is constituted by a two-way interplay between human and non-human actions. This interplay also invites, as clearly felt in the three chapters below, a dimension of play and enjoyment. This means that aside from boosting the efficiency of societies by upgrading the quality and logistics of everyday lives, the complexity of human-technology relationship has paved new avenues for enjoyment and recreations (Hurme and Jouhki 2017). Computer-generated art is one consequence of such a relationship; and, according to the science-fiction writer William Gibson, “that is exactly what is so great about it” (1996, 31). Named “Between Technological and Aesthetic Grids: Philosophical Challenges Posed by AI Artists”, Chapter 6 by Sagit Alkobi Fishman uses two examples of autonomic technological entities that create art that might be impossible to distinguish from art that is created by human beings. The author then asks whether the absence of a human in the actual process of artistic creation that is solely produced by the technological entities entitles the artwork to be considered as real art and therefore to be subjected to esthetic judgment. Since each product that these entities create is original, their relationship with human art becomes difficult to formulate. Through the “technological grid”, that is the prism of technology itself, there is a temptation to consider humans as advanced computer-like creatures. At the same time, through the “esthetic grid”, the traditional platform used in esthetics for the purpose of evaluating artworks, there is a temptation to differentiate between human art and computer-generated art by presuming that their nature and identity are different. In addressing the question of both modalities of the grid, Alkobi Fishman observes that meaning is a necessary and sufficient condition for an object to be subjected to aesthetic judgment. As theories that scrutinize the source of meaning in the creation of art have been controversial, the author examines several such theories to show that according to at least some of them, such artworks are eligible for esthetic judgment as no restriction regarding the nature of the art creators is presented. This means that there is no reason for rejecting, a priori, the possibility that technology-generated artwork is of artistic value. This also calls for employing a new grid modality of art evaluation. Chapter 7, by Josef (Seppo) Gründler, expands on “Sounds in Grid: History and Development of Grid-Based Musical Interfaces and their Rooting in Sound, Interac-

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 Liora Bigon and Nava Shaked

tion and Screen Design.” In electronic music grids are everywhere, maintains the author: full of light, full of color, full of promise, full of sounds. This chapter asks how grid-interfaces for electronic music can be used for everything from sequencing to modulation, being interface and multimodal display, instrument and score at the same time. The chapter also conceptualizes maps of field recordings, soundscapes and sound-mappings as followers of the grid. With regards to esthetics, grid-interfaces determine whole genres of music. They are a perfect showcase of how wearing the multidisciplinary hats of science, art, design and engineering leads to new products and concepts for generating music and acoustic artifacts, or listening to them. The development and use of grid-interfaces such as monome, launchpad, software-grids and maps, function as a blueprint for exemplifying the interconnectedness between these different design practices and fields of competence. In addition, the development of a grid-interface demonstrates which ways this idea evolves, including how the switch morphs with a pixel. This computer-generated process asserts the human-machine interaction and vice versa. The final chapter of this Part, Chapter 8, is Frank Bauer’s “On Grids of Computational Art Production: A Convergence of Artistic, Computational, Craft and Performative Making.” This chapter discusses the correspondence between several disciplinary grids and their associated ontologies, that is: the making of artistic intent; digital model making; instrument making; and performative making. Drawing on participatory observations made by the German-Kurdish artist Nevin Aladag, the chapter enquires into the gridded conditioning of computational art production workflows from their material, operational and authorial bases. Conceptually, the enquiry builds upon a notion of disciplinary grids as cultural constructs, while the interlaying of these grids employs a cultural technique which perceives designing from an inherently cross-disciplinary approach. These interferences are then analyzed from within their experimental systems, employing logics where “scientific objects and the technical conditions of their production are inextricably interconnected” (Rheinberger 1997, 2) in an interwoven process. The chapter then approaches gridded fabrications through the media’s philosophical concept of “operative ontologies”, suggesting reciprocal relations between forms of making and forms of being. This reveals how interposing of human actions and non-human actions constitutes artistic intent. At the same time, the author raises the question of how computational art production constitutes an ontological divide between the conscious convergence of artistic, instrumental and fabrication constraints. Suggesting understanding the grid as the authorial category, he further reveals how distributed authorial networks (Latour 2011) and an abandonment of disciplinary customs in favor of problem-specific and individual solutions, may bring about complex and innovational design solutions. Grounding the arts of the grid back in the humanities and social sciences, Part III further elaborates on the polyphonism and polymorphism of the grid. Entitled “Kinetic Grids: Bridging, Digging, Floating”, this Part interprets the grid in the light of several allegorical configurations. From using the grid and its contradictory qualities

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as a bridge to connect between different historical periods in a synchronic way, it moves towards another kind of connectivity, as between the disciplines by excavating the ground and exploring the meeting points between the disciplines in their depths. In this way, the gridded imagery undergoes a metamorphosis from horizontal bridge into a vertical ladder between the first two chapters. These allegorical configurations can be further developed considering the third chapter, which is engaged in maritime terminologies and in the maritime world, to entangle a floating spider web that is connected with a series of societal and formalistic structures. In all, the contributions of this Part create an impression of a kinetic grid, one that through bridging, digging and floating also shifts between histories of arts and sciences, anthropology and creativity studies, visual art medias and performance. The core argument of Chapter 9, “Searching for the Grid at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century: When Art and Science Shared their Fragments”, by Francesca Orestano ‒ builds on a recent exhibition at the National Gallery in London on “Young Bomberg and the Old Masters” (November 2019 to March 2020). The exhibition brought to the fore the young David Bomberg, an active painter in the London twentieth-century avant-garde, who was fascinated by the Old Masters, especially Botticelli and Michelangelo, feeling an urge to translate their formal lessons into a new language. His solution was structuring the language of modernity upon a “grid”, containing both the composition lesson of the old masters and his modern elaboration of form. The London exhibition highlighted the grid as a connecting element between classical art and modern art. It also showed that the grid functions as an epistemic tool that can bind art and science within a harmonious system, and can point on the potential beauty of numbers. But, as the author expands, there is more to it. While the grid constitutes a strong image and concept, almost a utopian idea, it also constitutes fragmentary bits of discourse, unfulfilled intervals, gaps and arbitrary measureless jumps. Its character contains the well-known but it also leaves space for the yet unknown. The heart of the chapter therefore addresses such intervals, or gaps in the epistemic grid of the turn of the century, and considers the gaps as interesting as the filled spaces of knowledge. It shows how scientists and artists dwelt at the same time on the periodical table of the elements, and on selected periods of history, allowing for the gaps to be as fruitful elements in their investigation as the well-known. Even though present-day conceptualizations of a grid offer far more complex configurations than a simple series of thematic intersections of horizontal and vertical lines spread across surfaces, it is possible to celebrate an even more fluid, dynamic, and true-to-life understanding of the grid. In Chapter 10, about “Depth as Grid: An Improvisational Actor’s Perspective”, Yoël Tawil highlights the importance of interpreting “depths” as cross-pollinating disciplinary intersections. Inspired by David Perkins’s “Klondike spaces” ‒ referring to gold prospecting as an analogy for creative problem-solving (2001) ‒ the chapter points to the importance of symbolically uncovering different (and sometimes precious) geological layers and formations when one digs deeper in a single confined space. It contends that going deeper within a

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Figure 1.5: Igor Revelis (Klone), a detail of A Study of Personal vs. Collective Memory, acrylic and spray-paint on canvas, 2020. “The poetics of the grid” is well exemplified in Klone’s piece, in which reality is being broken down to be reassembled again in a fragmentary way, and in which figurative elements dissolve into an abstract. Through curtains and screens of a multilayered grid, fragments of art-history traditions, regional iconographies and personal memories are deconstructed, reconstructed and finally integrated into a complex setting. The setting combines both organic and pre-planned forms, geometric flat lines and more flowing volumetric shapes, recalling a mélange of fragmented visual experiences that connect the individual with the universal without erasure of any scaling. The poetics of this piece operates therefore in many complementary levels: it extends over and yet excavates the surface, it bridges and yet disrupts the scene, it brings up the viewer’s memories and yet amputates them. The poetics of the grid is kinetic.

given field ‒ as opposed to “looking sideways” for collaborative opportunities – can produce “sideways”-like results, often of an unexpected nature. This stands in contrast to scoping out the land across a plateau. Acting, perhaps one of the professions which most encourages the practitioners to uncover their “authentic self” as part of an ongoing professional development, provides a template for exploring these ideas. Drawing on the author’s personal experiences as a professional improvisational actor

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for thirteen years and a scholar of creativity studies, this chapter shows that honing an actors’ craft entails a trajectory of multiple encounters with other domains of knowledge which are an essential part of the understanding of acting. Over time, thespians enhance the initial superficial understanding of acting as a form of “pretend-play” with actual professional insights lifted from psychology, history, biology, mathematics, technology, entrepreneurship and more. This approach, posits Tawil, is anything but exclusive to the realm of acting. Its core principles of exhaustiveness, taming temptation and confidence ‒ are presented here as a fertile tool to inspire quarrying grids, through which any discipline can benefit from meaningful encounters with other disciplines that lie within a deeper understanding and mastery of itself. Oriented towards the Western Mediterranean and deeply involved in maritime, societal and artistic networks is Lara D. Nielsen’s Chapter 11, entitled “How to Do Things with Grids: Anarchitectures of Navigability.” In moving between the grid, diameter, and sphere ‒ this chapter draws on multidisciplinary resources (architecture, cartography, geometry, new thalassology, anthropology) to expand on the profoundly ambivalent equivocalities of the grid’s paradigmatically dual nature and internal contradictions. It seeks to trace the grid’s dispensatory technologies and poetics in the context of three-dimensional social space, or social sculpture, in this kinetic and maritime world (Nielsen 2017). The author takes a cue from Gordon Matta-Clark’s architectural interventions (e.g., “social sculpture” and “destructural punctuation”) whose practices at the boundaries of architecture and contemporary art radicalize habits of doing and undoing grid spaces. Yet taking us to the seas demands a re-set and cartographic return to grid boundaries and dispensations in more fluid and floating social worlds. Linking the idea of debilitation (Jasbir Puar) with sprawling geographies of systemic brutalisme (Achille Mbembe), Nielsen discusses contemporary art projects such as digital forensics (Forensic Architecture). Such works focus attention on the force and parry of the kinetic grid, and on grid projections, floating social theories/sculptures of movement and migrations (Fig. 1.5). The three contributions that compose Part IV, “Grids of Learning: Linguistic, Virtual, Visual”, are preoccupied with interactions and fusions that traverse between the real and the digital worlds, with affinity to educative experiences. Here, the human-machine relationship and the correspondence between the arts and sciences are translated into a “grid” of collaborative and gamified activity, involving emotions, illusions and interplays. This Part is multi-dimensional, moving back and forth between conceptual, virtual and visual structures and their attached designs in different scales and levels of experience. Celebrating the transition of computation and associated elements “off the desktop” and into the world and back again, this Part also suggests that the digital world not only becomes ubiquitous and is disseminated in the everyday environment around us, but it also increasingly concerns our language, body, and cognitive understanding (see also Dourish and Bell 2007). Providing some glimpses of embodied interactions between people, pedagogical agendas and technology in the context of linguistics and applied sciences, the contributions of this

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Part explore the ways in which the digital world and aesthetic designs may condition, and be conditioned by, the real world’s structures and conceptions. In Chapter 12, “The Linguistics Relation in the Virtual Grid: A Digital Dialogue” Nava Shaked explains that in the digital world there is a special interaction between humans and machines. This interaction creates a metrical grid of emotions, a language grid that is based on a dialogue involving intentions, inferences and knowledge, and that its occurrence in the virtual world is very much based on the pragmatics of the real world. As this chapter shows, the grid of virtual relationships and dialogue between humans and machines is very much based on, and is even dependent on, the emotional grid as in human-to-human interaction. A question arises, is there any bi-directional effect on the dialogue? We take elements from our virtual world back to real life and using these elements in a casual, everyday dialogue conducted among humans. For instance, exemplifies the author, we borrow from the digital-world dialogue elements such as linguistic structure and adopt machine syntax to create a new lexicon that now legitimates language in the real world. Similarly, in software language, we create objects to reflect a set of announcements and emotions (like an emoji) which we deploy linguistically. We also use sounds and voice to animate our utterances, and we embrace code language to simplify interactions, regardless of grammatical correctness as long as it is “functionally working.” What we see now, this chapter contends, is an evolution of over fifteen years of internet, social networks and instant-messaging penetration into every linguistic sphere of our life. In this way, similarly to the era of the Industrial Revolution in its time, the digital era has created new types of interactions. These include the huge amount of time we spend in the virtual worlds of gaming, social and educative entertainment, and infotainment ‒ and, of course, using artificial intelligence to improve all these interactions to the point that it is hard sometimes to determine which is the machine and who is the human. Written by a group of specialists in various disciplines that are preoccupied with immersive technologies, Chapter 13 is entitled “Storytelling in Virtual Reality: A Multidisciplinary and Immersive Experience using Grid Methodology for Students.” The authors, Tom Peeters, Kristof Timmerman, Jeroen Cluckers, and Stephen Hargreaves, share an “immersive lab” in order to encourage innovative, practice-based research. They define the “grid” as a tool to manage a team of people with different backgrounds that collaborates in a process of creative problem solving, against the background of “immersive storytelling” in virtual reality. Immersion refers to the feeling that occurs in a situation where spectators (viewers, gamers, etc.) are paying so much attention to the particular medium, and this medium causes so much “involvement” that the audience is no longer aware of what is happening around them. In order to reach the highest levels of immersion, storytellers need to investigate how they can embed innovative technical possibilities in new and old narrative techniques (Roth and Koenitz 2016; Slater and Sanchez-Vives 2016) from interactive theater, games, etc. To tackle these challenges, the authors inaugurated the research project “Show &

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Tell!”, targeting at developing a composed grid of integrated methodology and workflow for the creation of immersive 360-degrees stories. This grid has proven to be an efficient tool in the complexity of the development of virtual reality experiences. The chapter therefore analyses the developed experiences in the immersive lab, in which narrative parameters were tested, with the main goal being to obtain different levels of immersion, starting from the lowest level of reality until “total immersion.” These parameters determine the strategy concerning the viewer by stimulating suspense, surprise and/or curiosity. The authors use their scalable collaborative grid network to find out more about the problem and put a coordinator at the center of the grid, in order to establish the most effective communication. Chapter 14, “The Multidisciplinary Learning Grid: A Conceptual Space to Develop Neuropedagogy-based, Arts-integrated Chemistry Activities”, examines what would happen if we introduced art observational strategies to the chemistry teaching practice. And, as its authors Debora Marchak and Inna Shvarts-Serebro further ask, why shall we do it at all? Since Chemistry teachers often recognize their students’ struggle to understand, recall and apply chemical concepts, Chemistry is considered as a highly abstract subject. The learning of its most concepts requires the creation of symbolic mental constructs of accepted scientific models by the learner, ideally including some emotional tag that allows the learner to make meaning out of it. The authors thus rethink chemistry teaching and present an arts-integrating approach that exposes the learner to varied modes of learning. Their chemistry teaching methodology borrows art/design elements, language and techniques in order to expand the learner’s thinking possibilities and allowing him to weave a personally-meaningful learning experience. At the practical level, activities developed by this approach fuse artwork observational strategies ‒ e.g. “See-Think-Wonder” ‒ with chemistry content. As a result, a multidimensional learning grid is being created, a grid that supports the multidisciplinary space which induces an interaction between the learner and the content that is simultaneously rational, multisensory and emotional. In their concluding remarks, “Grids of Light, Darkness, and Intermediate Shades” (Chapter 15), Andreas Zehetner and Liora Bigon tie back together the conceptual and empirical issues raised by the varied contributions of this volume. Their overview is made in light of this volume’s three thematic threads of “interdisciplinarity”, the “grid”, and the “arts.” This short chapter highlights the linkage and associations between the contributions, while also directing towards the leverage and the new avenues of future exploration based on crossdisciplinarity. As exemplified, the very way of finding the “grid” is a breakthrough in itself, not ignoring off-the-grid perspectives. This way means a search for connections and interconnections that bring up unique possibilities and combinations; and a fusion between domains to create and recreate sometimes surprising but always infinite compositions.

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References Aristotle. Poetics, trans. S.H. Butcher, Gutenberg EBook of Poetics project. Bakke, Gretchen. The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Bordwell, David. Poetics of Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2008. Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society, second edition. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2010 [1996]. Culkin, John. “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan. Saturday Review, March 18, 1967, pp. 51‒53, 70–72. Dourish, Paul, and Genevieve Bell. “The Infrastructure of Experience and the Experience of Infrastructure: Meaning and Structure in Everyday Encounters with Space.” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 34, 3 (2007): 414‒430. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995 [1977]. Gibson, William. “The Net is a Waste of Time.” The New York Times Magazine, July 14, 1996, p. 31. Halsall, Francis. “An Aesthetics of Proof: A Conversation between Bruno Latour and Francis Halsall on Art and Inquiry.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30 (2012): 963–970. Halsall, Francis. “Actor-Network Aesthetics: The Conceptual Rhymes of Bruno Latour and Contemporary Art.” New Literary History 47, 2 (2016): 439–461. Higgins, Hannah. The Grid Book. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Home, Robert. Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities. London: Routledge, 2013. Hurme, Pertti, and Jukka Jouhki. “We Shape our Tools, and Thereafter our Tools Shape us.” Human Technology 13, 2 (2017): 145–148. Kim, Tai-hoon, Adrian Stoica, and Ruay-Shiung Chang (eds). Security-Enriched Urban Computing and Smart Grid. Cham: Springer, 2010. Kostof, Spiro, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings through History. London: Thames and Hudson, 1991. Kuiper, Kathleen. “The arts.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2020, online source. Accessed February 5, 2021. https://www.britannica.com/topic/the-arts. Krauss, Rosalind. “Grids.” October 9 (1979a): 50–64. Krauss, Rosalind. “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” October 8 (1979b): 30–44. Latour, Bruno. “Ethnography of a ‘High-Tech’ Case: About Aramis.” In Technological Choices: Transformation in Material Cultures since the Neolithic, edited by Pierre Lemonnier, 372–398. London: Routledge, 1993a. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993b. Latour, Bruno. Aramis, or the Love of Technology, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996 [1993]. Latour, Bruno. Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Latour, Bruno, and Peter Weibel (eds). Making Things Public: The Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Latour, Bruno. “Why Do Architects Read Latour? An Interview with Bruno Latour.” Perspecta 44 (2011): 64–69. Marcuse, Peter. “The Grid as City Plan: New York City and Laissez-Faire Planning in the Nineteenth Century.” Planning Perspectives 2 (1987): 287–310. Middleton, David. “Book Review.” The Journal of Collaborative Computing 6 (1997): 396–399.

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Mishra, Punya, and Matthew Koehler. “Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A Framework for Teacher Knowledge.” Teachers College Record 108, 6 (2006): 1017–1054. Nielsen, Lara D. “This Kinetic World: Rethinking the Grid (Neo-Baroque Calls).” Journal of Performance and Philosophy 3, 1 (2017), online source. Accessed January 30, 2021. https:// www.performancephilosophy.org/journal/article/view/127/177. Perkins, David N. The Eureka Effect: The Art and Logic of Breakthrough Thinking. New York: Norton Company, 2001. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Rose-Redwood, Reuben, and Liora Bigon (eds). Gridded Worlds: An Urban Anthology. Cham: Springer, 2018. Roth, Christian, and Hartmut Koenitz. “Evaluating the User Experience of Interactive Digital Narrative.” AltMM ‘16 (2016), online source. Accessed February 2, 2021. https://www. semanticscholar.org/paper/Evaluating-the-User-Experience-ofInteractive-Roth-Koenitz/8534dbe65fafcfd235206a5c92bc6ceb15e71096. Siegert, Bernhard. Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Slater, Mel, and Maria Sanchez-Vives. “Enhancing our Lives with Immersive Virtual Reality.” Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 3 (2016): 1–74. Laurier, Eric, and Chris Philo. “X-Morphising: Review essay of Bruno Latour’s Aramis, or the Love of Technology.” Environment and Planning A 31 (1999): 1047–1071. Vannini, Phillip, and Jonathan Tagart. Off the Grid: Re-Assembling Domestic Life. London: Routledge, 2014. Vasset, Philippe. Un livre blanc. Paris: Fayard, 2007. Wang, Lizhe, Wei Jie, and Jinjun Chan (eds). Grid Computing: Infrastructure, Service, and Application. New York: Routledge and CRC Press, 2017. Watkinson, Matt. The Grid: The Decision-making Tool for Every Business. New York: Penguin, Random House, 2017. Young, Spencer (ed.). Crossing Boundaries at Medieval Universities. Leiden: Brill, 2010.

Leonie Bradbury

2 The Networked Artwork: The Grid as Dynamic Relational Form? Abstract: One cannot discuss the relation between artworks and networks without acknowledging the importance of the grid in modern art as a visual precursor. Rosalind Krauss – known for her astute analysis of modernist art and its transition towards the postmodern – discusses the grid on several occasions throughout her career. This chapter highlights Krauss’ essays, “Grids” and “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, both from 1979. The first is discussed to illustrate the documentation of the grid as the underlying structure of modernist art, and the latter as a text that documents the shift away from the grid to the expanded field of postmodernist thinking. This reading of Krauss turns on how her emphasis on the grid shapes our thinking of the artwork as network. In other words, perhaps the network is to the art of our time what the expanded field was to Postmodern art and the grid was to Modern art. Keywords: Network; Grid; Rosalind Krauss; Contemporary Art; Postmodernism; Modernism; Franklin Evans

With each passing year, space appears less like a grid, and time less like a linear progression, even as neither seems to be returning to the simple bordered terrains or cyclical seasonal patterns of old. (Christopher Vitale 2014, 4)

Introduction As it reshapes the world we inhabit, the concept of the network has emerged as the dominant cultural paradigm across numerous fields and disciplines. Whether biological, social, political, global, communicational, or computational, networks are constituted by a decentered, distributed, multiplicitous, nonlinear system of nodes, plateaus, and edges that are endlessly interconnected and interdependent. Networks prioritize relationships between things over the things themselves, suggesting a reconfiguring of binary elements including: digital/tactile, virtual/material, private/public, and past/present. As networks rapidly change our world, it is logical to assume that contemporary artistic practices are impacted as well. In fact, works of art are uniquely situated to discover and reveal new ways of understanding social and cultural phenomena including that of the network. Several questions arise: How do contemporary works of art relate to network culture? Alternately, how do networks redefine our understanding of specific works

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Figure 2.1: Installation view. Franklin Evans, juddrules, Montserrat Gallery, 2014.

of art? How, in turn, are these works expanding our understanding of the network? Through art historical analysis, I argue that instead of depicting, illustrating or referring to networks as context, Franklin Evan’s multimedia installation juddrules is constituted or composed in and as a network (see Fig. 2.1). It is a dynamic relational form in which the work of art and the network are rendered indissociable from one another. I further claim, that components which were previously considered as existing outside of the work of art – the gallery, the studio, texts, histories, artworks, and even reproductions  – are now part of what constitutes the work, thus indicating a profound shift in perspective in what we consider the “work of art” and the ways in which it is addressed and interpreted. One cannot discuss the relation between artworks and networks without acknowledging the importance of the grid in modern art as a visual precursor. American art critic Rosalind Krauss – known for her astute analysis of modernist art and its transition towards the postmodern – discusses the grid on several occasions throughout her career. For the purpose of this brief chapter, I wish to highlight two of Krauss’ essays, “Grids” and “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”, both from 1979. The first is discussed as a means to illustrate the documentation of the grid as the underlying structure of modernist art, and the latter as a text that documents the shift away from the grid and modernist thinking to the expanded field of postmodernist thinking. The question that motivates my reading of Krauss here turns on how her emphasis on the grid shapes our thinking of the artwork as network? In other words, perhaps the

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network is to the art of our time what the grid was to the art of the modernist era, and the expanded field was to the postmodern era. It is a new model or paradigm for the art of our times.

Grids, Diagrams and Networks In “Grids”, Krauss addresses the importance of the grid to modernist painting. She distinguishes two types of relationships to the grid: centrifugal or centripetal. The centrifugal grid, or “beyond-the frame attitude”, extends the work beyond the boundaries of the painting (as object) and into the infinite space that is the world. She explains this as follows: “By virtue of the grid, the given work of art is presented as a mere fragment, a tiny piece arbitrarily cropped from an infinitely larger fabric. Thus, the grid operates from the work of art outward, compelling our acknowledgement of a world beyond the frame” (Krauss 1979b, 60). The centripetal grid, by contrast, works from the outside of the painting within the picture plane, it is “complete and internally organized” rather than being “continuous with the world” (Krauss 1979b, 63). Krauss calls this the “within-the-frame attitude”: “The [centripetal] grid is an introjection of the boundaries of the world into the interior of the work; it is a mapping of the space inside the frame onto itself. It is a mode of repetition, the content of which is the conventional nature of art itself” (1979b, 61). Krauss thus sets up a duality and set of binary oppositions to structure the argument including: inside/outside, infinity/containment, and continuity/autonomy. She then describes the function of the grid as both temporal and spatial, suggesting that it is the “form that is ubiquitous in the art of our century”, while appearing nowhere, nowhere at all, in the art of the last one (Krauss 1979b, 52). Additionally, she defines its purpose in terms of art that secures its own autonomy and self-purpose: Insofar as its order is that of pure relationship, the grid is a way of abrogating the claims of natural objects to have an order particular to themselves; the relationships in the aesthetic field are shown by the grid to be in a world apart and, with respect to natural objects, to be both prior and final. The grid declares the space of art to be at once autonomous and autotelic (1979b, 51‒52).

Krauss also addresses its capacity to bridge the gap between science and spiritualism and adds a psychoanalytic dimension by analyzing the grid’s “capacities to repress” both the scientific and the spiritual. She concludes her essay by reiterating the powerful hold the grid had on modernist art: “Indeed, as we have a more and more extended experience of the grid, we have discovered that one of the most modernist things about it is its capacity to serve as a paradigm or model for the anti-developmental, the anti-narrative, the anti-historical” (1979b, 64). In short, Krauss equates the grid with the very essence of Modernism.

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Krauss wrote “Grids” and “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” at a time when Modernism was in the process of being surpassed by a new, emergent model of the Postmodern. In contrast to her analogy of the grid, which was limited to the field of painting, her argument in the “Expanded Field” essay is focused on the domain of sculpture. In both essays, she uses a mathematical model to explain her case. For “Grids”, as the title suggests, she uses the grid as a model underlying abstract painting, whereas for the “Expanded Field” she offers a new mathematic model derived from a Structuralist mapping operation known as a “Piaget group”, which is illustrated through a diagram or “quaternary field.” In this case, the diagram is not a model that visualizes the underlying structure of a painting, as she explained through the use of the grid in Agnes Martin’s work, among many others; rather, this diagram is meant to illustrate a phenomenon in the field of sculpture, where artists are making work that falls outside of the established categories of modernist sculpture. She describes this transformation as a “logical expansion” whereby a set of binaries (not sculpture, not architecture) is “transformed into a quaternary field which both mirrors the original opposition and at the same time opens it” (Krauss 1979a, 37). Her earlier emphasis on binaries and the modernist grid has thus now been expanded to include more axes (as if there are two grids overlaying each other at a forty-five degree angle). Her expanded quaternary field diagram highlights the reciprocal relationships – the “edges” – between the various nodes such as “landscape”, “architecture”, and so on, relationships that can be read as a type of network diagram. Krauss’ new “complex model” is used to capture and reflect the many emergent three-dimensional art forms that could no longer be classified by the category of sculpture, which Krauss defines as “not-landscape” plus “not-architecture” (1979a, 37). Krauss acknowledges that other (non-Western, earlier) cultures have generated works in this category, even if this work was not included in “ours” (1979a). In addition to “the complex”, she also introduces the newly added categories of “marked sites”, “site-constructions”, and “axiomatic structures” as categories for classifying new works (that are now primarily identified as earthworks) such as those created by Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Nancy Holt, and Alyce Aycock. She summarizes the diagrammatic relationship as follows: “The expanded field is thus generated by problematizing the set of oppositions between which the modernist category sculpture is suspended” (1979a, 38). Modernist sculpture, she argues, moves away from its “site” and becomes “placeless and self-referential”, essentially “nomadic” (1979a, 34). Additionally, its relationship to the base/pedestal is altered since it becomes absorbed into the art object itself: “the sculpture depicts its own autonomy” (1979a, 34). Krauss aligns her theory of the expanded field with the term postmodernism, a counterpoint to the medium specificity and “demand for the purity” of modernism and as such, the expanded field of postmodernism is a historical event that could be mapped in the quaternary field diagram. The distinction between Krauss’ affirmation of the grid and the expanded field and the concept of the network is instructive, for one might argue that Krauss’ models no

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longer work today in the same way and that a new structural model has emerged, namely that of the network. It is important to remember that the network model – although a structural model like Krauss’ models – is not a fixed model but rather a dynamic model that is capable of expanding and contracting. It is a model that is comprised not of a series of binary oppositions defined by a finite relational activity (i.e. a two-way street), but can be characterized instead as a multiplicitous sets of Deleuzian “and, and, ands.” It is a system where the relational possibilities are complex and infinite. Networked artworks combine the postmodern embracing of literature, narrative, and discourse (history) with a new system where the relational form (the network) includes both the grid and the expanded field. However, both the grid and the field are flat, geometrically ordered, and concerned with the surface of things (they are diagrams), whereas the network’s structure is deep, dynamic, and multidimensional. The question thus emerges whether the network can serve as a contemporary diagrammatic model, signifying an even further expanded field of artistic production, or whether it presents something entirely different? If Modernism is characterized by a breaking away from the past, and if we equate Postmodernism with a re-embracing of the past (as pastiche/collage), what is the model for the networked artwork’s relationship to the past? Is it the mash-up? A feedback loop? Like Krauss, I too find myself at a moment in time where a new cultural paradigm has emerged, that of the network. Just as Krauss identified “the grid” as the ubiquitous art form of the twentieth century, “the network” has most certainly emerged as the prominent form of the current moment, although whether it will come to visually represent decades of cultural production remains to be seen. When analyzing the structures of artworks and recognizing within them the structure of a network, the network provides us with a new model (or system) through which to understand contemporary artistic practice. Whereas Clement Greenberg’s model was related to the artwork as a formal entity (organic) and Krauss’ model was structural (mathematic), the interpretive model addressed in this text is the network (computational). Just as Krauss in 1979 identified new concerns within postmodern art practice, concerns that no longer reflected those of Modernism, the set of conditions informing artistic practice today can no longer be described as Postmodern. Although the continued influence and significance of Krauss’ “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” cannot be denied, a more recent publication Retracing the Expanded Field: Encounters Between Art and Architecture suggests that new diagrammatic forms may be warranted, especially since, “ultimately, the expanded field designates not only a set of axiomatic principles but also a constellation of themes that can reflect as well as deflect the orientation of the scheme devised by the essay’s author” (Papapetros 2014). As the editors argue, “the diagram’s resilient afterlife demonstrates that the structuralist framework that Krauss was so instrumental in introducing into art historical writing has not dissipated entirely; instead, it has generated a number of alternative geometries that both retrace and transgress the grid of her crystalline pattern” (Papapetros 2014, xvii).

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Perhaps, then, these new diagrammatic models can include the multi-dimensional, dynamic form of a network, especially since it too provides a “constellation of themes” and an “alternative geometry” that seems reflective of our contemporaneity. Indeed, several authors in the volume address the transition of the grid into a network by way of representing a transition from a modern to the postmodern sensibility. In the face of the world’s increasing complexity and heterogeneity, the grid thus fails to capture this complexity and heterogeneity. In this sense, is it possible that the modern grid and the expanded field have been replaced by the dynamic relational form of the network?

Artwork as Network Let’s now turn to the concept of the artwork as network. What can the networked artwork do that other forms cannot? How is it different from an installation, assemblage, painting, or sculpture? How does a networked artwork differ from other object networks, technological networks or social networks? One basic question to address is also how a networked artwork is different from a “regular” non-networked artwork. Although there is no such thing as a “regular” artwork, we could entertain for a moment the question whether a portrait painting by Rembrandt is or is not a networked artwork. One could argue that the object is part of a network of other Rembrandt paintings, prints, replicas of Rembrandts, and so on. It is also part of particular time period and cultural production, which can be considered a network. I would argue that although the painting is a part of a network (of associations, relations, socio-economic systems, etc.), it in and of itself, an “art object” does not constitute a network. Its “form” is that of a singular object that, even if contingent in relation to its social, economic, and historic circumstances, is not in and of itself a networked artwork. Networked artworks by definition are dynamic relational forms and consist of multiple elements and “nodes” that have relational connections “edges” to other “nodes”, and to the network/artwork as a whole and therefore do not constitute a singular, autonomous object. French curator Nicolas Bourriaud first coined the term “relational form” when he deployed it to describe contemporary artists whose works included a social context and had “spectator participation” as a “constant feature of artistic practice” (1998, 11). He explains that the work of art is expanding beyond the boundaries of a “thing” that is being made by an artist: The setting is widening; after the isolated object, it now can embrace the whole scene: the form of Gordon Matta-Clark or Dan Graham’s work cannot be reduced to the “things” those two artists “produce”; it is not the simple secondary effects of a composition, as the formalistic aesthetic would like to advance, but the principle acting as a trajectory evolving through signs, objects, forms, gestures […] The contemporary artwork’s form is spreading out from its material form: it is a linking element, a principle of dynamic agglutination (1998, 8).

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Bourriaud uses the term “relational form” to describe works of art whereby human interaction – frequently on the part of the viewers – play an active part in completing, if not constituting, the work. I will be deploying the term “relational form”, however, as another way of indicating the networked condition of a work of art, rather than Bourriaud’s focus on the relationships between people. My use of the term extends the “sociability” of the term to include the formal and physical elements of a work – objects, images, texts  – and the associations and ideas they elicit and generate in response to one another (through their relationships), including the exhibition in which they are presented, which is a relational context as well. Emphasis on “relational forms” describes a conglomeration or constellation of all these various independent yet interconnected elements that together still form what Latour would call a “unit.” Bourriaud’s suggestion that “each particular artwork is a proposal to live in a shared world, and the work of every artist is a bundle of relations with the world, giving rise to other relations, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum” certainly rings true (1998, 9). In 2014, I curated a large-scale installation Franklin Evans: juddrules for Montserrat College of Art Galleries where I was the director at that time. It was through the making of this exhibition that I began to develop my theory about the artwork as network. In light of this chapter’s topic it felt prudent to revisit the project. I will begin with a formal description of the visual elements of the installation, the artists process, and the various art historical references the work explicitly elicits. juddrules spreads across the gallery walls and floors in a grid-like form. Visually overwhelming and intense, certain sections of the exhibition read like an art history textbook with many reproductions of well-known paintings and references to art historical and theoretical texts. Other sections read more like a Google image search, but one where the images are made material and find themselves interrupted, conjoined by color test prints and strips of painter’s tape. Evans’ practice involves bringing together items ranging from fully finished large-scale trompe l’oeil oil paintings to digital printouts, from scraps of tape to bits of string. While on site in the gallery, he adds even more items, including site-specific blocks of color painted directly onto the wall, printed-out texts from art books, and gallery press releases, layering and connecting the various elements into a site-specific installation. Although Evans considers himself first and foremost a painter, his installations go beyond any traditional definition of painting. Evans’ process reflects our ability to actively consume and produce information using the Internet as a tool. It simultaneously addresses the Internet’s utility and its overwhelming complexity and contradictory nature. juddrules specifically offers a blend of traditional and digital technologies since it combines hyperrealist paintings with pixelated imagery downloaded from the Internet. Juddrules’ obsessive referencing to outside source materials, both visual and textual, appears to embrace information overload rather than constituting a critique. Evans engages the peripheral, ephemeral materialities that evidence one’s life and collects digital images and texts in an effort to rematerialize them in his work. His

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process of making the abstract concrete, of looping or conceptual doubling, and of mirroring information into various states of mediatization, is where juddrules functions as a site of convergence between traditional artistic practices and internet cultures. These so-called “feedback loops” create a disorienting effect. But how exactly do these they relate to the culture or structure of a network? juddrules is precisely an installation concerned with the space between things (i.e. objects, people, images, materials, ideas), suggesting that Evans’ practice is closely related to this larger cultural phenomenon of networked connectivity. But is juddrules in the end a mere visualization of a network? Does it simply offer a metaphor for our networked culture? Or does the work expose other ways of conceptualizing the relation between artwork and network? The winding labyrinth of painter’s tape, the spatial confusion caused by the placement of imagery on the floors and ceiling, and the overwhelming quantity of visual stimulation lead to an overall effect of disorientation (see Fig. 2.1). The way the viewer interacts with the piece is also a multipath, multi-sensory and self-selecting experience. Viewers are encouraged to see and make these connections between the various parts as they engage with and walk through the work. Wandering and meandering, both your eye and feet drift through the installation as if a twenty-first century flâneur, having exchanged the dense streets of Paris for the text and image filled forest of juddrules. However, due to the density of the information and its immense quantity, it takes time for the viewer to begin to discern certain distinct elements and to identify what it is we are experiencing. In addition to the sense of visual disorientation, juddrules thus causes confusion in terms of its basic definition. Is it an installation, an environment, a work in progress, or a work abandoned? Has the gallery become a studio space? Are we looking at a sculpture, an assemblage, or perhaps a three-dimensional collage? What exactly is the nature of all of the art historical references and the conversations they provoke? At the same time, are the many references to other art works intended as ironic gestures, or do they serve as a critical examination of the elevation of certain painters or paintings over others? In short, should we consider judddrules as a parody of art history’s great icons or a well-intended homage? What binds these various questions together are two fundamental observations about the exhibition. First, that juddrules is a work engaged not just with painting but also with the history of painting. And secondly, that the exhibition’s very organization – its sense of overwhelming visual complexity, its sense of sensory disorientation – has strong suggestions of our current condition of visual overload, of a world saturated with digital images, of our immersion in a culture increasingly shaped by the visual. For juddrules also includes finished paintings on canvas, works in progress, abandoned works, sketches, inspirational sources – the artist’s “visible evidence” – and presents them as part of the gallery installation, as part of a “finished” work that is simultaneously and constitutively unfinished. The studio, no matter how glamorous or humble, is at its core a workspace. In juddrules, the artist’s work place has become

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Figure 2.2: Detail. Franklin Evans, juddrules, 2014.

the space of display, yet including evidence of the conditions of its making, such as the scaffolding, the paint trays, and brushes (see Fig. 2.2). The space of display continues to echo as workspace, so much so that it seems to still be in a state of flux and work could resume at any time. In this sense, in addition to the ways in which the work gestures toward rethinking the history of painting, as well as toward a sense of visual overload, of our immersion in a world already saturated with images, the argument informing this chapter is that the various elements that comprise judddrules have combined into a “relational form” – in short, the various elements are combined into what I call a “network.” If we are to consider juddrules as a dynamic relational form, and more specifically a network, what role does the artist’s studio play in this formation? Given that both the artist’s studio in Houston Street, New York and the Montserrat Gallery are places of production and that a wide range of objects – papers, tape, scraps, photographs, magazine pages, studies, and finished “fine art” works  – moved back and forth between the two locations, what is the form that holds it all together as a work of art? Where does the work begin and end? Or does juddrules not have clear boundaries, so that the boundaries are intentionally blurred, ambiguous? The occasion of the exhibition and the limitations of gallery space (both in terms of physical dimensions and the duration of its availability) serve, temporarily, as a constraint that contains the work. As the gallery became the artist’s studio and the studio became part of the work, both its primary location at Houston Street and its temporary manifestation at

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Montserrat are not separate entities but rather are part of the networked form that now composes juddrules. juddrules positions the artist studio in the gallery as an intrinsic part of the work of art. It not only includes all the objects on display within its “boundaries”, but also the artist himself (as part of the three-week residency), the Houston Street studio, and the temporary studio created at the Montserrat Gallery, and the exhibition itself. Together these components form a relational form, a network of interdependent entities. juddrules defies further categorization as neither sculpture nor painting, installation nor assemblage, and instead presents viewers with a complex, three-dimensional environment, a constellation of sorts. In Donald Judd’s 1965 essay Specific Objects, his mention of the walls, floors, ceilings and entire rooms as being a part of the work certainly speaks directly to juddrules’ engagement with the gallery space. However, in comparing three-dimensional work to paintings, Judd states: “It isn’t necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyze one by one, to contemplate. The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole is what is interesting” (2005, 184). When considering this statement in the context of juddrules, it is easy to see how it is indeed interesting to look at as a whole, yet it also offers that which Judd deems “unnecessary” by offering hundreds of things to look at, compare and analyze. juddrules thus both embraces and contradicts Judd’s “rules” as they are laid out in Specific Objects, for there are numerous correspondences and dissonances between the text’s ideas and concepts and the installation on view. Despite the obvious and extreme differences between each artist’s creative output, the installation can be considered an homage to Donald Judd, especially the way in which it highlights the significance of his practice and the relevancy of Judd’s ideas forty years after the publication of the Complete Writings (see Fig. 2.3). Significantly, juddrules allows the parts to remain identifiable as what they are – i.e. paint roller, press release, and inflatable swimming pool – while simultaneously applying them as formal aesthetic elements within a larger composition. The composition of

Figure 2.3: Detail. Franklin Evans, juddrules, 2014.

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Figure 2.4: Detail. Franklin Evans, juddrules, 2014.

Figure 2.5: Detail. Franklin Evans, juddrules, 2014.

a work of art is generally defined as the unifying construct that governs the placement of visual elements and guides the viewer to discern the main focus of the work. Yet within juddrules, the viewer is not guided to a single focal point but becomes distracted and disoriented by the profusion of images and the intentional lack of a single focal point (see Fig. 2.4). The traditional elements of composition – unity, ba­lance, focus, contrast, pattern and proportion – are deliberately challenged by the density of the information and the multiple visual clusters competing for the viewer’s attention. In both its physical form and complex content, juddrules is disorientating, questioning many culturally constructed categories regarding high and low culture and the value of images in society today. If high quality “finished” paintings are juxtaposed with popular culture ephemera, reproductions of famous art works, and the artist’s own work, then this juxtaposition can also be thought of as a question of framing (see Fig. 2.5). Understood in this context, Evans does not simply extend or expand the categories of high and low culture; rather he nullifies both by intentionally transgressing the boundaries between the two. By not distinguishing between the original and the copy, fine and low art, he reveals that the boundaries between high and low art are culturally constructed, thus opening to a renewed understanding of their relation, their own “framing system”, a system perhaps best described as a network. Regardless of their source or origin (artist’s studio or the internet), all the images in juddrules are considered equal. The “mashup” of heterogeneous layers of materials operates at a nexus between the two ends of the digital and analog spectrum, at once fine art and the popular culture. In addition to reframing categories of high and low art, juddrules also intentionally and creatively blurs the boundaries between the studio as a place of production and the gallery as its displaying counterpart. juddrules presents a continuous re-articulation of the way images and the categories we create to define and contain them are perceived. It is an environment where these boundaries are constantly shifting and fluid. It is a place where a painting can be a print or an image, or where a piece of tape becomes a painting, or where a photograph becomes a sculpture, and all of it together forms an immersive environment,

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understood here as a relational form. Each image or component presents a reframing of ideas, concepts, and artistic conventions. The installation thus requires active participation from the viewer, stimulating them to make connections between the many various parts, moving between the present moment and across time by the inclusion of historical references. It contests preconceived assumptions about what comprises a work of art and opens up of new limits in terms of how we decide on certain categorical distinctions. In the repeated reframing of art world conventions, juddrules creates multiple, simultaneous feedback loops in terms of space, time, and content. It proposes a new model of relations that is not binary or fixed but inclusive and fluid. This does not constitute a mere dissolution of these boundaries and categories but rather their reframing and rearticulating, which results in an expansion of these binary categories into a re-articulation of different qualitative states. In this sense, the work becomes a fluid interchange of ideas, visual formats, definitions of space and spatial designations. Interchangeable, conflatable, and mutable, the installation only temporarily exists in its present form. Always in flux, juddrules waits to be dismantled so it can emerge as a new relational formation at its next location, with similar components, yet different emphases, foci, and associations. In and as a dynamic relational form, juddrules enacts and performs this recasting. Although the various parts within Franklin Evans: juddrules connect to one another in a variety of ways, they do not congeal or become absorbed into a cohesive totality, a singular whole. The parts continue to be the parts even as they are momentarily contained within the space of the gallery, the context of the exhibition, and/or the work of art. It is in response to the particular dynamic form of the work that follow that a new terminology is needed. “Relational form”, “artwork as network”, and “networked artwork” begin to designate a new set of terms that have emerged in response to the recent developments in contemporary art and theory. In short, the question that has been explored here is: rather than the installation becoming a visualization of a network or resorting to networks as a useful metaphor, how exactly does the work of Franklin Evans begin to rearticulate and inform our understanding of an “artwork as network.” juddrules has a sense of formality to its composition that betrays a conversation with painters and painting across time, both imaginary and real. Evans engages with his fellow painters through visual art historical references or “quotations” of both text and image, employing their methodology (Judd’s “rules” as much as Mondrian’s use of painter’s tape). Indeed, the tape allows juddrules to connect to the rich history of this humble household medium, a tool for generating complex, creative compositions (see Fig. 2.6). Evans elevates the tape to an active participant in the final product rather than a means to an end, even if the tape serves to complicate how a work is finished or remains unfinished. It serves as a connector, a web, and a structure that both binds and unbinds all the physical components of the installation, offering a rich tapestry of art historical references that add to the density of the work. The quotations

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Figure 2.6: Detail. Franklin Evans, juddrules, 2014.

and the numerous historical references combine to form an articulated yet temporary “whole” where past and present are layered and presented in a non-linear fashion. It is precisely this layering effect that makes this work a relational form. The physical components and the interpretive and associative details combine together to form a constellation of forms, texts, and ideas. In short, it is in this way that we may begin to call juddrules a “network.”

Network Models This chapter has argued that the networked artwork serves as a powerful visual tool that generates new models to explore and understand our hyper-connected networked age. Its fluid, dynamic, relational form offers new ways to frame and reframe existing works, expanding the work of art’s relation to the world in which they begin to find their critical relevance. In part, it is the very expansive nature of the installation that proved the most challenging in terms of putting this into words and finding some measure of their effect. What the work “is” included the materials used to create the work, the spaces that displayed them, and the visitors to the exhibition. As the work spreads out across time and space, present and past, the global and the personal, the provisional and the permanent, digital and analog, are all constellated in the work. However, these contradictions or tensions within the work do not function as a series of binaries but rather exist as a complex web of interconnectedness, where information, ideas, and physical forms overlap, double, and continuously loop in and out of a networked whole. A key component is that the installation is a temporary conglomeration of objects, ideas, sound, images, and visual ephemera; it is an exhibition whose physical form is dismantled after their period of public display has ended and the “objects” return home to the studio or even storage. Ultimately, the focus of the work is not on the individual “objects” (or nodes) but rather the relationships between the “objects” (the

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edges) and the way these nodes and edges relate to the whole (a dynamic, relational form). What, then, does juddrules offer to network discourse that is different? The networked artwork offers diversity, expansiveness, and creativity. The relational nature of this work is not simply transactional or abstract; rather it is intellectual, physical, and embodied. Lastly, what it offers most uniquely is an experience of a network rather than an abstract, two-dimensional reductive image of a network. Juddrules’ emphasis on fluidity rather than stability, its favoring of mutation, multiplicity, and connectivity over a presentation in a fixed, finalized form that exists in a singular time and place, all this continues to entice me. History itself emerges as a dynamic relational form that is in active dialogue within the objects of the installation, rather than a tangential “thing of the past”, history exists as part of what constitutes the work in the present day. Another ambition for this chapter is the way in which our understanding of the work of art allows us to look beyond our current moment and look back historically at earlier works and ideas that can now be rethought through the lens of networks. At the same time, the work should also allow us to look ahead, so that we might begin to understand the emergence of new works that further address and expand the intersection of artwork and network. Recently, new forms of networks are emerging in social sciences and computational sciences that also suggest that most networks are not independent but are rather infused with other networks, suggesting the emergence a new third form, a type of conglomerate or meta-network that forms as smaller networks intersect, overlap, and interlace. The concept of dynamic and adaptable “meta-networks” could become the most appropriate organizing construct that captures the interconnected, interdependent, and complex networks created by the work of art. Alternately, their multilayered structures can act as independent networks and at the same time become part of an interconnected network that encompasses others again. As network technologies continue to develop and change our world, one can only assume that works of art will not simply change along but actively respond, critique, and further transform these changes. The opening up of new experimental frameworks in relation to works of art can change the course of art history and art practice itself. But it begs the question: can the artwork as network also open up new possibilities for contemporary artistic practices? For instance, can it offer artists a new way to think about their work and provide new critical modes for its interpretation? Can it provide new opportunities for its manufacture, distribution, and exhibition? In addition to applying an analytical, network model when looking at works of art already in existence, can the artwork as network model offer a new place for a work of art to begin? In closing, I would like to cite Vitale once more: “Network models have been used to map the Internet, better understand social networks, predict crashes in markets and electrical grids, simulate crowd behavior, and design roadways to decrease congestion […] All that was needed, in a sense, was a change in perspective” (2014, 12). It is my hope that in bringing to your attention Franklin Evans, juddrules, I have presented an aesthetic model – the artwork as network – that contributes to such a “change in perspective.”

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References Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2009 (1998). Judd, Donald. “Specific Objects.” [1965] In The Complete Writings 1959‒1975, 181–189. Halifax and New York: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and New York University Press, 2005. Krauss, Rosalind E. “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” October 8 (1979a): 30‒44. Krauss, Rosalind E. “Grids.” October 9 (1979b): 50‒64. Papapetros, Spyros and Julian Rose. Retracing the Expanded Field: Encounters between Art and Architecture. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014. Vitale, Christopher. Networkologies: A Philosophy of Networks for a Hyperconnected Age – A Manifesto. Washington: Zer0 Books, 2014.

Ariel Lifschitz, My Urban Roots (fragment of artwork), digital printing, 2020 (courtesy of the artist).

Part I: Planting and Planning the Grid

My Urban Roots forms part of a broader design study that deals with sustainability from personal perspectives. This work’s fragment shows an urban grid made up of roots that fill in unconstructed spaces in a given urban fabric, such as streets, avenues, parks, gardens, and spacing between blocks of buildings. It shows the details of this organic grid, presented as a repeating tradition of human practice to compress nature into familiar orthogonal patterns, patterns which are also somewhat artificial in the eyes of the artist. My Urban Roots directly corresponds with this Part’s three chapter contributions, by its preoccupation with the urban grid, and that of its architect-artist in passing interpretation regarding historicity, town planning practices, sustainability and natural landscapes.

Renato Leão Rego

3 The Grid Specialized: Practical Town Planning, Artistic Features, and Natural Settings in Twentieth-Century Brazilian New Towns Abstract: The grid has been deemed an instinctive tool for creating new towns, for no other parceling scheme seems so easily outlined, yielding uniform plots plainly describable in deeds. It is advantageous from the commercial point of view, as it offers none of the problems that irregular plots and curved perimeters present to planners, who can easily calculate the area of standardized, orthogonal shapes. However, the grid has been criticized for a calculated indifference to the natural setting, and has been taken as the physical equivalent of the laissez-faire economy: the perfect plan for the capitalist city, generating urban forms strong in private spaces, but weak in public ones. Moreover, its principle of order, regularity, simplicity and practicality can become rigid and lack interest if mechanically applied. For the grid is neutral, non-hierarchical, and will appear monotonous unless infused with special content, thus gaining individuality, hierarchy and aesthetic appeal. Referring to a series of Brazilian case studies, this chapter presents new town layouts in which the grid was more or less creatively adopted as the basic component. I examine early twentieth-century layouts developed by civil engineers who were attuned to both the natural settings and urban beauty, as well as the mid-century designs of rationalist architects. Relating to the City Beautiful idea, the Functional City notion and the formulation of closed grids, the paper explores how environmental thinking and artistic compositions helped to “specialize” the otherwise indistinct gridiron town layout and produce compelling townscapes. Keywords: new towns; modernism; city beautiful; functional city; urban grid; sustainability

Introduction The grid has been the main urban design model for Brazilian towns. Some urban settlements in colonial Brazil depicted a less rigid, more organic layout, due to an intentional adaptation to natural topographic conditions (Teixeira 2012; Correia 2008; Reis 2000; Holanda 1995). Nonetheless, Portuguese colonial towns generally presented a gridiron layout, although less systematized than the Spanish colonial

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urban design. After independence from Portugal in 1822, Brazilian capital cities experienced a surge of modernization and the colonial-town irregularity was generally erased, as contemporary sanitation requirements demanded straight streets (Rego 2014). Belo Horizonte (1897), the first new provincial capital built from scratch in Republican Brazil, employed a system of two overlapped grids – orthogonal streets and diagonal avenues-, as a modern, Parisian-like urban image. The establishment of the first garden suburb in São Paulo, in the late 1910s, instigated a legal debate as the city’s municipal legislation did not permit curved roads. Twentieth-century Brazilian new town plans also drew on the Portuguese-heritage gridded layout, particularly those designed for pioneering, hinterland agricultural areas, following governmental efforts to occupy the territory and develop the country (Rego 2019; Trevisan 2009). The creative use of the grid in the new towns planned in early and mid-twentieth century Brazil has not received proper attention. One overview of gridded new towns concluded, without elaboration, that “links with urban theories in vogue in the country or internationally do not constitute a general explanatory basis, maybe because of the activity of civil engineers” (Rosaneli 2014, 567). However, the first Brazilian town planners, who originally trained as civil engineers and were aware of the North American City Beautiful movement and European planning ideas, were themselves responsible for the creativity found in these gridiron layouts. In contrast, architects acting as town-planners from mid-century onwards stuck to more functionalist ideas and produced less ‘artistic’ designs, as evidenced by the post-Brasília new towns built in northern Brazil in the early 1970s (Rego 2019). As a multiple case study, this chapter focuses on a wide-range of town layouts in pioneering agricultural settings (namely: Rolândia, 1934; Maringá, 1945–47; Tamboara, 1947; Jussara, 1951; Cidade Gaúcha, 1953; and Ivaiporã, 1953, in Paraná state; Angélica, 1954, in Mato Grosso do Sul state; Rurópolis, 1972, in the state of Pará; Sinop, 1979, in Mato Grosso state; and Palmas, 1989, in Tocantins state), located in different administrative regions of the country (South, Central, West-Central and North) and created under different political regimes (democracy and dictatorship). It explores the prominent private colonization and urbanization enterprises in Paraná, Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul; the mammoth governmental settlement and colonization plan along the Transamazon highway in Pará; and the creation of a new state, Tocantins, and its capital city. In those layouts the grid has proved to be a practical design device, a spatial organization system with aesthetic, symbolic and behavioural implications. The chapter thus relates artistic composition, urban form, town planning, landscape architecture, geography and sustainability. It calls for a holistic, multidisciplinary approach to understanding the potentials of the gridded layout and how it may affect townscapes and spatial perception. Drawing upon previous morphological studies and interpretative historical research, I argue that the urban grid – a standardized product that facilitates urban design, land demarcation, commodification of space and town construction  – can become ‘specialized’ when artistic features are incorporated and the natural setting is taken into consideration.

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In contrast, when those distinctive aspects are lacking, the grid tends to embody its negative spatial characteristics.

Designing Orthogonal Plots, Blocks and Streets The gridded tradition of planning is a ubiquitous urban design model found in many different places and epochs. The grid does not correlate with any particular type of regime, economic system or religious orientation, and the only common denominator for all grid-planned settlements is the existence of an authority, willing and able to plan and build settlements in that way. Their reasons varied, ranging from functional to symbolic, political and aesthetic (Ross and Bigon 2019; Rose-Redwood and Bigon 2018; Rose-Redwood 2008; Grant 2001; Koolhaas 1994; Kostof 1993; Reps 1992; Sennett 1990, Marcuse 1987; Mumford 1961; Lynch 1954). In the layout of twentieth-century Brazilian new towns the traditional urban grid was mainly applied for practical reasons; it being a convenient instrument for real estate speculation and commodification of space (Mumford 1961; Reps 1992; Koolhaas 1994; Lynch 1954). The colonization scheme of northern Paraná state, which founded dozens of new towns in Southern Brazil, applied straight lines to connect streams and

Figure 3.1: Regional planning and town layout in northern Paraná, 1934–1936. From left, the cities of Rolândia, Arapongas, Cambé and Londrina.

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ridges – the natural lines. It thus easily defined more or less rectangular rural plots that had direct access to water and transport, as roads were always built along the ridges (Fig. 3.1). In typical new town layouts, whether private or state initiatives, and in monumental urban designs the grid has never been totally dismissed as a planning model. This can be seen in the design for Goiânia (1933) – a new garden-city-like state capital; Palmas (1989) – a post-modernist capital city for newly-created Tocantins state, and Brasília (1957)  – the functionalist new federal capital. Garden City designs proved to be costlier than the orthogonal street pattern and, in Brazil, they typified affluent neighborhoods. While upper- and middle-class garden suburbs sprawled in the most important urban areas in the country, early twentieth-century improvements to city centers were designed according to Beaux-Arts and City Beautiful ideas (Leme 2005). On the other hand, new towns were not entirely designed upon organic lines either, since the garden-city ambience was merged with a formal orthogonal arrangement of central axis and avenues. A bucolic, cozy, meandering layout would not appear urban, not even planned or modern, in pioneering agricultural settings (Rego 2014). In this sense, the gridded pioneering new town can also be seen as an emblem of modernity (Krauss 1985). However, this does not mean that the grid generated standardized, uniform new towns to a great extent. In general, the layouts of new towns built by colonization and settlement enterprises in twentieth-century Brazil do not resemble the North-American cases analyzed by Reps (1992). First, the time framing is different. Brazilian new towns were mostly planned at the time when town planning was being formed as a field of knowledge in the country. Engineering schools then offered regular courses on town layout, especially concerning urban traffic and sanitation issues. Moreover, town planning courses in Polytechnic Schools recognized the achievements of contemporary urbanism. Course curricula addressed such subjects as: the Linear City, Garden City, City Beautiful, Functional City, zoning, parkways, diagonal arteries, green belts, and civic centers. Practical examples were taken from real towns (Washington, Paris, Rome, Welwyn, Radburn, Goiânia, and Belo Horizonte) and from visionary plans (Chicago, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo). European and North-American town planning ideas and practices have been debated in, and diffused by, engineering schools, professional associations and specialized journals and newspapers since the first decades of the last century. These concepts were further diffused by the Brazilian professionals travelling abroad for studies, conferences, and technical visits (Angotti-Salgueiro and Simões Junior 2020). Moreover, foreign experts were invited in as town planning consultants, particularly the French urbanist Alfred Agache, who lectured in, and coordinated planning proposals for, Rio de Janeiro (1930), Porto Alegre (1935), Belo Horizonte (late 1930s), São Paulo (1940), Curitiba (1943) and Vitória (1947), among other Brazilian cities (Leme 2005; Ficher 2005; Puppi 1981; Puppi 1986). The private colonization enterprise in northern Paraná state was a major initiative resulting from the pioneering agricultural development of deforested areas during the

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first-half of the twentieth century. It became an exemplary systematic urbanization process and was taken as a model for other private and governmental initiatives targeting the occupation of the Western and Northern hinterlands in the second-half of the twentieth century (Rego 2017). The major land company responsible for the planning of dozens of new towns, possibly a hundred of them, relied on foreign surveyors initially and then, later on, two civil engineers who graduated from the São Paulo Polytechnic School joined its board of directors. The smaller land companies also working in that area usually hired autonomous civil engineers for the task of planning (Rego, Sessak and Taube 2015). The new town plans created by civil engineers thus prevailed in the first half of last century, when City Beautiful ideas, French urbanism and the Beaux-Arts style were also part of the engineering curricula. Architecture schools became more widespread only in the mid-twentieth-century, at which time the new towns built in the more recently deforested rural lands were chiefly planned by architects. By mid-century, when architects took the lead role in planning proposals and urban design, functionalist ideas had already replaced academicism (Pinheiro 2010; Rego, Sessak and Taube 2015; Ficher 2005). As a matter of fact, Angélica (1954), a small new town planned by a São Paulo-based architect in the 1950s on the western agricultural frontier, reflected the Functional City principles and advanced their eminent materialization in Brasília (1957). The scientific approach of functionalist urbanism worked to find the minimum elements of each urban function in order to achieve the simplest design solution, which was to be applied even to more complex situations. While the plain grid was then praised for being practical, rational, geometric, and abstract, the townscape inevitably was impoverished with the loss of individuality. The grid was thus adopted as the underlying principle for both academicist and modernist layouts. What varied was the treatment given to it, sometimes more artistic and sensitive, sometimes less creative. But what would be needed to make the grid special again?

The Grid Specialized As Rem Koolhaas (1994) pointed out, the bi-dimensional discipline of Manhattan created an undreamed-of liberty for a tri-dimensional anarchy. In contrast to its urban plan, the chaotic skyline of Manhattan is punctuated with vertical monuments and distinctive buildings, to some extent obliterating the repetitive street pattern of the grid. Theoretically, a grid plan negates spontaneity and is indifferent to topography, yet, despite an apparent neutrality, essentially imposes itself as a superior mental construct. It has been criticized for being abstract, unpicturesque, imposing, lacking adaptability, monotonous, impersonal and rigid. However, an impression of monotony arises in part from the absence of special features. Likewise, formal and informal

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grid designs have both advantages and disadvantages (Unwin 1909). There are many other unfavorable opinions about the uniform grid, resulting from its mechanical use. However, sensitive design can avoid this (Lynch 1954). The gridded town plan can achieve considerable levels of legibility, identity and interest. Focal points and clear limits can improve the simple, practical, and ordered grid layout. In making decisions as to how to build, enlarge or renew urban areas, we are faced with issues regarding size, density, grain, outline and pattern (Lynch 1954). We must also think about other physical town-planning elements, such as: the position of isolated and grouped public buildings; open spaces, their form and position; distinguishing streets; and site conditions, to name a few other physical town-planning elements. Therefore, the grid can be ‘specialized’, or instilled with features unique to the location. In balancing these features, we can consciously build compelling townscapes upon essentially standardized gridded plans. A number of creative examples follow. The city of Rolândia (Fig. 3.1) was planned by a Russian surveyor in 1934 as a 10,000-inhabitant town whose initial layout was depending on the site. The rationale for a grid orientation in this town was the railway and the curved perimetric avenue that encircled the plateau and preserved the adjacent streams. The focal point of the layout was the train station, from which three diagonal larger avenues lead to the town hall, church and school (in the city center), the cemetery (on the far eastern edge of the city), and the sports facilities (on the western edge of the city). The entire blocks reserved for those buildings, strategically positioned on the grid, created singular events in the urban tissue. A similar solution can be found in Jussara (1951). Planned for approximately 7,000 inhabitants on a flat terrain, its gridded plan had a clear-cut central square on which six tree-lined avenues converge. Symmetry reinforced the artistic aspirations of the city layout. Four public squares and the adjacent school and catholic church specialized the otherwise indistinct grid. The design of Tamboara, 1947 (Fig. 3.2) was based on a rectangular grid, with a linear shape, positioned along a ridge. At the core of the city, the civic center accommodates the church opposite the town hall and symmetrical public squares between them. Diagonal tree-lined avenues and lateral public squares contribute to an artistic symmetrical layout. The town´s planner was a civil engineer, the former mayor of Curitiba who had delivered Alfred Agache’s master plan for that city. Agache had recommended (1930) that the artistic layout of a town be based much more on the organization of beautiful combinations of buildings and open spaces than on the construction of monuments. He further suggested that dispersed public buildings, parks and squares would forfeit all the symbolic expression and opportunity to convey the community’s ideals. Like Tamboara, Cidade Gaúcha (1953) also adopted a linear design shaped by the road on the main ridge and adjacent watercourses. Its gridded, hexagonally-shaped plan was idealized by a civil engineer who graduated from the Curitiba School, to house roughly 15,000 inhabitants. The main public buildings (the town hall, catholic churches, and bus station) were symmetrically and strategically positioned in

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Figure 3.2: Layout of Tamboara, 1947, civil engineer Alexandre Gutierrez Beltrão, partially modified in 1969.

public squares at the crossing of perpendicular or diagonal tree-lined avenues. This was clearly intended to create striking perspectives and artistically customize the grid. A hybrid urbanism is noticeable in the plan of Maringá, 1947 (Fig. 3.3), prepared by a prestigious São Paulo-based civil engineer. The city was laid out for 100,000-inhabitants according to Garden City lines, however straight orthogonal streets were integrated with the winding ones, which conform to the topographical contour of the site. The individuality of the town layout is mainly attributable to the site features, as the city layout was molded around urban parks preserving nearby streams. A pre-defined shape was avoided, even though the urban tissue is gridded in the civic center, where the terrain is flat and formality called for. Although a grid was employed, it conveyed an “outgrowth of the circumstances of the site”, as the British town planner Raymond Unwin pointed out (1909, 138). City Beautiful and other historical formal motifs were also incorporated – namely the trivium and the crescent – and, accordingly, primary public buildings, site conditions, blocks, avenues, boulevards, trees and open spaces, in varied form, number and position, were related according to Beaux-Art notions of artistic composition. Maringá was laid out as a polycentric town, with clearly delimited neighborhoods, each provided with its own secondary center  – a grouping of commercial buildings around an open space in the geometric center of the area, usually accessed by tree-lined avenues. In terms of grid specialization, what can be

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Figure 3.3: Layout of Maringá, 1945‒1947, civil engineer Jorge de Macedo Vieira.

said about the (main) civic center and whole urban form in Maringá is also valid for each of its neighborhoods: morphological components were arranged in order to individualize and specialize each district of the city. In a “conscious artistic designing of irregularities” (Unwin 1909, 104) as in Maringá’s layout, there is a sustainable balance between the natural and the artificial, the formal and the informal – in short, the grid and the elements employed to specialize it. A similar approach is evident in the Ivaiporã plan, 1953 (Fig. 3.4), albeit with a more arbitrary shape intended to artistically adapt the grid to the site contours. The street width and the tree-lining helped define the status and hierarchy of urban roads, and junctions have been understood as potential focal points for special treatment in order to create grand perspectives. Nevertheless, the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) discourse on urbanism excluded the Garden City, Beaux-Arts and all kind of explicit formalism inadequate to modern necessities. CIAM differentiated themselves from traditional urbanism and defended modern urbanism as the antithesis to everything that had existed previously. The form of the city was thus defamiliarized and reformatted (Holston 1989). All of the prize-winning proposals in the competition for Brasilia’s pilot plan adopted the Functional City ideas and the principles of the Chart d’Athènes, CIAM’s guiding document. But the construction of Angélica had already put into practice functionalist planning ideas in Brazil, thus paving the way for the disappearance of artistic features in the town layout.

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Figure 3.4: Aerial view of Ivaiporã, 1980, civil engineer Yaroslau Sessak

Angélica (Fig. 3.5), a 15,000-inhabitant town designed by a São Paulo-based architect in 1954, presented a regular shape and orthogonal street system on a rather flat terrain. Functionally segregated, the rationalized city organization conveyed a somewhat abstract layout. The rectangular, orthogonal, standardized residential sectors were planned according to the neighborhood unit concept and thus isolates pedestrians from vehicles. Artistic features were not present in this layout and the mechanically applied open grid could be extended indefinitely as the city grows. Like many others, the positivist layout of Angélica classified, separated, ordered, and standardized the urban form for the machine age. Consequently, undistinguished gridded residential areas were created.

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Figure 3.5: Layout of Angélica, 1954, architect Jorge Wilheim.

Rurópolis (1972), one of the dozens of new towns designed along the Transamazon highway by a Rio-de-Janeiro-based architect for a governmental colonization scheme, shows a similar approach. Based on post-Brasília functionalist urbanism, the layout of Rurópolis segregates the urban functions and shapes gridded residential areas, albeit less formally due to site conditions. Public buildings were loosely scattered on the large informal central open axis, so any kind of formal vista or artistic motif is absent. The notion of hierarchy and centrality was also rejected. After a revision and expansion of the initial city plan in 1979, the architect responsible for the layout of Sinop (Fig. 3.6) adopted Maringá’s layout as a planning model. Low density, large urban plots, regular shapes, a grid pattern, a symmetrical arrangement of some diagonal roads, three urban parks and, its most conspicuous element, ubiquitous roundabouts were adopted. On an absolutely flat terrain, the symmetrical grid was composed of very wide streets and avenues (ranging up to 50 meters in width), which were on average 3 km long in the east-west direction and 7 km long in the north-south direction, enhancing an otherwise horizontal, monotonous townscape. Sinop was not designed as a multi-nuclei urban form and the uniform layout of the residential areas, despite their central open public spaces, did not enable the construction of varied townscapes or different neighborhoods. Furthermore, open spaces in residential areas were placed in standard blocks, which were occupied by public buildings with no special treatment. In contrast, the city center was empha-

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Figure 3.6: Layout of Sinop (revised 1979), architect Alfredo Clodoaldo de Oliveira Neto.

sized artistically so as to specialize the grid, as in Maringá. The grid, according to the town planner, was definitely the best option for that terrain, but the overall impression is that its drawbacks stem from the flatness, low density and colossal dimensions of the gridded, largely functional plan. An aerial photo of Sinop points to a common problem in Brazilian new towns. The new urban extensions are in effect disrupted, mechanically designed additions to the existing urban form. Their usual poorly-elaborated gridded layout – sterile fragments of strict utilitarian logic, ends up devoid of any identity and individuality. The vastness of Sinop can also be seen in the capital city of the new state of Tocantins: Palmas, 1989 (Fig. 3.7), which is also a gridded city for the machine era, originally planned for one-and-a-half-million citizens. Its main urban axis, 150 meters wide, includes two avenues of four lanes each, plus parking areas on each side, a median strip and compulsory setbacks. Palmas was designed by two architects who had lived in Brasília and London and adopted the Milton Keynes new town as a planning model. Like the plan for Milton Keynes, Palmas also presents a loose network, which was adjusted to site conditions. In addition to its surrounding natural setting, the gigantic grid, wide avenues, functional zoning and the adaptation of the neighborhood unit concept are also notable features of the city. The town layout exhibited a relative centrality (the administrative center) in an otherwise non-hierarchical linear form. City functions were segregated and residential areas were shaped in orthogonal ‘macroblocks.’ They can be understood as a gigantic, geometric adaptation of Clarence Perry’s neighborhood-unit concept. Each residential macroblock was designed to house a population of up to 12,000 inhabitants. They were to contain an outer

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Figure 3.7: Aerial view of Palmas (detail, 2020), 1989, architects Luiz Fernando Cruvinel Teixeira and Walfredo Antunes de Oliveira Filho.

green belt and have only two entrances, which would enhance their insular environment. In clear contrast to the authoritarian structure of Brasília, the Palmas layout rejected the modernist, standardized housing and the uniformity of the superblock in favor of a more heterogeneous townscape. Thus, the inner displays were defined by different architects, yielding unique configurations. However, the act of avoiding a plain internal gridded pattern, aiming at diversity, has been as detrimental to the city as its external homogeneity (Rego 2020).

Conclusions In the examples analyzed in this chapter, the rectangular or square grid plan formed the initial template upon which designers could specialize the urban form by adapting it to topographical conditions and adding other morphological elements and artistic motifs, for environmental, symbolic and aesthetic purposes. All of the examples were of towns planned from scratch but the lessons learned are also valid for urban expansion.

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The gridded spaces examined here were attuned to different cultural values and historical circumstances, but relate to the quest of building better-planned urban worlds. The results are compelling when: – the gridded urban form is treated as a defined, limited whole, regardless of shape and perimeter; – the focus of the center is the arrangement of public buildings and open spaces along with other formal motifs; – there is systematic distinction apparent among the streets; – focal points break the uniform gridded plan, and; – an imaginative organization of urban elements comes into play. Sensitive design can thus mitigate the shortcomings of the urban grid model, and natural features and artistic composition can help specialize the grid. The arrangement of the urban form is not different from that of architectural composition, and can be a fine expression of community life.

References Angotti-Salgueiro, Heliana, and José Geraldo Simões Junior. “Crossing Histories: Brazilian Planners of São Paulo and Their Transnational References (1910‒1930).” Urbe 12 (2020): 1‒13. Correia, Jorge. The Establishment of Portuguese Colonial Towns in North Africa. Porto: FAUP, 2008. [in Portuguese] Ficher, Sylvia. Architects from the Polytechnic. São Paulo: EDUSP, 2005. [in Portuguese] Grant, Jill. “The Dark Side of the Grid: Power and Urban Design.” Planning Perspectives 16, 3 (2001): 219–241. Holanda, Sérgio Buarque. Roots of Brazil. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1995. [in Portuguese] Holston, James. The Modernist City. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989. Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1994. Kostof, Spiro. The City Shaped. New York: Bulfinch Press, 1993. Krauss, Rosalind E. “Grids.” In The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Krauss’ anthology of essays), 9‒22. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1985. Leme, Maria Cristina da Silva (org.). Urbanism in Brazil 1895–1965. Salvador: UFBA, 2005. [in Portuguese] Lynch, Kevin. “The Form of Cities.” Scientific American 190 (1954): 54–63. Marcuse, Peter. “The Grid as City Plan: New York City and Laissez‐Faire Planning in the Nineteenth Century.” Planning Perspectives 2, 3 (1987): 287‒310. Mumford, Lewis. The City in History. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1961. Pinheiro, Eloisa Petti. “Foreign Ideas Creating Desirable Cities in South America: From Academicism to Modernism.” Scripta Nova XIV, 331 (2010). http://www.ub.edu/geocrit/sn/sn-331/sn-331-11. htm [in Portuguese, no doi] Puppi, Ildefonso C. Sanitary Structuration of Cities. Curitiba: UFPR, 1981. [in Portuguese] Puppi, Ildefonso C. Facts and Reminiscences of the Faculty. Curitiba: UFPR, 1986. [in Portuguese] Rego, Renato Leão. “Brazilian Garden Cities and Suburbs: Accommodating Urban Modernity and Foreign Ideals.” Journal of Planning History 13, 4 (2014): 276‒295.

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Rego, Renato Leão, Taissa Sessak Ribeiro, and Jaqueline Taube. “Classical Ideas, Progressive Aspirations: Academicism and the Layout of Northern Paraná New Towns.” Revista de Morfologia Urbana 3, 1 (2015): 17‒27. [in Portuguese] Rego, Renato Leão. “Shaping an Urban Amazonia: ‘A Planner’s Nightmare’.” Planning Perspectives 32, 2 (2017): 249‒270. Rego, Renato Leão, Ideas for New Towns. Architecture and Urbanism in Twentieth-Century Brazilian Hinterlands. Londrina: Kan, 2019. [in Portuguese] Rego, Renato Leão. “Palmas, the Last Capital City Planned in Twentieth-Century Brazil.” Urbe 12 (2020): 1–16. Reis, Nestor Goulart. Images of Villages and Towns of Colonial Brazil. São Paulo: EDUSP, 2000. [in Portuguese] Reps, John W. The Making of Urban America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Rosaneli, Alessandro Filla. “Grid Plan New Towns in the Brazilian Coffee Frontier.” Journal of Urban Design 19, 5 (2014): 638–659. Rose-Redwood, Reuben S. “Genealogies of the Grid: Revisiting Stanislawski’s Search for the Origin of the Grid-Pattern Town.” Geographical Review 98, 1 (2008): 42‒58. Rose-Redwood, Reuben, and Liora Bigon (eds.). Gridded Worlds: An Urban Anthology. Cham: Springer, 2018. Ross, Eric, and Liora Bigon. “The Urban Grid and Entangled Planning Cultures in Senegal.” Planning Perspectives 34, 5 (2019): 779–804. Sennett, Richard. “American Cities: The Grid Plan and the Protestant Ethic.” International Social Science Journal 42, 3 (1990): 269‒285. Teixeira, Manuel C. The Form of the Portuguese-Origin City. São Paulo: UNESP, 2012. [in Portuguese] Trevisan, Ricardo. “New Towns.” PhD diss., University of Brasília, 2009. [in Portuguese] Unwin, Raymond. Town Planning in Practice: An Introduction to the Art of Designing Cities and Suburbs. London: T. F. Unwin, 1909.

Shaoqian Zhang

4 Centrifugal or Processional: Divine and Mundane Power in Ancient Chinese Funeral Grids Abstract: Taking an interdisciplinary approach involving Chinese religious studies and urban planning, this chapter introduces two different types of Chinese grid: One is organized in a radially symmetrical manner, and emphasizes the center as the representation of divine power. The other follows a bilaterally symmetrical order, and it emphasizes the procession and deepening of space in an urban grid along the central axis, to protect and deify the mundane power and spatially consolidate social hierarchies. To many scholars, traditional Chinese political systems can be regarded in terms of reciprocation and negotiation between divine and mundane power. Ideas of hierarchical societies, such as monarchical supremacy and governors receiving their mandates from heaven, constituted the core concepts regulating traditional Chinese political systems. Therefore, in the two types urban grid, their autonomous yet interdependent functioning created a wide variety of spatial patterns and architectural types in temples, altars, palaces, residences and cities. Against this background, my question focuses on the urban planning of ancient imperial Chinese funeral cities, which also follows a grid pattern. One approach in earlier Chinese religious thought was to regard the deceased as divine, with their funeral cities serving as an altar to which the living could send prayers. The other approach was to treat the deceased in a manner suggesting they were still alive. In this knowledge system, the living world and the underground world were entrusted to hold the same structure, demonstrating a yin (decreased) and yang (living) isomorphic cultural model. However, a number of these funeral cities demonstrate a combination of these two types of grid, as well as the two types of approach to the afterlife. By comparing the symbolic and allegorical representations found in these two types of funeral grid, this paper looks at the changing Chinese beliefs in an afterlife and the organizational principles and cultural connotations of traditional Chinese society itself. Keywords: centrifugal grid; processional grid; Chinese funeral culture; ancestral worship; imperial tomb

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Introduction1 Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), widely regarded as the father of modern China, and the leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party, died in March 1925. His body was first preserved in the Biyun Temple in Beijing, awaiting the completion of his mausoleum in the capital city, Nanjing, construction of which not completed until the spring of 1929 (Chen 2008) (Fig. 4.1). The location of Sun’s Mausoleum was on the Purple Gold Mountain, site of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) imperial tombs. Aligning his mausoleum with the Ming imperial tombs not only evoked Sun’s early mission to expel the Manchus and restore Han ethnic primacy in China, but also borrowed the thousand

1 The author thanks Wang Lin, a senior research at Hanyangling Museum, for his generous help in locating primary documents and images for this research project.

Figure 4.1: Aerial view of the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum and Park in the 1930s.

Figure 4.2: The Plan of the Changling Tomb of the Ming Dynasty. 1. Front Gate; 2. Stele Pavilion; 3. Main Gate; 4. Paper Burner; 5. Sacrificial Hall; 6. Inner Gate; 7. Pai-Lou; 8. Incense Table; 9. Square Bastion; 10. Radiant Tower; 11. Retaining Wall; 12. Tumulus.

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years’ tradition of ancestor worship in Chinese funeral culture, conferring upon him the status of an “ancestor” for modern China. Unsurprisingly, the American trained architect, Lü Yanzhi (1894–1929) laid Sun Yat-sen’s mausoleum out on the model of Ming imperial mausoleums, with a memorial arch, tablet pavilion, sacrificial hall and coffin chamber on a south-north oriented central axis (Lai 2005) (Fig. 4.2). When comparing the ground plans of Sun’s Mausoleum with the Changling of the Ming Yongle Emperor (1360–1424), we can notice that both funeral structures follow a bilateral symmetrical order and emphasize the procession and deepening of space, from the entrance gate to the burial chamber embedded in the mountain. The major difference between the two is that the bell-shaped Sun Mausoleum was intended as an open site for public veneration, whereas the Changling of the Ming featured imposing walls heavily guarded by imperial troops. As suggested by Chinese historian, Chen Yunqian, constructing Sun’s Mausoleum in such a classical funeral revival style, allowed the ruling party, the Chinese Nationalist Party, to translate the tradition of ancestral worship and the Confucian virtue of filial piety into loyalty to the party (Chen 2005). Her statement, in turn, implies that constructing funeral sites for ancestors had historically played a vital role in politics. China is a repository of some of the most significant burials in world history. Chinese views of death, tomb, and burial practice can be traced to the first millennium BCE, and have persisted into contemporary life. The famous dictum from Zuozhuan suggests that “the fundamental matters of a nation are ancestor sacrifice, and military” (Zuo 2016, 149). In the belief that the ancestors would determine the nation’s future, Chinese tombs and ancestral temples were carefully built for regularly conducted worship. In the case of Sun Yat-sen’s Mausoleum, its presence would help legitimize the new capital city, Nanjing, and therefore the Nationalist Party’s “Capital Plan” in 1929 designated its administration zone adjacent to Sun Yat-sen’s Mausoleum (Musgrove 2013). The Nationalist Party also planned a variety of worship rituals related to the mausoleum, enhancing the fame of this national icon and the legacy of Sun Yat-sen (Wagner 2011). Indeed, as the political culture subsequently deteriorated, the worship rituals became more and more frequent and emotionally provocative, with Chiang Kai-shek ostentatiously shedding tears as he read Sun Yat-sen’s words during a ceremonial visit to the tomb, just prior to fleeing with his government to Chongqing in 1937 (Chen 2005). Evidently legitimizing the Nationalist Party’s political authority, Sun Yat-sen’s Mausoleum was woven into contemporary politics from its foundation. This chapter focuses on the ground plans of imperial Chinese funeral cities, which, similar to the planning of Chinese capital cities, also follows a grid pattern. Grid plans, by which the city streets or urban walls are laid out at right angles to each other, are among the most ancient forms of city construction, utilized by human cultures worldwide for millennia. As the seemingly universal forms of grid planning give rise to different political ideologies, the planning of the traditional Chinese necropolis speaks to different understandings of afterlife and ancestral worship. By comparing the symbolic and allegorical representations in different types of traditional Chinese

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funeral grid planning, the chapter looks at the changing Chinese beliefs regarding an afterlife and the organizational principles and cultural connotations of traditional Chinese society itself. This is a broad topic, both religiously and spatially, covering multiple disciplines including Chinese architectural history, art history, philosophy and religious studies. Therefore, I do not plan to exhaust all the possibilities inherent in Chinese funeral site design. First, the traditional funeral space usually consists of both underground/ hidden components (burial chamber) and aboveground complexes, but I am limiting my discussion here to aboveground structures. Second, domestic Chinese thoughts on funeral and afterlife have embraced foreign religious influences through all historical periods. In order to have a focused discussion, for this piece, I have not selected any tomb that illuminates cultural diversity. The primary goal here is, by analyzing a few examples of Chinese imperial funeral grids, to uncover the underlying logic of a tomb’s design, and to interpret a funeral site as an embodiment of social relations, politics and religious beliefs.

Centrifugal versus Processional in Chinese Urban Grids Before our discussion on Chinese funeral grids, two different types of Chinese urban planning will be introduced. Chinese historians generally believe that the basic system of ancient Chinese architecture and urban planning – especially the architectural spatial pattern characterized by the grid and its “urban box” in relation to the hierarchical political system characterized by courtyards – can be traced back to the Shang Dynasty, around 2000 BCE (Xu 2013). A number of imperial capital cities were more or less enlarged gridded urban boxes and they displayed a centrality, symmetry and hierarchal spatial layout in their overall composition. The hierarchical grid promoted the subjects’ consciousness of social orders and persuaded them to employ the rules of society to police themselves (Zhang 2019). Political power did not exist only in the human domain. The power structure of the ancient Chinese belief system is divided into two levels: “Heaven” and “Human.” Among them, the human power structure has a strict hierarchy, with imperial power being the highest, and the legitimacy of the highest human power originates from the “mandate of heaven”, meaning that the emperor is “the son of heaven.” In other words, in ancient Chinese culture, “heaven” is an existence higher than the emperor’s power (Xu 2013). The so-called “harmony of heaven and man”, crucial to Chinese political thought, also indicates that there is a division between heaven and mankind. After conducting an inductive study on the spatial patterns of traditional Chinese architecture, architectural historian Yitao Xu found that there are two basic spatial types in traditional Chinese urban grid structures. One is organized in a radially sym-

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Figure 4.3: Reconstruction of the Zhou Ancestral Temple Complex for the emperor by Jiao Xun 焦 循 (1763–1820), from Qunjing gongshi tu 群經 宮室圖, in Sancai tuhui 三才圖會, and copied in various other texts.

Figure 4.4: Ariel view of the Forbidden City, as example of processional grid.

metrical manner, and emphasizes the center as the representation of divine power (the Heaven, buddha etc.) (Fig. 4.3). Examples of this kind of centrifugal space include the Temple of Heaven, Mingtang (Bright Hall), ancestral temples, and the Temple of Earth. The other type follows a bilaterally symmetrical order, and it emphasizes the procession and deepening of space in an urban grid along the central axis, to protect and deify the mundane power (emperors, the noble classes, etc.) and spatially consolidate social hierarchies (Xu 2013) (Fig. 4.4). There are numerous examples of this kind of processional grid, such as the Forbidden City and the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE) city of Chang’an. According to Yitao Xu, the centrifugal space highlights “heaven” or the “heavenly deity”, and the processional space highlights “people” or the “people’s governorship.” Chinese traditional culture emphasizes that “the way of heaven” is eternal and unchanging. Therefore, the centrifugal “heavenly space” has a single center, and its form reflects the ultimate authority of “heaven.” In contrast, human beings are impermanent, and any supreme ruler would inevitably face death. Therefore, the

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processional grid consolidates political power and manages social relations without underscoring the eternity of any individual (Xu 2013). Traditional Chinese political systems can be regarded in terms of reciprocation and negotiation between divine and mundane power. Ideas of hierarchical societies, such as monarchical supremacy and governors receiving their mandates from heaven, constituted the core concepts regulating traditional Chinese political systems. Therefore, these two types of urban grid, their autonomous yet interdependent functioning created a wide variety of spatial patterns and architectural types in temples, altars, palaces, residences and cities.

From Ancestral Temples to Monumental Tombs Following on from this discussion on two different types of Chinese grid, here we may shift our focus back to the urban planning of ancient imperial Chinese funeral cities, many of which also follows a grid pattern. Perhaps no people in the world have been as intensely preoccupied for as long a time with veneration of, preparation for, the afterlife as the Chinese have been, despite a diversity in funeral cultures from region to region. For the Chinese, the ancestors’ journeys and situations after death have always exerted a great impact on their offspring. Over the course of thousands of years, there emerged numerous understandings of an afterlife, wherein the deceased encounter destinations including a heaven and a netherworld (what the Chinese call huangquan), resulting in a variety of tomb styles and funeral site planning. The understanding of Chinese imperial tombs needs to be contextualized in relation to the structure and symbolism of the ancestral temple, which is, according to art historian, Wu Hung, “the legitimate place for holding both political and religious ceremonies during the Western Zhou […] a collective monument of a clan or lineage, identifying its political status, preserving memories of its past, and linking it into a large social network through a temple system” (Wu 1995, 78). The Western Zhou Dynasty (1047–772 BCE) established a clan-based society through familial moral entities, sanctified by rites related to ancestral worship. Commenting on family lineage and national politics, Wang Guowei (1877‒1927), a famous Qing Dynasty intellectual, wrote in his famous essay Yinzhou Zhidulun (i.e., “Discussion on the Social Institutions of Yin and Zhou”): The Zhou Dynasty’s first ideal was to crown the son and lineal descent, and the patriarchal clan system, the mourning system of the deceased and the system of allotting land came from this. The second ideal was the system of temple numbers, and the third ideal was to forbid the marriage of the same family names. These were the reasons why the Zhou could govern the kingdom (Wang 2004, n.p.; author’s translation).

Under this Zhou Dynasty model, the ancestral temple was the most important symbolic architecture of the nation, legitimizing the rulership and at the same time,

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extending the temple system into a large social network. According to “Jifa” of Liji (i.e., The Book of Rites): “There are kings under heaven, who divide the land to establish a country, who set up the capital city, by setting up ancestral temples and offering sacrifice” (Liji 2018, 127; author’s translation). The ancestral temple gave legitimacy to the political powers, and therefore functioned as the starting point of a capital city’s plan. As far as the location of ancestral temples is concerned, a number of documents point out that the ancestral temple complex should be in the very center of a capital city. Philosopher Mo Zi (468–376 BCE) wrote: “The saintly kings of the Xia, Shang and Zhou Dynasties founded their state capitals, by choosing the location of the central altar of the country and regarding it as the ancestral temple” (Mo 2018, 28; author’s translation). According to historian-politician Lü Buwei (291–235 BCE): “ancient kings chose the center of the world to build their country, and then chose the center of the country to build their palace, and the center of the palace to build their ancestral temple” (Lü 2018, 231). Many texts have stated that the early Chinese capital cities featured a stage of “centering on the ancestral temple.” Judging from the archeological evidence of Zhouyuan, the earlier capital of the Western Zhou Dynasty, the so-far discovered Zhou ancestral temples were not always located at the geometric center of the entire city, but they were always in the core area of the city (Wang 2018). As far as religious functions of ancestral temples are concerned, ancestral temples functioned as sites in which people could pose questions to their ancestors, a place to facilitate communication between human beings and higher authority through the inscribed texts on oracle bones. Worship of ancestors demonstrated a desire to be connected to a higher course, reaching beyond human domain. Ancestor worship also helped sanctify human relations. Later, the Western Zhou Dynasty’s conception of the unity between ancestors, family and nation had been clearly iterated in many Confucian doctrines, manifesting themselves as principles of filial piety and hierarchical societies. In the case of the actual planning of ancestral temples, the focus, as with most spaces devoted to divine power, was on the center  – not only was the ancestral temple complex built in the center of the capital city, but the planning also materialized in a centrifugal pattern. According to The Book of Rites, “The emperor has seven temples, with three of them in the Zhao location and three in the Mu Location, and the founding emperor’s temple makes the No. 7” (Liji 2018, 14; author’s translation) (Fig. 4.3). Examining the layout of the imperial ancestral temple complex, we can see that the founding emperor’s temple is located in the center, with the temples of his descendants positioned according to the zhao-mu system (intra-lineage rank system). Archaeological evidence is scanty for the early ancestral temples of the Western Zhou Dynasty. However, Wang Mang (45 BCE–23 CE), who seized the Chinese imperial throne from the Liu family of the Western Han Dynasty (202 BCE–9 CE) and founded the short-lived Xin Dynasty (9–23 CE), strove to restore Western Zhou classical ancestral worship traditions. Unsurprisingly, in an effort to legitimize his own rulership,

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Wang Mang built a number of ritual architectural complexes in a centrifugal manner, including the Temple of Soil and Grain, Mingtang Quepi, and the ancestral temple complex. According to the concrete archaeological evidence and later research done by Huang Zhanyue, Wang Mang’s ancestral temple complex consisted of twelve ancestor temple sites. Each ancestor site was heavily walled with four entrance gates in each direction, and the center was occupied by the ancestor temple built on a high earthen mound (Huang 1960). Wang Mang’s monumental ancestral temples followed principles of the Seven Temple Model in the Zhao-mu system from The Book of Rites, as illustrated in Fig 4.3, with slight revisions. The centrifugal grid of the ancestral temple complex underscored the eternity and divinity of the ancestral spirit in the belief system of early China.

Translating the Centrifugal Grid into the Funeral System Wu Hung points out that the ancestral temple system started to decline from the Eastern Zhou Dynasty (770‒256 BCE), and by the time of the Western Han Dynasty, funeral monuments had assumed most of their political and religious roles (Wu 1995, 75‒76). In the earlier days, the ancestral temple had symbolized the entire ancestral lineage’s spirt, whereas personal tombs were individual and related to human remains, thus considered to be secondary and even unclean. The earlier tombs were constructed to be small and humble underground concealments. Yet, in the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, the central focus of ancestor worship shifted from the “collective lineage temple to tombs of families and individuals” (Wu 1995, 78). During this period (around the Fourth and Third Century BCE), large mausoleums became popular (Wu 2010, 17). Traditional ancestral temples relied on ritual vessels and ritual activities to manifest their political and religious significance. By contrast, funeral structures relied more on their impressive architectural forms to communicate their significance (Wu 1995, 78). Because of this shift, the Mausoleum of the First Emperor of the Qin Dynasty (221‒206 BCE) still impresses, with its monumental scale, yet only archeological experts know the true location of the Qin ancestral temple. The popularity of mausoleum construction endured for more than 2,000 years after the Eastern Zhou Dynasty. One of the core values of the ancestral temple was in its expression of divinity over the human realm, manifested through its centrifugal layout. The idea of absolute authority and everlasting dynasty was also applied in the plan of the tomb of the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty (Fig. 4.5). Named the Lishan Mausoleum, the burial chamber is situated underneath a 76-meter-tall earth mound, shaped like a truncated pyramid. The Lishan Mausoleum is the very center of the funeral city, which is modeled on the Qin’s capital city Xianyang. The ground plan of the funeral city

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Figure 4.5: Ariel view of the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor.

demonstrates three layers of an “urban box”, the Lishan Mausoleum, the inner city and the outer center. The centrality of the Lishan Mausoleum was emphasized not only through its central location, but also its height, symbolizing the un-surmountable power and might of the emperor himself. Since this Qin emperor’s burial chamber has never been excavated, we can only obtain information about it from Sima Qian (c. 145–c. 86 BCE)’s report in his famous Records of the Grand Historian. According to Sima Qian, inside the tomb of the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty, “Palaces and scenic towers for a hundred officials were constructed, and the tomb was filled with rare artifacts and wonderful treasure […] Mercury was used to simulate the hundred rivers, the Yangtze and Yellow River, and the great sea, and set to flow mechanically. Above were representation of the heavenly constellations, below, the features of the land” (Sima 2020, n.p.). Sima Qian’s description implies that the interior of the tomb was made into a symbolic space, a microcosm of the universe. The symbolic arrangement and decoration of his burial chamber demonstrates the soul of the deceased emperor as divine and eternal. The monumental Lishan altar that was built above the burial chamber reinforced the notion that the first Qin emperor’s spirt was transcendental, and the Lishan Altar was a site at which the emperor’s decedents could send prayers. However, archaeological excavation of the Qin funeral city has revealed a strikingly different understanding of the afterlife (Fig. 4.6). Archaeological explorations currently concentrate on various sites of the extensive necropolis surrounding the Lishan Mausoleum mound, including the Terracotta Army to the east of the tomb

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Figure 4.6: Tomb pit with earthenware burial army, tomb of the First Emperor of Qin.

mound. The Terracotta Army consists of thousands of earthen solider sculptures, carriages and horses to serve as a garrison for the mausoleum. Here we sense the idea that the netherworld is similar to the mundane world. By making the earthenware solider sculptures naturalistic, practically identical to real soldiers, the Qin emperor was thought to be protected and relieved of the dread of uncertainty (Higham 2004, 274). Here the necropolis provided him with his worldly possessions, his army, palace and valuables, and a burial style differing from that of his unopened burial chamber, indicating a more realistic imagining of the world after death ‒ an imagining based on an imitation of the world of the living. Nevertheless, these two ways of interpreting the afterlife – the deceased emperor as divine and eternal vs. the diseased emperor keeping his palace life after death – coexisted without conflict, or one dominating the other in the funeral city of the Qin Emperor. Over the course of one thousand years after the Warring States Period, imperial funeral structures continued to develop in China, and the Chinese funereal culture absorbed other religious beliefs and practices to enrich itself, an example being the practice of fengshui (geomancy) in Daoism. By the time of the Song Dynasty (960– 1279), a few official books a had been published on the planning of imperial funeral systems. The famous New Book of Geography (Dili xinshu), an important reference for exploring traditional funeral customs, preserved detailed accounts of the funeral systems of the Tang Dynasty (618–907) and Song Dynasty. According to dili xinshu, once the imperial funeral site had been chosen, the emperor was to be interred in the center of the site, a placed named Mingtang, whereas his officials and subjects were

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Figure 4.7: Burial site based on the Zhao-mu System with Mingtang as the center.

to be buried according to their social rank, in an imaginary grid space (Wang 2012), as specified by the forty-nine acupoint map of Fig. 4.7. The structure of this necropolis not only confirms the emperor’s political superiority after death, but also highlights the religious significance of his tomb (Zeng 2006, 104). Overall, a number of imperial Chinese tombs demonstrate an integration between ancestral lineage temple worship and the intention to replicate a living environment for the departed soul. Consequently, these imperial tombs incorporated architectural elements from both the ancestral temple as well as contemporary palaces.

Consolidating the Processional Funeral Grid Commenting on the development of Chinese funeral sites, architectural historian Liu Dunzhen observed that, from the Qin Dynasty to the Northern Song Dynasty (960– 1127), imperial tombs usually adopted a centrifugal layout, and the burial mound was located in the center of the funeral structure, with entrance gates in four directions (Fig. 4.8). In the last two dynasties, the Ming (1368‒1644) and Qing (1644–1912), the

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Figure 4.8: Plan of the Gongling, Tomb of Li Hong (653‒675) of the Tang Dynasty (618‒907). 1. Entrance Gate; 2. Funeral Site Boundaries; 3. Burial Mound and Sacrificial Altar.

layout of the imperial necropolis was dramatically altered, with the burial mound moved to the end of the funeral grid, and a number of gates added along the central axis (Liu 1980, 363). Compared to the earlier periods, the two most striking characteristics of the Ming imperial tombs are: (a) the funeral layout resembling that of a palace, using a grid to deepen the space; and (b) the focus of the necropolis has shifted, with the sacrificial hall at the core of the funeral city, and the burial mound placed in the deepest section of the entire necropolis. This differed markedly from earlier dynasties, wherein the sacrificial altar was built on top of the burial mound. We are not entirely clear as to why such a transformation took place in the layouts of Ming and Qing funereal cities, but a strong desire for the tombs to strictly resemble palaces might have been one motivation. According to the Qing Dynasty documents in Jingningfu Zhi (i.e., “Records of Jiangning City”), when someone visited the tomb of the first emperor of the Ming Dynasty, he saw a “Treasure City (Baocheng), Great Pavilion (Minglou) […] mostly similar to the Ming Imperial Palace in Nanjing” (Xiang 2009). In this knowledge system, the living world and underground worlds were entrusted to maintain the same structure, demonstrating a yin (deceased) and yang (living) isomorphic cultural model. According to Xu Yitao, imperial palaces usually adopted the processional grid, to protect and deify the mundane power (emperors, the noble classes, etc.) and spatially consolidate social hierarchies (Fig. 4.6). There is perhaps no better example of the processional grid than that of the Forbidden City, the palace for emperors of both the Ming and Qing Dynasty. Heavily guarded by layers of walls, the Forbidden City was repeatedly separated the inside from the outside and its space was effectively deepened, with the imperial familial residential unit located in the northern

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Figure 4.9: The Hall of the Great Harmony in the Forbidden City.

end of the city, the most private sector of the whole country (Zhu 2004, 24). While the emperor’s residential unit was located in the concealed northern quarter, the central building of the Forbidden City is the Hall of the Great Harmony, which is also the largest building within the Forbidden City and one of the largest wood structures within China (Fig. 4.9). Built above three levels of a marble stone base, it was the place where the Ming and Qing emperors would, along with officials and ambassadors, conduct important ceremonies such as enthronements and weddings. In order to meet the emperor, an individual was required to walk along the central axis and pass as many as seven gates before arriving at the Hall of Great Harmony, the meeting point between the inner and outer court. As the focus of the Changling, the Mausoleum for the Yongle Emperor of the Ming, the architectural structure of the Sacrificial Hall (Fig. 4.10), with its nine bays, three-level marble stone base and double-eaved hip roof, precisely follows the standard and scale of the Hall of Great Harmony. North of the Hall of the Great Harmony, it is located in the inner court of the Forbidden City; whereas behind the Sacrificial Hall, one enters the burial precinct of the Changling Mausoleum (Liu 1980, 364–365). Here the Sacrificial Hall served not only as a space for essential ritual activities associated with ancestor worship, but also as a meeting point between the living and the

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Figure 4.10: The Sacrificial Hall of the Changling Tomb of the Ming Dynasty.

spirits from the Netherworld. Overall, we can see numerous resemblances between the Forbidden City and the Changling Mausoleum, in their architectural hierarchies and adoption of the spatial strategies of the processional grid, and the processional funeral grid remained popular in China for 600 years until the collapse of the Chinese imperial ruling system.

Conclusion: Understanding Chinese Funeral Grid By focusing on the origins of two types of Chinese funeral grid, namely ancestral temples and imperial palaces, this chapter has uncovered some of the basic nature and fundamental purposes of traditional Chinese funeral structures over several thousand years. The chapter is concluded with a discussion of Sun Yat-sen’s Mausoleum, the design of which followed the tradition of the processional funeral grid of the Ming imperial tombs. The final location of Sun’s burial mound, was 90 meters higher than the Ming tombs in Nanjing. Sun Yat-sen’s Mausoleum was intended to elevate his posthumous political status, from the elected “provisional president” to the “father of modern China”, and thus a successor to the Ming emperors. However, the architect Lü Yanzhi did make some departures from the Ming imperial tomb formula. Compared to the square-shaped Ming funeral grids, Sun’s site plan, in the shape of a bell, symbolized “awakening.” Moreover, imperial tombs were generally enclosed spaces, inaccessible to the public. In contrast, Sun’s Mausoleum was intended as an iconic memorial hall symbolizing his ideals. His Sacrificial Hall deliberately adopted elements from world famous memorials and tombs like the Lincoln Memorial and Napoleon’s tomb,

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in order to equate Sun with great Western leaders, thereby confirming his rightful place in the pantheon of world history (Lai 2007, 67). Sun Yat-sen’s Mausoleum signified a profound desire to synthesize divergent beliefs in a single mortuary setting. Overall, despite the Chinese funeral structure’s obvious link to the most conservative of traditional Chinese customs, this tradition continued to influence Chinese architecture and visual culture, echoing developing Chinese beliefs in an afterlife and the organizational principles of Chinese society itself.

References Primary Sources: Liji 禮記 [The Book of Rites], Compiled by Liu Xiang, Dai De, and Dai Sheng. Nanjing: Jiangsu keji chubanshe, 2018. [in Chinese] Lü, Buwei 呂不韋, Lüshi Chunqiu 呂氏春秋 [Master Lü’s Spring and Autumn Annals]. Nanjing: Jiangsu keji chubanshe, 2018. [in Chinese] Mo, Di墨翟, Mo Zi 墨子. Beijing: Yazhi chubanshe, 2018. [in Chinese] Sima, Qian, Shiji 史記 [Records of the Grand Historian]. Accessed July 15, 2020. http://www.ziyexing. com/files-5/shiji/shiji_06.htm. “Tang gonglin shice jiyao 唐恭陵實測紀要 [Survey Record of the Gongling of the Tang Dynasty]”, compiled by Institute of Archaeology-Henan Branch, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in Kaogu 考古 [Archaeology], 5 (1986), 458. [in Chinese] Wang, Zhu 王洙, Dili xinshu 地理新書 [New Book of Geography]. Changsha: Xiangtan daxue chubanshe, 2012. [in Chinese] Zuo, Qiuming 左丘明, Zuozhuan 左傳 [Chronicle of Zuo], annotated by Cai Jian. Beijing: Zhongguo fangzhi chubanshe, 2016. [in Chinese] Xihan lizhi jianzhu yizhi 西漢禮制建築遺址 [Western Han Dynasty Ritual Architecture Ruins], compiled by the Institute of Archaeology, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Beijing, wenwu chubanshe, 2003. [in Chinese]

Secondary Sources: Chen, Yunqian. “Yilin yishi yu minguo zhengzhi wenhua [Funeral Visitation Rituals and Political Culture in the Republican China].” Open Times 6 (2008): 47–48. [in Chinese] Higham, Charles F. W. Encyclopedia of Ancient Asian Civilizations. New York: Facts On File, 2004. Huang, Zhanyue. “Han Chang’ancheng nanjiao lizhi jianzhu de weizhi jiqi youguan wenti [ The Location of Ritual Architecture in the Southern Suburbs of Han Chang’an City and Related Issues].” Kaogu [Archaeology] 6 (1960): 52–58. [in Chinese] Lai, Delin. “Searching for a Modern Chinese Monument: The Design of the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Nanjing.” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 64, 1 (2005): 22–55. Lai, Delin. “Chinese Modern: Sun Yat-sen’s Mausoleum as a Crucible for Defining Modern Chinese Architecture.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2007. Sicheng Liang. Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture. Beijing: Xinhua shudian, 2011.

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Liu, Dunzhen, ed. Zhongguo gudai jianzhu shi [History of Traditional Chinese Architecture]. Beijing: Zhongguo jianzhu gongye chubanshe, 1980. [in Chinese] Liu, Rui. Han Chang’an de chaoxiang, zhouxian yu nanjiao lizhi jianzhu [The Orientation of The Axis of Han Chang’an and the Ritual Architecture in the Southern Suburbs]. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2011. [in Chinese] Mo, Yang. “Zhongshanwang de lixiang: Zhaoyu tongban yanjiu [The Ideal of the King Zhongshan: Research on the Copperplate of Mega Domain].” Meishu yanjiu [Art Research] 1 (2016): 45–52. [in Chinese] Musgrove, Charles. China’s Contested Capital: Architecture, Ritual, and Response in Nanjing. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2013. Wagner, Rudolf. “Ritual, Architecture, Politics and Publicity during the Republic: Enshrining Sun Yat-sen.” In Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Art, edited by Nancy Steinhardt, Jeffrey Cody, and Tony Atkin, 223–278. Honolulu: University of California Press, 2011. Wang, Guowei. “Yinzhou Zhidulun.” In Wang Guowei Lunxueji [A Collection of Wang Guowei’s works], edited by Fu Jie, 221. Kunming: Yunan Chubanshe, 2004. [in Chinese] Wang, Peng. “’hemiao’ huo ‘duomiao’: Guanyu zaoqi Zhongguo duyi zhong miaolang shezhi fangshi de zairenshi [‘Combined Temples’ or ‘Separated Temples’: Reconsidering the Way of Setting up the Ancestral Temple of the Son of Heaven in Early Chinese Capital Cities].” Jianzhushi [Architectural History] 41, 1 (2018): 14. [in Chinese] Wu, Hung. Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Wu, Hung. Art of the Yellow Springs. London: Reaktion Books, 2010. Xiang, Yangming. “Mingdai diling de lishi,keji he wenhua he yishu jiazhi [The Historical, Technological, Cultural and Artistic Value of the Imperial Mausoleum in the Ming Dynasty].” Ming Changling yingjian 600 zhounian xueshu yantaohui [Symposium on the 600th Anniversary of Ming Changling]. Beijing: shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2009. [in Chinese] Xu, Yitao. “Jianshu Zhongguo gudai jianzhu de xuanli kongjian moshi [A Brief Discussion on Power in the Spatial Patterns of Traditional Chinese Architecture].” Paper presented at “Identities and Political Power in Chinese Architecture”, The International Convention of Asia Scholars 8th Annual Conference, June 2013, Macau, China. [in Chinese] Zeng, Junyu. “Dili xinshu Zhong mingtang yihan zhi tanxi [A Study on the Meanings of Mingtang in the Dili Xinshu].” MA thesis, Taipei Arts University, 2006. [in Chinese] Zhang, Shaoqian. “Spatial Strategies of the Grid: A Comparative Study of Urban Planning in Traditional China and the American West.” Architext’s special issue “The Urban Grid in Planning and Architectural Cultures: From Global South to North and Back Again”, 7 (2019): 60–77. Zhang, Wei. “Cong zhaoyutu kan zhongshanguo linyan guihua [Reading the Planning of Zhongshan Kingdom Cemetery from the Mega Domain Map].” Dongfang shoucang [Oriental Collection]13 (Jul. 2020): 86–87. [in Chinese] Zhongguo shehui kexueyuan kaogu yanjiusuo [The Insititue of Archaeology, The Chinese Academy of Social Science]. Xihan lizhi jianzhu yizhi [Western Han Dynasty Ritual Architecture Ruins]. Beijing: wenwuchubanshe, 2003. [in Chinese] Zhu, Jianfei. Chinese Spatial Strategies: Imperial Beijing 1420–1911. London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2004.

Liora Bigon and Eric Ross

5 Globalizing Senegal’s Grid-Plan Legacies in Light of Islamic Studies, World History and Urban Studies Abstract: This chapter examines the history of the grid-plan in the urban planning traditions of Senegal. The authors, an urban historian and an urban geographer, have approached the issue from a variety of methodological and conceptual angles not normally brought together in a single study. The question of historic urban design practices in Senegal requires synergy between a number of disciplines: African studies, Islamic studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, human geography, urban planning, urban history and art history. The chapter opens with a short overview of the place of sub-Saharan Africa and its urban traditions in the fields of Islamic Studies, World History, and Urban Studies. In particular, we review the current literature on grid planning and its conceptual and geographical scopes, bearing in mind sub-Saharan Africa’s traditions of settlement design. In this interdisciplinary historiography, Africa generally falls short of perceived norms. It appears to lack an urban past, an urban settlement-design culture, and particularly, an indigenous practice of grid-planning. It is against this background that indigenous grid-planned settlements in Senegal are analyzed. We tie historical developments to more recent colonial and post-colonial gridded configurations. We shall demonstrate that the urban grid-plan emerged independently in Senegal, before European colonization, and continued to be practiced alongside the various colonial-era grid-planned urban projects. We shift the discussion from one of morphological essentialism regarding the genealogy of the grid (e.g. contrasting an “indigenous grid” to an exogenous “French grid”) to a more entangled approach, one that reflects hybrid present-day spatialities. Employing rich and variegated methodology, sources, and recent fieldwork, we investigate a number of Senegalese urban centers of past or contemporary importantance. We hope that the chapter will contribute to the mainstreaming of Afrtica’s urban traditions within the global urbanization meta-narrative. In this way, another African thread can be woven into the fabric of Global Urban Studies, creating a more inclusive and cosmopolitan tapestry. Keywords: African/Islamic/French Studies; Senegal; urban history; grid-plan cultures; Sufism

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State of Study: Interdisciplinary Intersections This study explores the range of gridded design practices that have flourished in Senegal over the last five hundred years.1 Over this period, grid plans have been implemented for a range of reasons by a variety of agents, resulting in hybrid spatial configurations. How can one disentangle these practices while also appreciating the manner of their entanglement? Our examnation of the phenomenon requires expertise in Islamic Studies, African Studies, Geography, Urban (Planning) History and French History ‒ fields that are not often mobilized in the same study. Tracing the histories and present-day geographies of urban planning cultures in sub-Saharan, Islamic Africa requires that we position Africa at the intersection of Islamic Studies, World History, and Urban Studies. However, Africa is still marginalized in this scholarly landscape, an outcome of the continent’s political and economic marginalization in modern times. Africanists have long called for a research agenda able to amend the continent’s epistemological marginalization. The world historian Patrick Manning has dedicated two comprehensive critical articles to explaining how people of Africa and the African diaspora (about one sixth of humanity) have mostly been exised from world-historical interpretations (2013; 2016). Similarly, the art historian René Bravmann observes that Africa is perceived to be “at the extreme edge of this [Islamic] civilization and conditioned by apparently different historical and cultural forces”, with its built heritage and creativity remaining “an eternal other – they exist but go unnoticed and unattended” (2000, 489). Africa is not usually considered a contributing source or active component in the making of Islam as a universal religion of global scope. In raising the question of what an Afrocentric perspective can contribute to the study of Islam, Eric Ross has suggested that the object of study be inverted, that we agnowledge the “Africa in Islam” as well as the “Islam in Africa.” In this way Africa can be viewed as an actual part of Muslim history and not merely as a local syncretistic practice outside of normative Islam (Ross 1994, 28). At the same time, established scholarship on urban planning history is centered on the European experience, first that of southern Europe (in antiquity) and then that of Western Europe and North America (in the medieval and modern eras). While a few other city-building traditions – those of China and the Islamic Middle East in particular – are also recognized as valuable to the discipline, this value is contextualized as somehow peripheral, as lying in the past and having been superseded by modern practices that spread from Europe (Hall 1996; Kostof 2001; Morris 1994). Perhaps more so than any other major world region, sub-Saharan Africa is almost entirely excluded from the world historical narrative of urbanization. A few

1 This chapter draws on a recently published book, entitled Grid Planning in the Urban Design Practices of Senegal (Cham: Springer, 2020, with permission). We invite interested readers to enjoy the full-length version.

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select parts of the continent, such as the Niger Bend, and the Hausa, Yoruba and Swahili city-states, are included at the periphery of medieval Islamic city-building. But otherwise sub-Saharan Africa is generally denied its own urban history, and remains entrapped in bucolic essentialism. The reason for this, argues the Africanist historian Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, is that “consciously or not, but always implicitly, there is a presupposition that the only fully developed urban model is the Western standard of reference” (2005, 12–13). When it comes to grid planning, the historiography embraces multiple world regions and eras. As a practice, grid planning is associated with a variety of forms of political, economic and social organization, ranging from egalitarian to more centralized and authoritarian regimes (Brown 2001; Grant 2018; Marcuse 1987; Zhang 2018). Grid plans have been implemented since ancient times. The city of Mohenjo Daro in present-day Pakistan and Egypt’s Middle Kingdom pyramid town of Kahun both date to the third millennium BCE. Since, grid plans have been implemented by the ancient Assyrians, Greeks and Romans, in imperial China, in the medieval bastide towns of southern France and late medieval England, in Renaissance Italy and Germany, and in colonial America, both North and South. Thus, the extraordinary symbolism of the grid as an ideal or rational built form imposed on landscapes can convey a great range of meanings and interests. Yet, the literature on grid planning, particularly in the medieval and modern eras, associates this spatial configuration exclusively to the exercise of power by European territorial states, both at home and especially beyond Europe, in the colonial periphery. Grid planning thus becomes inseparable from Western “modernity” and rationality. Colonial cities – often laid out as grids, among other designs – are perceived in this literature as a direct prolongation of Western modes of planning. This is true concerning the Portuguese, Spanish, French and British colonial empires in the New World, Asia and Africa (Goerg and de Lemps 2003; Home 1997; Njoh 2016; Parry 1961; Reps 1997). It seems therefore that urban planning literature has absolved itself of having to deal with non-Western planning cultures, or with any interactions between them and Western colonial cultures. The introduction of the grid plan in colonized countries has been depicted as occurring in a spatial emptiness. “Baptized” by the grid, colonized regions globally were “westernized” and could enter the mainstream of urban history. This Eurocentric view has persisted in some classic planning history textbooks (Morris 1994; Kostof 2001). Nothing is said in these works about Native American, Indian or African planning concepts and their possible interaction with the colonial counterparts. Indicatively, for the art historian Mark Hinchman, the grid plan in West Africa “represented the West, a city pointedly not African. In order for the grid-as-myth-of-the-West to function, a great deal of repression needed to occur, foremost the knowledge of many African traditions of rectilinear architecture” (2012, 307). Because the scholar has used French colonial and métis sources almost exclusively, he seems to be unaware of the indigenous grid plan practices pursued in Senegal independently of colonial practices. Knowledge of these practices neces-

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sitates looking beyond colonial sources and crossing them with the types of sources used in other scientific disciplines, such as Islamic Studies and Geography. For example, studies of the global history of grid planning have completely ignored Benin City (Edo), the capital of the greatest rain forest kingdom of Africa. Consolidated by the twelfth century, the capital was looted and destroyed by the British who annexed it in 1897. According to seventeenth-century oral traditions, written accounts of European visitors in a variety of languages, and archaeological evidence (Ben-Amos and Thornton 2001; Nevadomsky et al. 2014), the city’s streets were laid out as a grid, centered on the king’s palace. Similarly, nothing is said about the city of Loango, capital of one of the oldest and largest kingdoms of the southern area of today’s Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville). It was established near the Atlantic coast in the thirteenth century by the Vili people. Based on the accounts and illustrations of European travelers, its main streets were wide, long, straight and clean; they met at right angles and led to the gates of the surrounding wall (Thornton 1983). When we trace the historic implementation of the urban grid-plan in Senegal, we find that at various times, this model was deployed by royal courts to help actualize secular authority and aristocratic prerogatives, by Sufi orders to promote proper Islamic conduct, and by the French colonial authorities to foster the rational exploitation of agricultural resources. In their day, all three agents were among the most powerful political and social institutions active in the territory. While Senegambia’s early-modern kingdoms and the French colonial administration were political institutions that constituted types of states, the Sufi orders are popular religious institutions. The exercise of authority by Senegal’s contemporary Sufi orders has been well studied: both the Sufi orders and their individual leaders (sheikhs) are generally recognized religious authorities, and it is also generally accepted that their religious authority extends into the social, economic and political spheres of Senegalese life (Copans 1980; Glover 2007; Mbacké 2005; Villalon 1995).

The Persistence of Grid-planning in Senegal Throughout the Ages The history of settlement design in the Senegambia region reveals a deeply-rooted tradition of grid planning, and its implementation there predates the introduction of exogenous grid-plan designs by the French during the colonial period. Grid planning appears in the sixteenth century with the establishment of the royal capitals of Wolof and Serer kingdoms (e.g., Maka, Kahone, Diakhao and Lambaye) (Fig. 5.1). It was then embraced by Muslim clerics in the seventeenth century for the laying out of autonomous centers of Islamic instruction (e.g., Ngalik and Ndanq). Towns established by the Jakhanke clerics ‒ famous for the quality of Islamic instruction they dispensed in the Western Sudan region ‒ were gridded (e.g., Diakha-Bambukhu, Bani Isra’ila,

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Figure 5.1: Current plan of Diakhao, historic capital of the Kingdom of Sine.

Figure 5.2: Current plan of the early nineteenth-century clerical town of Ndanq in Cayor.

Didécoto, and Gunjur in Kombo). Though no contemporary plans of these clerical towns were preserved, oral histories and their current configurations indicate that these towns, like the royal capitals, were laid out according to the endogenous gridand-pénc model (Fig. 5.2). This means that a particular model of grid design developed in this region quite independently of external influences. This urban model featured a central public square (the pénc in Wolof), with the royal palace located to its west. Surrounding this civic center was an orthogonal street system. Where Muslim clerics began establishing autonomous religious centers in the seventeenth century, they adopted this elite urban model, replacing the royal palace in the scheme with their own great houses. The pénc of royal capitals was dominated by monumental civic trees, while that of clerical towns housed the great mosque and was aligned to the qiblah to Mecca, which set the orientation of the overall city plan (Ross 2012). The grid-and-pénc model had no fixed meaning or significance. It was rather a marker of authority, be it secular or religious. In the royal capitals the grid plan was associated with the aristocratic regime and its accompanying rituals, while in the clerical towns this plan represented religious devotion and an Islamic orthodox life lived along aṣ-Ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm, that is, the “Straight Path”, under the leadership of the sheikh. The Senegambian grid-and-pénc model continued to be implemented in settlements established by the dominant Sufi orders as these expanded massively during the first decades of colonial rule (1880s‒1930s). At the height of the colonial system, when new Sufi settlements mostly linked to the peanut economy were proliferating, the popular authority of the Sufi orders was already firmly established. The colonial administration generally lacked the resources to police or service rural localities directly. Such local authority was often conveniently delegated to local sheikhs and the Sufi orders they were affiliated to (Robinson 2000). Therefore, the sheikhs were able to implement

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a variety of policies in religious education, in agriculture, and in urban design in the localities under their control with little interference from the colonial state. Since independence in 1960 the Sufi orders continue to exercise a measure of actual authority within society and the public sphere. They have used, and continue to use the grid plan to foster their spiritual and actual suzerinity, building a sense of community and identity among their followers (Ross 2006; 2012). Not only did the modern Sufi leadership continued to develop the “ancestral” Senegambian grid plan design for their settlements, they implemented it systematically in all their settlements (Figs 5.3 and 5.4). In this way, the well-ordered urban landscape was no longer the preserve of an exclusive elite. It became identified with the social, spiritual and educational project of Sufi mass movements. In short, grid-planning as a tool of power is well attested in Senegambian history. It was used by both secular and religious indigenous elites prior to the introduction of new forms of grid planning by European colonial authorities. Grid-plan designs served various functions and rationales during three centuries of French rule in Senegal and adjoining territories. The history of the French urban settlements in Senegal begins relatively early, in the second half of the seventeenth century. It is one of the oldest histories of European city-building in sub-Saharan Africa. The contemporary urbanization efforts of the French were only mached by those of the Portuguese in Angola and of the Dutch settlement of Cape Town. Most other European settlements in sub-Saharan Africa date to the establishment of formal

Figure 5.3: Current plan of the Tijaniyya-Mahdiyya shrine-town of Tiénaba.

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Figure 5.4: A streetview in the center of Tiénaba.

Figure 5.5: Engraving of Fort Saint-Joseph of Galam on the bank of the Senegal River, 1745.

colonial regimes about two hundred years later. The grid plan was used by various French colonial authorities, first by mercantilist trading companies, and then by the colonial administration. The French first deployed grid planning in the hesitative street layouts of the trading posts (comptoirs and river escales) (Fig. 5.5). More comprehensive grid plans were then adopted in communes (legally constituted French municipalities, such as Saint Louis, Rufisque, Gorée and Dakar) and colonial capital cities (Fig. 5.6). During the phase of military conquest of interior regions, the French implemented grids in the planning of the misnamed villages de liberté (that is, prison

Figure 5.6: View of the orthogonal layout of old Saint Louis’ city center.

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Figure 5.7: A streetscape from the colonial escale of Tivaouane.

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Figure 5.8: A main artery in Fatick’s old escale.

camps for liberated slaves). Once colonial “peace” had been assured they began building a network of gridded railway market-towns (rail escales such as Thiès and Tivaouane) for the mass export of cash-crop peanut production (Figs 5.7 and 5.8). Initially, these colonial grids were exclusionary, intended for European officials and merchants and their personnel. When the successful colonial cities experienced demographic expansion and sustained economic growth in the early twentieth century, colonial authorities found themselves planning, for the first time, housing for “native” residents. Entire new quarters were laid out, most often as grids, in every major French colonial city. The Médina quarter in Dakar constitutes such a neighborhood. Laid out in 1914, it was segregated from the older colonial center by a “cordon sanitaire”  – an unbuilt space serving as a racial and “hygienic” buffer. As with so many colonial endeavours, the main rationale in the planning of new quarters designated exclusively for Africans was to facilitate surveillance and sanitary and tax control (Fig. 5.9). This type of spatial segregation brings to the fore an internal contradiction inherent to the colonial situation: colonialism created dynamic ethnically heterogeneous societies; but at the same time, it strove to control populations by maintaining the fiction of fixed, homogenous subject groups through coercive landuse and economic policies. However, even at the height of the colonial era (the inter-

Figure 5.9: View of an intersection in the colonial grid-planned African quarter of Médina in Dakar, planned in 1914 (the size of the blocks there is much smaller than in the ajascent expatriate quarter of the Plateau, and population density is much higher).

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Figure 5.10: Map of residential allotments in Touba, showing the old-style regular grid of Darou Khoudoss (eastern section of map) of the 1970s and the transition to the Dakar-style “H” and “T” “degenerate grid” adopted in Madiyana neighborhood (western section) in the 1980s.

Figure 5.11: The ancestral jujube bush on the left, in the Lebou pénc of Thieudéme, Dakar’s city center.

war years), colonial control over Senegal’s spatial practices was not hegemonic. In a variety of active and passive ways, as individuals or collectively, Africans acted in the colonial urban spaces, reconfiguring them, and turning the very tools of colonial domination to their advantage, creating hybrid spatialities in the process. Identifying the entanglements of various colonial-era agents of urbanization, opens the way for a more nuanced and integrative understanding of the grid-planning culture of Senegal. This understanding transcends any endogenous-exogenous dichotomy. During the colonial era, and since independence, the two grid-planning cultures, Senegambian and European, have become inextricably entangled. We explore this entanglement by tracing how the two spatial practices became formalistically and creatively hybridized in several prominent Senegalese cities. In the Sufi city of Touba, for instance ‒ a city that symbolizes cultural resistance to colonialism ‒ the implementation of common post-WWII Western design models of mass residential allotments ‒ what Stephen Wheeler has called the “degenerate grid” (2015) – has all but engulfed the indigenous grid-and-pénc model so characteristic of colonial-era Sufi urbanization. Moreover, the conjoined agencies of the State (first colonial, then sovereign) and of the Sufi religious orders has transformed certain neighborhoods in Senegal’s “hybrid” cities (Fig. 5.10), cities like Tivaouane, Kaolack and Diourbel which serve both the civil administration of the State and the religious activities of the Sufi orders. In these cases, the Sufi orders have intervened in the grid to create the public squares (pénc) and monuments requisite for a religious center. Downtown Dakar offers another example of entanglement, particularly because of Dakar’s reputation as the showpiece of French colonial planning in West Africa (Bigon 2016). As elsewhere on the continent, colonial urban planning in Dakar proceded through expropriation and erasure of indigenous urbanity. Yet in the very heart

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of Dakar a network of indigenous Lebou péncs (combination of public square and community center) has resisted all attempts at removal and has persisted, with its original toponymy, thriving within the imposed colonial grid systems (Bigon and Hart 2018) (Fig. 5.11). The Lebou practices of settlement configuration have not taken placed “along side” the colonial grid planning, as one might expect from the literature on the “dual” colonial city. Rather, the two practices unfolded in dynamic involvement with each other. As with the Sufi towns discussed above, a more processual approach to urban planning practices and designs helps to understand the resiliency of the Lebou pénc.

Conclusion and a Note on Interdiciplinarity and Methodology This chapter reveals the multilayered origins and the formalistic entanglements of grid-planning in the historic urban traditions of Senegal. Its contribution is tripartite: first, it traces a specific type of settlement configuration as a cross-sectional topic in a single territory, Senegal, over a long span of time. It explores the range of political, economic, social, and spiritual objectives pursued by the various regimes that implemented grid-planning as an integral part of their urban cultures. Secondly, a rich variety of research methodologies and sources have been employed. Sources of data include: primary and secondary literary sources from Europe and Senegal, recent field observation and data collection in many Senegalese towns, and use of current satellite imagery. This combination of sources generates a fresh understanding of the persistence of grid-planning over the centuries in Senegal. Thirdly, the chapter contributes to the expanding scholarly project of creating a more global history to replace the otherwise Eurocentric meta-narrative; and to the narrower scholarly project of creating a more global urban (planning) history. In doing so, it integrates Islamic Studies ‒ by further tying sub-Saharan Africa’s urbanism to the mainstream research on the Middle East and environs-- and it enriches Area Studies research ‒ by examining the variegated urban planning cultures of a single territory over the long term. Methods emplyed for this study include analysis of satellite imagery. We have taken advantage of the free data offered on Google Earth in order to map both historic and current settlements across Senegal. Google Earth’s continuous updating of satellite images of Senegal since 2003 makes it possible to do time-series analysis of places, monitoring how they have changed over the past few decades. In addition, a joint field excursion was undertaken by the authors in January 2018 which included visits to Dakar, Touba, Rufisque, Tiénaba, Ndiassane, Thiès, Tivaouane, Diourbel, Fatick, Foundiougne, and Kaolack. Our observations in the field aimed to determine how the urban morphology is lived, how the streets, public squares, and housing allotments function together to create local community life. On-site observation proved partic-

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ularly crucial for the Lebou péncs, as these are tiny urban places where the buildings, open spaces, mosques and urban trees are so tightly enmeshed in Dakar’s built fabric that the essentials of the morphology cannot be readily determined from even high-resolution satellite images.

References Ben-Amos, Paula, and John Thornton. “Civil War in the Kingdom of Benin, 1689‒1721: Continuity or Political Change?” Journal of African History 42 (2001): 353‒376. Bigon, Liora. French Colonial Dakar: The Morphogenesis of an African Regional Capital. Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 2016. Bigon, Liora, and Thomas Hart. “Vernacular and (Post-)Colonial Planning Interactions: Beneath the Grids of Central Dakar, Senegal.” Journal of Historical Geography 59 (2018): 52‒67. Bravmann, René. “Islamic Art and Material Culture in Africa.” In The History of Islam in Africa, edited by Nehemia Levtzion, and Randall Pouwels, 489‒519. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000. Brown, Kate. “Why Kazakhstan and Montana are Nearly the Same Place.” The American Historical Review 106, 1 (2001): 17–48. Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine. The History of African Cities South of the Sahara: From the Origins to Colonization. Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2005. Copans, Jean. Les marabouts de l’arachide. Paris: Le sycomore, 1980. Nevadomsky, Joseph, Natalie Lawson, and Ken Hazlett. “An Ethnographic and Space Syntax Analysis of Benin Kingdom Nobility Architecture.” African Archaeological Review 31, 1 (2014): 59–85. Dumez, Richard, and Moustapha Kâ. Yoff, le territoire assiégé: Un village lébou dans la banlieue de Dakar. Dossiers régions côtières et petites îles 7. Paris: UNESCO, 2000. Frey, Henri-Nicolas. Côte occidentale d’Afrique. Paris: Marpon et Flammarion, 1890. Glover, John. Sufism and Jihad in Modern Senegal: The Murid Order. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007. Goerg, Odile, and Huetz de Lemps. «La ville européenne outre-mer.» In Histoire de l’Europe urbaine, edited by Jean-Luc Pinol, vol. II (2 vols), 277–551. Paris: Seuil, 2003. Grant, Jill. “The Dark Side of the Grid Revisited: Power and Urban Design.” In Gridded Worlds: An Urban Anthology, edited by Reuben Rose-Redwood, and Liora Bigon, 75–100. Cham: Springer, 2018. Hall, Peter. Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. Home, Robert. Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities. London: E & FN Spon, 1997. Hinchman, Mark. “The Grid of Saint Louis du Sénégal.” In Colonial Architecture and Urbanism in Africa, edited by Fassil Demissie, 295–323. Surry, Burlington: Ashgate, 2012. Kostof, Spiro. The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History. London: Thames and Hudson, 2001. Labat, Jean-Baptiste. Nouvelle relation de l’Afrique occidentale. Paris: Cavelier, 1728. Manning, Patrick. “African and World Historiography.” Journal of African History 54 (2013): 319–330. Manning, Patrick. “Locating Africans on the World Stage: A problem in World History.” Journal of World History 26, 3 (2016): 605–637. Marcuse, Peter. “The Grid as City Plan: New York City and Laissez-Faire Planning in the Nineteenth Century.” Planning Perspectives 2 (1987): 287–310.

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Mercier, Paul, and Georges Balandier. Les pêcheurs Lébou du Sénégal: particularisme et evolution, collection études sénégalaises, no. 3. Saint-Louis, Sénégal: IFAN, 1952. Morris, A. E. J. History of Urban Form before the Industrial Revolution. Essex and New York: Longman and John Wiley, 1994. Njoh, Ambe. French Urbanism in Foreign Lands. Springer: Cham, 2016. Parry, J. H. The Cities of the Conquistadores. London: Hispanic & Luso-Brazilian Councils, 1961. Reps, John. The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Robinson, David. Paths of Accommodation: Muslim Societies and French Colonial Autorities in Senegal and Mauritania, 1880–1920. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000. Ross, Eric. “Africa in Islam: What the Afrocentric Perspective Can Contribute to Islam.” International Journal of Islamic and Arabic Studies 11, 2 (1994): 1–36. Ross, Eric. Sufi City: Urban Design and Archetypes in Touba. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006. Ross, Eric. “Building Community: Configuring Authority and Identity on the Public Squares of Contemporary Senegalese Sufi Centers.” In Prayer in the City: The Making of Muslim Sacred Places and Urban Life, edited by Patrick Desplat, and Dorothea Schultz, 205–238. New Brunswick, Bielefeld: Transaction Publishers, Transcript Verlag, 2012. Thornton, John. Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition, 1641–1718. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. Villalon, Leonardo. Islamic Society and State Power in Senegal: Disciples and Citizens in Fatick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Wheeler, Stephen. “Built Landscapes of Metropolitan Regions: An International Typology.” The Journal of the American Planning Association 81, 3 (2015): 167‒190. Zhang, Shaoqian. “Spatial Strategies of the Grid: A Comparative Study of Urban Planning in Traditional China and the American West.” Architext 7 (2018): 66‒77.

Limor Cohen, Mirit Malihi, Shay Malkin, 3d Fractal, Julia St, Engraving on perspex, lighting, 2020 (presented at the 2020 Bridges Conference’s Mathematical Art Galleries, courtesy of the students-creators).

Part II: Generating Grids of Computational Arts

In the spirit of this Part’s three contributions, 3d Fractal, Julia St is a computational artwork that embodies a hybrid diffusion, if not confusion, between mathematics and digitalized aesthetics. It has been created, accordingly, by both Integrated Design and Applied Mathematics students. More specifically, this artwork is a three-dimensional object that describes a fractal convergence (Julia’s group) following a 3D expression presented by a series of 22 different and parallel planes. These planes are built from 22 perspex frames. On each perspex engraved shape, the shape is obtained by changing the constant C from 0.6 to 1.4 in equal jumps. Together, a three-dimensional shape is created and gives a glimpse of the fractal in all three-dimensional sides. Apart from its inherent interdisciplinarity, this artwork exemplifies a symbiosis between the more conventional, static and finite gridded construction of its framework, and the infinite grid as generated by the dynamism of the represented fractal. The work sits on a podium with internal lighting that illuminates the engraving line and creates a special three-dimensional floating shape. It is accompanied by a video showing all stages of fractal development from circle to line.

Sagit Alkobi Fishman

6 Between Technological and Aesthetic Grids: Philosophical Challenges Posed by AI Artists Abstract: Among the recent thought-provoking technological developments there are machine learning systems that aim at creating art using grid-based artificial neural networks. Those grid-based art systems exhibit a high degree of autonomy in the creation process, thus inviting questions concerning the identity of the artist as well as the artistic status of the resulting works. In this chapter, I shed light on these matters by asking: how shall we interpret or understand such works? That is, what is their source of meaning, hermeneutically speaking? Can we reasonably talk about the artist’s intention as the source of meaning of such works? What might be an alternative? Because the process of creation consists in part of grid-oriented computations, at first glance it may seem impossible to endow the works with meaning by appealing to the artists’ intentions. However, close analysis shows a more subtle picture. Reflecting upon a few analytic philosophical approaches, I show that although under actual intentionalism one encounters what I have defined as the problem of intentional gap, fictional intentionalism, wherein the artist’s intention serves as a methodological interpretive principle, provides an alternative direction worthy of consideration. Keywords: Artificial Intelligent Art (AI Art); Machine Learning; Grid; Generative Adversarial Network (GAN); Actual Intentionalism; Intentional Gap; Anti-Intentionalism; Fictionalist Intentionalism

Introduction In October 2018, Christie’s New York auction house sold a printed portrait for $432,500 (Cohn 2018). Embodied in a squared canvas with a gilded wood frame, the portrait (shown in Fig. 6.1) depicts a somewhat blurred semi-abstract image of a gentleman wearing a black coat and white collar. The composition in its entirety encapsulates dark smudged stains of colors from which the image emerges and with which it is partly merged. At the right bottom corner there is a hand-written signature in the form of a mathematical formula. By the title given to the portrait, the depicted gentleman is Edmond de Belamy from La Famille de Belamy. But the story of the man and his family, as implied by the non-conventional signature, has little to do with men and families in the usual sense. The portrait, along with ten additional works that together form the series entitled La Famille de Belamy, were all given birth by Artificial Intelligence (AI), under the delivery of the Paris-based collective Obvious consisting of Hugo CasellesDupré, Pierre Fautrel, and Gauthier Vernier. Unusual in various respects, the event sur-

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Figure 6.1: Portrait of Edmond de Belamy created by the Paris-based collective Obvious using an AI algorithm.

rounding Edmond de Belamy has joined slightly earlier, perhaps less branded, events, as well as later ones, involving so-called AI Art (e.g., Bogost 2019); all of which have aroused questions pointing to a fundamental puzzlement regarding the possibly new form of artistic expression instantiated by the very encounter between AI and art. The encounter between AI and art is not new. Already during the first years of the second half of the twentieth century, computer scientists and artists were drawn into examining and exploring the artistic possibilities of generating visual imagery by or with the aid of AI systems. Perhaps the most cited such endeavor is the one undertaken by Harold Cohen, who in 1968 introduced a computerized painter in the form of an expert system he dubbed AARON that rested on his own expertise as a painter (Morbey 1992). Nevertheless, recent contemporary encounters between AI and art have been inherently different, for they have rested heavily on machine learning techniques. What characterizes systems that employ such techniques is that they do not require the formulation of some expert knowledge in order to execute a variety of tasks that otherwise would require expertise. Instead, they learn by themselves based on often vast amounts of data they are fed with, and they gain the desired expertise via implicit means of statistics. Thus, for such systems to generate, for instance, pictures of portraits, landscapes, or images of abstract visuality, no predefined rules are required, but rather a large enough set of suitable visual inputs to learn from. Underlying a large portion of contemporary machine learning art systems is the recently introduced algorithmic framework called Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). In the visual domain, GAN usually uses grid-based artificial neural networks.

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Its goal is to train a generative model to generate images that appear as if they were drawn from a distribution represented by some given collection of images. Thus, given, for instance, a dataset of paintings of portraits, the algorithm’s output is a generative model that ideally knows how to synthesize portraits that look as if they were taken from the same distribution as that of the dataset. Using the resulting generative model to create a new image often involves selection-based activities undertaken by the model’s user ‒ selecting the training dataset, selecting a particular output out of many, and more. But when viewed through the prism of technology, the process of creation amounts to a grid-oriented process wherein every unit in the aesthetic grid, namely a division of the image into elementary rectangular units, is the result of computations undertaken by artificial neurons in the networks’ neural grids. Simply put, the technology uses artificial neural grids that correspond to aesthetic grids: the grids serve as location indices in the sense that the artificial neurons correspond to specific locations in the processed and/or generated images, and thus the technology’s process of creation is composed of grid-oriented computations. Such systems demonstrate a higher degree of autonomy. They, in turn, invite forcefully and in a non-hypothetical manner questions concerning the identity of the artist, the artistic status of the resulting works, and the nature of the aesthetic experience that such works may offer. In this chapter I shed light on a few such matters by asking: how shall we understand or interpret works generated by or created with the substantial aid of such AI systems? That is, what is the source of meaning, hermeneutically speaking, of such works? Can we reasonably talk about the artist’s intention as the source of meaning of such works? What might be an alternative? The following section refers to relevant algorithmic, technological, and artistic facets of grid-based artificial neural networks used in the creation of art, focusing specifically on elementary GAN-based systems. Subsequently, the challenge of meaning and intention in the realm of AI art is unpacked and discussed using GAN-based paintings as an example. The chapter concludes with a number of summary remarks. Reflecting upon a few analytic philosophical approaches, it is shown that under actual intentionalism one encounters what may be defined as the problem of intentional gap, but that fictional intentionalism provides an alternative direction worthy of consideration.

Machine Learning and Art The transition from expert systems to machine learning systems has marked a paradigm shift in the various fields of AI. Conceptually, the shift may be characterized as a move away from human expert knowledge and its rule-based formulation toward vast amounts of data and automatically obtained statistical knowledge. The increasing accessibility to data, the growth in computational power, and algorithmic developments such as GAN and its variants have contributed to this shift.

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Figure 6.2: GAN’s algorithmic framework; the training phase of a discriminator and a generator.

GAN was invented in 2014 by Ian Goodfellow et al., and as previously indicated, its goal is to train a generative model to generate outputs that seem as if they were taken from a distribution represented by a given dataset. In order to train the generative model, G, GAN uses another model ‒ a discriminative model, D ‒ and trains both of them simultaneously in a turn-based game-like procedure. Both D and G are assumed to be parametric computational models so that learning amounts to the tuning of the models’ parameters. G receives a random input and generates an output, whereas D receives an input that comes either from G or from the given dataset S and estimates the probability that it came from S. D’s game-goal is to tell apart G’s outputs and the dataset S, and G’s game-goal is to generate outputs that fool D. In each of D’s turns, mini-samples are taken from G and S and a score is computed for D’s performance on the combined mini-sample; D then tunes its parameters so as to improve its score on the mini-sample. In each of G’s turns, a mini-sample is generated by G and a score is computed for D’s performance on the mini-sample; G then tunes its parameters (causing modifications to the generated mini-sample) so as to lower D’s score and thus fool D. This game-like procedure ends once G wins ‒ meaning that D cannot tell apart the generated outputs and the given dataset ‒ following which G can be used by demand to generate new outputs. A schematic illustration of this procedure is shown in Fig. 6.2.

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Figure 6.3: A simplified schematic illustration of a reversed CNN serving as a generator and a CNN serving as a discriminator. The grids manifest partial connectivity that suffices when dealing with data consisting of visual imagery.

The convergence of GAN’s training phase into the state wherein the discriminator cannot tell apart the generator’s outputs and the given dataset is not guaranteed. However, even when such convergence occurs, this does not imply that the generator’s outputs are indistinguishable from the given dataset: a different discriminator, for instance, a human, might be able to tell the two apart. How well a GAN-trained generator performs, that is, the quality of its outputs, depends among others on the discriminator used as trainer. Within the domain of image processing, GAN typically uses multilayered gridbased artificial neural networks as its models: Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is frequently used as the discriminator, whereas a reversed CNN serves as the generator (see Radford et al. 2015; Krizhevsky et al. 2017). As shown in Fig. 6.3, in each layer in a CNN, except for the output layer and possibly a few just before it, the neurons are structured in an array of grids; each neuron is associated with a particular location in the aesthetic grid of the input image, and each (except for neurons in the input layer) is connected to a small neighborhood in the preceding layer and not to the

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entire layer. In a reversed CNN, the arrangement is similar, albeit in a reversed order. The grids in both a CNN and its reversed version thus serve as location indices in the sense that the artificial neurons in the neural grids correspond to specific locations in the aesthetic grids of the processed and/or generated images. Image processing and generation procedures are therefore composed of grid-oriented computations. Given that images are spatial data represented by grids, using such grid-based networks makes it possible to effectively exploit the data’s spatiality and to significantly reduce the number of parameters the networks have to learn. The combination of GAN with CNN and its reversed version yields the possibility of efficient learning of image synthesis. This has given rise to further developments, including diverse variants of GAN and numerous applications in a variety of fields ‒ medicine, security, physics, gaming, design, commerce, entertainment, and art, to name but a few (e.g., Creswell et al. 2018; Bau et al. 2019). In the context of visual art, GAN-based systems, even elementary ones, provide a special kind of means by which to generate paintings, illustrations, and photo-like images. The French collective Obvious, for example, used an elementary GAN-based system to generate their Belamy series of portraits. Providing the system with a dataset consisting of 15,000 images of portraits painted between the fourteenth and the twentieth centuries, they trained and probably re-trained the system so that it learnt the statistics of the portraits’ visualities, resulting in a trained network that generated many new portraits from which they selected several to constitute the series (Christie’s). From a broader perspective, the process of creation included additional choices relating, for example, to the naming of the series (which was meant to pay tribute to Goodfellow), the signing of the work, and other elements. I will return to this point later. Generally speaking, from the user’s point of view, an elementary GAN-based system may be described as a software that includes two phases—training and generation. In the training phase, the user provides the system with a dataset from which to learn, and optionally chooses various training parameters. In the generation phase, the system generates outputs by demand. If the user is not pleased with the quality or visuality of the outputs, he or she may proceed in several ways, for instance: (a) request the system to continue generating outputs and select those that are good enough or best fit his or her goal; (b) repeat the training process using the same or a different dataset while applying the same or different parameters; (c) attempt to improve the generator’s performance by manually tuning its parameters. Hence, the user can determine the degree of his or her involvement in this process through the choices he or she makes. Nevertheless, in all cases, the system remains autonomous in choosing and generating the particular elements or features composing each and every one of its outputs, under the distribution it had learnt. For this very reason, one may be led into an intricate web of puzzling issues regarding, inter alia, the artist’s identity and the artistic status of the resulting works. Seen through the prism of the user, the process of creation may thus be described in terms of selection-based activities done during the GAN phase, combined with pos-

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sible post-GAN activities. Viewed through the prism of technology, the process of creation amounts to a grid-oriented process so that every unit in the aesthetic grid is the result of computations undertaken by artificial neurons in the neural grids.

Meaning and Intention in the Realm of AI Art How to make sense of works generated by or created with the substantial aid of AI systems of the kind described above? What, for instance, should we make of the blurriness visuality that characterizes Edmond de Belamy? What about the particular colors, lines, shapes, and composition of the portrait? How shall we decipher or read into this and other such works? When encountering a work of art or a candidate to be considered as such, regardless of whether or not it falls under the label of AI Art, a challenge of interpretation emerges ‒ namely, the challenge of assigning a meaning or meanings to the work in a reasonable or enlightening manner so as to enhance our understanding of it. Indeed, the assumption underlying the very attempt at interpreting works of art is that they require interpretation, or, to put it differently ‒ that they are objects that in some sense go beyond their description in virtue of their being objects of art. For this reason, an evaluation of a work of art, namely judging the quality of the work or assessing its artistic value, is an activity that in part relies on the meaning or meanings of the work (Carroll 1992; Savile 1996). The question, however, of how to interpret works of art and, in particular, where to look for their meaning or meanings, has yielded competing approaches in both the continental and the analytic philosophical traditions of art. In both traditions, under different names, disputes have focused on the questionable authority of the artist in determining the meaning or meanings of his or her works. In the continental tradition, an attack on the centrality of the artist moved famously through structuralism and later through post-structuralism, reaching its by now iconic peak in Roland Barthes’ declaration of the death of the author and Michel Foucault’s view of the author as a function. The analytic tradition, which is the focus of what follows, has displayed a slightly different path. One of the questions widely discussed within the analytic philosophy of art is whether the artist’s intentions are indispensable or relevant ‒ at least to some extent ‒ for the interpretation of his or her works. The idea that the artist’s intentions are a major factor determining the meaning of the artist’s work has its roots in Romanticism. From the perspective of the analytic tradition, however, the idea has often been associated with Pragmatism ‒ specifically, with a model of conversation or, more broadly, of communication (Carroll 1992; Stecker 1993; 2006; Currie 2005, 107–133; Davidson 2005, 89–107). When wishing to understand someone’s deed or utterance, we typically look for that someone’s intention in order to reveal the meaning of his or her deed or utterance. Likewise, when wishing to understand a work of art, it may seem plausible to follow a similar

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route; a work of art is analogous to some sort of “utterance.” Nonetheless, if one holds the view known as actual intentionalism in any of its versions, according to which the artist’s intention is a necessary condition for a work’s meaning (e.g., Currie 2003; Stecker 2006), then when attempting to account for GAN-based works, an immediate intellectual difficulty arises: can one reasonably refer to the artist’s intentions, given the high degree of autonomy of GAN-based systems? As previously emphasized, the human user of a GAN-based system has limited control over the concrete features constituting a specific output. Additionally, the user is not the one who actually generates the output. Therefore, we may be tempted to argue that the user is not entitled to be called “the artist.” Rather, whoever actually picks the concrete features and generates the output, namely the GAN-based system, is the one entitled to be called “the artist.” If we embrace this reasoning, then it is not possible to refer to the artist’s intentions. As mentioned above, every unit in the aesthetic grid of an output image of a GAN-based system is the result of computations undertaken by artificial neurons in the neural grids, and thus the system lacks actual intentionality. Following this argument, if we assume the system to be the artist, we are led to infer that its outputs are meaningless and therefore cannot be objects of art. Nonetheless, this entire reasoning is called into doubt, for there are various ways in which the human user of a GAN-based system might be able to influence the body of the work and, in particular, incorporate intentions into it, even if not in the traditional fashion. To begin with, by adopting, compiling, or constructing a dataset, the user can choose a subject matter, such as portraiture; and by adding different filters, which essentially constitute further choices, he or she can focus on specific facets of the subject, such as historical period, gender, certain visual characteristic, and so on. While training and re-training the system on the dataset, the user can go through an iterative process of creation conducted by selections and eliminations. These provide means by which to express intentions, albeit in an indirect manner. During the process, the user may refine or alter his or her initial intentions, allowing them to evolve based on the system’s intermediate outputs, until choosing a final output or outputs or a state of the system with which to possibly continue through a post-GAN phase ‒ a phase that can manifest additional layers of intentions through the naming of the work, its presentation, its contextualization, and other elements. It thus follows that categorically depriving the user of the status of an artist is not plausible. Even so, when attempting to understand particular visual elements and features in a GAN-based portrait such as, for example, why the entire composition of Edmond de Belamy is shifted slightly upward, or why the image both emerges from and merges with smudged stains of dark colors defining its boundaries but also blurring them, we are left without answers. These kinds of elements and many other concrete visual features cannot be endowed with meaning by appealing to the user’s intentions. This is because the user’s actions undertaken during a GAN phase often influence the visuality of the system’s output as a whole and, accordingly, may be guided by intentions aimed at the output as a whole. In particular, the user’s intentions cannot be mani-

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fested in most of the concrete visual features since these are the result of the statistical visuality learnt by the generative model, although it is biased by the user’s selections. Thus, even if a specific cluster of cells in the aesthetic grid looks like a brush stroke that calls for interpretation, it is impossible to endow it with meaning by appealing to the user’s intentions. Hence, when viewing what seems to be a painting of a portrait that was generated by a GAN-based system and attempting to interpret some of its concrete visual features as is usually done with any other painting of a portrait, a problem arises. The problem is not restricted either to elementary GAN-based systems or to paintings of portraits. To summarize the issue concisely, the problem stems from a gap between the seemingly natural objects of interpretation relative to the assumed art form and the artist’s actual intentional space. This gap, which I call the intentional gap, introduces an impasse for actual intentionalists who assume the artist’s intention to be a necessary condition for a work’s meaning. For such intentionalists, either a GAN-based painting ends up being meaningless, or ‒ perhaps the apparent painting should not be thought of as such, but instead should be considered to be some other form of art? A similar problem arose more than a century ago with respect to photography. At its emerging phase, it was thought of as an instrument with no artistic touch and with poor artistic prospects. Thus, a few decades after its invention, Charles Baudelaire asserted that photography ought to be no more than “the servant of the science and arts ‒ but the very humble servant, like printing or shorthand, which have neither created nor supplemented literature” (cited in Harrison et al. 1998, 668). Once photography was conceptually detached from painting and science-oriented documentation, it became possible to reflect upon it in a way that led to explore its unique artistic dimensions and, in turn, conceptualize it as a new artistic medium or a new art form. Exploring this direction with regard to machine learning art, particularly GAN-based art, might be illuminating not only within the scope of actual intentionalism. But a transition from a medium into an artistic medium is not without challenges of its own (e.g., Davies 2003, 181‒191). The expressiveness of the medium ‒ of every medium ‒ needs to be explored, and this takes time. However, even if such a transition were immediate, there might be something inconvenient, theoretically speaking, in such a path, at least as far as GAN-based paintings are concerned. This is because, as already mentioned, the technology of machine learning, when applied to the realm of painting as in the example above, is meant to train a model to generate paintings based on examples of paintings. And by this rationale, would we not wish the output to be regarded as a painting? Such difficulties can be circumvented if we reject altogether the premise that the artist’s intentions are relevant to the understanding of a work of art and to the determination of its meaning. There are a variety of views that already align with such a track. One of these is especially intriguing since it does not dismiss the idea of intention per se ‒ as is done, for instance, by anti-intentionalists such as Monroe Beardsley and William K. Wimsatt (1987/1946) and their followers. Rather, it uses

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intention as a methodological principle. This view is held by Alexander Nehamas (1981), among others, and it falls under one of the versions of hypothetical intentionalism sometimes referred to as fictionalist intentionalism. According to this view, the previously assumed actuality of intentions is dismissed: a work’s meaning is identified with what the audience would understand to be intended, based on the work itself, by some postulated artist not necessarily related to the actual artist. Artist and intentions are constructions of interpreters; and the work’s meaning stems from a hypothetical intention. Hence, it is enough that an interpreter succeeds in coherently constructing intentions associated with some postulated artist in order for a work to be considered meaningful. Through the prism of this view, then, interpreting a GAN-based painting such as Edmond de Belamy does not require us to consider it as something other than a painting, and additionally ‒ the problem of the intentional gap does not arise. An interpreter, for example, can postulate an artist that might have intended Edmond de Belamy to resemble a gentleman from about two or three centuries ago, possibly with relation to religion. The postulated artist might also have intended the smudged stains of colors from which the figure emerges to convey that Edmond de Belamy takes part in both the divine and earthly worlds ‒ albeit with a tendency toward the former, as might have been intended by the composition being shifted slightly upward. The postulated artist might also have intended the mathematical formula, which refers to a GAN algorithm and appears at the bottom right corner in place of a signature, to express tension between the past, represented by the depicted gentleman, and the future, represented by the algorithm; or alternatively ‒ the intention might have been to convey the idea that the algorithm itself created the portrait. We do know that this latter possibility was the actual intention of Obvious, who signed the portrait, but this does not matter to the fictionalist intentionalist. Of course, there can be many other reasonable interpretations; and although the question of how to cope with multiple interpretations is not trivial, there are various proposals, for instance, to pick the interpretation maximizing the artistic value of the work, that resolve the matter to a plausible degree. There is something even more appealing when considering this brand of intentionalism in the context of machine learning art: the activity of interpretation, through which the interpreter constructs artists and intentions, can implement some sort of a test analogous to the Turing Test when the postulated artist is a human. The Turing Test was introduced by Alan Turing in his seminal paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950). Like thinkers before him, Turing wondered whether machines can think. But unlike his predecessors, he proposed a behavioristic-like approach ‒ a test by which to determine whether machines can act indistinguishably from thinking-agents. In simple terms, the test itself amounts to a written conversation between a human, J, and two other interlocutors, one of which is a computer; J’s goal is to judge or decide which of the other two is the computer. Turing thus sidestepped the need to define what thinking is and how exactly it is done by machines. For a computer to

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be considered intelligent, it is enough that it displays capabilities that fool an intelligent agent into believing the computer to be an intelligent agent too. Returning to the hypothetical intentionalism of the kind described above, if we employ a Turing-like line of reasoning we do not need to define what intention is or how the computerized system implements intention. In particular, in our story of machine learning art, it does not matter that the grid-based computations do not contain actual intentions: it is enough to imagine that the work was created by some human artist who activated intentions for the system to be considered intentional. From a broader perspective, fictionalist intentionalism may seem to be somewhat paradoxical: on the one hand, it is presumed that artistic intention is important for the understanding of a work, whereas on the other hand, it is also presumed that the artistic intention of the actual artist can be ignored. Some thinkers who stressed this point, such as the philosopher Paisley Livingston, have argued, in the context of the literary arts, that adopting the structure or framework of intention-oriented interpretation without committing, to some plausible extent, to the actual artist’s intentions results in undesirable consequences, such as “mistaking accidentally coherent textual meanings for intentionally expressed attitudes, attributing the latter to a nonexistent creator” (Livingston 2008, 154). Nonetheless, fictionalist would disagree that such a consequence is undesirable, because it may increase the artistic value of the work. In the context of machine learning art, it is this very consequence that makes the approach so appealing, enabling in many cases to reasonably assess and interpret GAN-based works.

Further Reflections and Concluding Remarks Technology has always been an integral part of art. Throughout the centuries, the discovery or invention of new materials and techniques, as well as the construction of devices and machines of different degrees of complexity, have often given rise to new forms of art, sometimes singling out a meaningful turning point in the history of art. Nevertheless, in all their manifestations, technological advances seem to resort to the traditional role technology has played in the context of art: to serve as a tool in the hands of the human creator. This picture, however, has drastically changed. We have seen an example of how a grid-based machine learning technology can be applied to the creation of art. As emphasized above, from the point of view of the technology as such, the process of creation amounts to grid-oriented computations; in particular, every unit in the aesthetic grids of generated images is the result of computations undertaken by artificial neurons in the neural grids. From the point of view of the human creator who uses the technology, the process of creation often amounts to selection-based activities ‒ selecting a subject matter, selecting a training collection of images to learn from, selecting a few outputs out of many, and so on.

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These two facets demonstrate the shift that has occurred in the role technology plays in art, which has switched from a passive to an active role. Under actual intentionalism, which centralizes the artist’s intentions in the process of interpretation and evaluation of works of arts, this shift manifests itself in the form of what I have defined as the problem of the intentional gap, which gives rise to further theoretical difficulties. Among the latter is the difficulty to view the technology as an artistic medium, similarly to the way a camera is seen, without giving up the idea of machine learning, i.e., that the machine learns to perform tasks ‒ for instance, to paint or generate paintings. Even so, as was shown above, under fictionalist intentionalism such difficulties are circumvented. Unlike postmodernist and anti-intentionalist approaches, this approach yields a behavioristic-like test that replaces the question “can machine intend” in a way analogous to the Turing Test. This enables us to reasonably account for many instances of machine learning art while preserving the idea of intention as a methodological principle. From a broader perspective, the rapid changes technology has undergone, and the artistic experiments these changes have invited, point to the need to establish philosophical frameworks by which to re-contemplate not merely the idea of artistic intention and technology’s implication on its centrality, but also the very changing relations between art and technology, specifically the change in the role technology has come to play in art. This change also points to the need to reexamine the history of art. Although art historians acknowledge that technology is an integral part of art, they have often marginalized the significance of technology for the narration or the understanding of the story of art (Shanken 2007). However, while such marginalization could find a convincing rationale in previous centuries, the present centrality of technology in art cannot be reasonably dismissed, especially when discussing contemporary emerging art forms like the one reflected upon within the scope of this chapter.

References Bau, David, Jun-Yan Zhu, Hendrik Strobelt, Bolei Zhou, Joshua Tenenbaum, William Freeman and Antonio Torrablba. “GAN Dissection: Visualizing and Understanding Generative Adversarial Networks.” Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2019. Accessed February 14, 2021. https://openreview.net/pdf?id=Hyg_X2C5FX. Beardsley, Monroe, and William K. Wimsatt. “The Intentional Fallacy.” In Philosophy Looks at the Arts, edited by Joseph Margolis, 3rd ed., 367‒380. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987 (1946). Bogost, Ian. “The AI-Art Gold Rush Is Here.” The Atlantic, March 6, 2019. Accessed January 30, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/ai-created-art-invades-chelsea-gallery-scene/584134/. Carroll, Noël. “Art, Intention, and Conversation.” In Intention and Interpretation, edited by Gary Iseminger, 97‒131. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992.

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Christie’s “Is Artificial Intelligence Set to Become art’s Next Medium?”. Accessed February 13, 2021. https://www.christies.com/features/A-collaboration-between-two-artists-one-human-one-amachine-9332-1.aspx. Cohn, Gabe. “AI Art at Christie’s Sells for $432,500.” The New York Times, October 25, 2018. Accessed December 25, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/arts/design/ai-art-soldchristies.html. Creswell, Antonia, Tom White, Vincent Dumoulin, Kai Arulkumaran, Biswa Sengupta, and Anil Bharath. “Generative Adversarial Networks: An Overview.” IEEE Signal Processing Magazine 35, 1 (2018): 53‒65. Currie, Gregory. “Interpretation in Art.” In Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, edited by Jerrold Levinson, 291‒306. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Currie, Gregory. Arts and Minds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Davidson, Donald. Truth, Language, and History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005. Davies, David. “Medium in Art.” In Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, edited by Jerrold Levinson, 181‒191. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Goodfellow, Ian, Jean Pouget-Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, Bing Xu, David Warde-Farley, Sherjil Ozair, Aaron Courville, and Yoshua Bengio. “Generative Adversarial Nets.” NIPS: Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, vol. 2 (2014): 2672‒2680. Harrison, Charles, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger. Art in Theory 1815‒1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Oxford: John Wiley and Sons Ltd, 1998. Krizhevsky, Alex, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey Hinton. “ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks.” Communications of the ACM 60, 6 (2017): 84‒90. Livingston, Paisley. “Intentionalism in Aesthetics.” In Contemporary Readings in the Philosophy of Literature: An Analytic Approach, edited by David Davies and Carl Matheson, 151‒166. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2008. Morbey, Mary Leigh. “Harold Cohen’s Artificial Intelligence Paradigm for Art Making: An Overview.” Marilyn Zurmuehlin Working Papers in Art Education 11 (1992): 38‒45. Nehamas, Alexander. “The Postulated Author: Critical Monism as a Regulative Ideal.” Critical Inquiry 8, 1 (1981): 133‒149. Radford Alec, Luke Metz, and Soumith Chintala. “Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks.” Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2016. Accessed February 2, 2021. https://arxiv. org/abs/1511.06434v2. Savile, Anthony. “Instrumentalism and the Interpretation of Narrative.” Mind 105, 420 (1996): 553‒576. Shanken, Edward. “Historicizing Art and Technology: Forging a Method and Firing a Canon.” In Media Art Histories, edited by Oliver Grau, 43‒70. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007. Stecker, Robert. “Pragmatism and Interpretation.” Poetics Today 14, 1 (1993):181‒191. Stecker, Robert. “Moderate Actual Intentionalism Defended.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64, 4 (2006): 429‒438. Turing, Alan M. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind LIX, 236 (1950): 433‒460.

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7 Sounds in Grid: History and Development of Grid-Based Musical Interfaces and their Rooting in Sound, Interaction and Screen Design Abstract: In electronic music, grids are everywhere: full of light, full of color, full of promise, full of sounds. Grid-interfaces for electronic music can be used for everything from sequencing to modulation, being interface and multimodal display, instrument and score at the same time. Beyond this, we can also understand maps of field recordings, soundscapes and sound-mappings as followers of the grid. On the esthetic side, the grid-interfaces have determined whole genres of music. They are a perfect showcase of how wearing the hats of science, art, design and engineering leads to new products and concepts for generating music, acoustic artifacts or listening to them. Thus, the development and use of grid hardware interfaces, software-grids and maps works as a blueprint to show the interconnection between these different design practices and fields of competence. This chapter will demonstrate how grids have been used since music notation was invented, how the idea of grid-interfaces has developed, and how the switch morphed with a pixel and that “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us” (Culkin 1967, 51). Keywords: sound; interfaces; design; electronic-music; controllers

Introduction The grid in sound and music is first and foremost not an optical pattern but a concept of arranging sound in time, pitch and timbre, or interacting with sound-producing or sound-controlling devices, such as instruments, music-software and studio-hardware. The grid may be also one, two or even more dimensional, displaying aspects of sound as a result of the transformation of the analysis of an acoustic signal to an optical display. Nowadays if we look at a modern recording studio or stage setup, grids are everywhere from the user interfaces of software to arrays of LEDs, buttons and switches in hardware. Grid-interfaces for electronic music are used for everything from sequencing to modulating sounds, being interface and multimodal display, instrument and score at the same time. Very often these functions are clearly visible and laid out in rows and columns of multicolor LED-buttons. Beyond this, we can also understand maps of field recordings, soundscapes and sound-mappings as followers of the grid and the classical western notation. On the esthetic side, the grid-interfaces

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have determined whole genres of music. They are a perfect showcase of how wearing the hats of science, art, design and engineering leads to new products and concepts for generating music, acoustic artifacts or listening to them. Thus, I want to show that the development and use of grid interfaces like monome, Launchpad, software-grids and maps ‒ functions as a blueprint for the interconnection between these different design practices and fields of competence. This chapter will demonstrate how grids have been used since music notation was invented, how the idea of grid-interfaces has developed, and how the switch morphed with a pixel. As a result, this shaped artists and their artifacts, which led to the development of more grid-inspired interfaces continuing like an ouroboros. Furthermore, in this chapter, I will not discriminate strictly between hard and software instruments, as they are basically the same in different forms, and just refer to them as electronic instruments. On the one hand, with the advent of electronic instruments, often non-instrumentalists obtained access to producing sounds, as opposed to keyboarders being unspoiled by previous knowledge. On the other hand, designers came up with new ideas of interfaces, while these instruments had to be learnt with as much difficulty as traditional instruments to produce esthetically satisfying artifacts.

Grids as Constraint and Matter of Course In my main profession, the grid was there from the beginning. If you look at a guitar’s fretboard, the obvious idea is to organize your playing visually. Especially in comparison to other instruments, fretted instruments nearly force their players to think in this metaphor. Guitarists are even more prone to do this, as the grid of the fretboard helps to organize the notes in a more special way, giving a sense that even the same note being played on different locations of the grid is not the same in terms of sound and articulation. Though some musician would define a “Grid Music System to be a musical system that provides a visual grid or matrix layout on a screen or physical interface as a method for the temporal structure of musical content” (Adeney 2011, 17), I want to show that the grid is also like “The Bed of Procrustes”, cutting off not only irrelevant parts. When I first heard about different forms like A|B|A or Sonata form, I was surprised by the attempts to try to fit time-based media into some form of grid, forcing a continuous stream into discrete items. For me it felt like cheating, using predefined forms or loops like recipes to follow. Also, the idea of fixing time and pitch values into the Western notation system still somehow evokes strange feelings, when I have to deal with it. Looking at a guitar fretboard, it immediately materializes as a grid. But in contrast to the strict system of the staff notation, where every note is nailed down in time and pitch, the fretboard grid with its inlays was always more like a river with eddies to rest, before challenging the next rapid. Even when performing song-

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based rock music, for me repetition was more a pragmatic matter than a conceptual one, and I never did quite get the circular concepts of loopers. Later on, dealing with graphic designers and students, I was always stunned by their interest in grids, telling myself, “Oh yeah, a grid, so what.” Yes, useful for doing some calculations in Excel (some might remember Lotus 123, the killer application, responsible for the success of personal computers); and again, when Ableton Live came on the stage in 2001 (see respective Wikipedia entry), I was not impressed by a loop and grid based digital audio workstation.

Perception, Patterns and Security Digging deeper into media theory and teaching the psychology of perception, I stumbled over grids all the time. If we think about the perception of time, we might argue that all forms of schemes such as loops, or patterns, fulfill two important purposes. First, giving the impression and satisfaction of a foreseeable future; and second, the joy of perceiving something we know already. As the constancy of nature is not provable, time inherently has a special uncertainty for all living beings. The visual grid eases the effort our brain has to make to decode visual structures. Following the “What Hierarchy” bottom up, it’s much easier for the information to contribute to features -> patterns -> objects decoding (Ware 2008, 24). According to Hummel and Biederman (1992) we and other mammals are hardwired to construct 3D objects out of geons, which are simple 3D primitives like cylinders, cones and boxes. By using this form of grid, less burden is applied to our perceptive apparatus. In the following, I shall examine how modern grid-based musical interfaces and instruments make use of these features. Grids do not evolve in isolation, but the quality of their progression is tied to all surrounding influences (Higgins 2009, 8). We humans are fond of patterns and grids, because they support us in our effort to decode and organize the chaotic world around us. Even if disliked and sometimes referred to as “un-human”, they fulfill a deep urge in our perceptive system as we believe in a coherent world (Kahneman 2012, 141). So even if people see patterns where none exist, we have to decode and compress the accumulated data, so as not to be lagging too much behind the outside world, which is called reality. Our perceptive system does a remarkable job in filtering and decoding, but has to rely on certain principles and experiences. The grid tells us that everything is in order, in place, foreseeable and manageable. As Hannah Higgins clearly exemplifies in The Grid Book, grids have changed our world, from Mesopotamian clay bricks up to the Internet (2009, 7).

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Notation, Buttons and Computers Musicians have been dealing with discrete units since the first efforts to write down music. The Seikilos Epitaph, the oldest surviving complete piece of musical composition, does not show a clear grid, but is following a timeline approach with symbols for the melody. A thousand years later, in Guido d’Arrezzo’s four-line staff notation, the grid is clearly recognizable and this continues up to modern five-line staff notation. Grids are also the basis of non-Western notation as in Indian, Korean and other written music. Even more clearly, we see this in modern guitar tablature, rooting in organ and lute notation as early as approximately 1300 CE, and we can still find it in its contemporary computer sibling, the ASCII tab notation (Fig. 7.1). Besides giving the perceptual rooted scale of discrete pitch something to rest on, the grid has also to tame the constantly flowing time in defining sections, bars and thus, rhythm. All time-based media favor some kind of grid when notated, whether bars, seconds or frames on the x-axis and amplitude, spectrum or tracks on the y-axis. So, we have two actors who have contributed significantly to the development and presence of grids in music and sound art. On the one hand, notation, fixation of sound with symbolic scores, or as technically mediated media transformation, recordings; on the other hand, the tools used to produce sound, musical instruments. Traditional musical instruments do not have switches to interact with, but there are interfaces designed around their special way of sound production. These instruments give us physical feedback and inspire us to work with their constraints. Nevertheless, whenever feasible, we find grids for better orientation and easier playing on keyboard instruments, stringed instruments, percussion instruments, sometimes determining special tuning. Obvious examples are the keyboard or fretboard. The absence of this characteristic also leads to different results and possibilities in terms of sound, not bound to a grid, as with fretless instruments. Before the development of computer music, there were computers, machines and electronic instruments. In order to interact and tame the seemingly overwhelming possibilities, the grid was a welcome tool to organize their interfaces. From spaceship control panels to atomic power plants and through to synthesizers, we see the structure

Figure 7.1: Ascii Tabulature.

Figure 7.2: MIR Control Panel.

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of a grid in arranged knobs, switches and sliders. Even if designed by engineers, these grids of control elements unintentionally follow the Gestalt Principles, as a clear layout could be live saving, e.g., in controlling an atomic power plant or spaceship (Fig. 7.2). The computer as an instrument is basically a machine with endless possibilities, without any constraints and without physical feedback for the player, composer or operator. An arbitrary input device, like a keyboard or mouse, basically a sensor ‒ is mapped for corresponding actions. The alphanumeric keyboard, in itself already a grid, seems only natural to us as long as we use it according to its defined purpose and as long as we use the keyboard in our usual language. Anybody having to type text on a keyboard in a foreign language, especially with foreign characters, knows this immediately. Early music computers were descended from general number crunching machines. These musical instruments, like the CSIR Mark1 computer, inherited the interaction metaphor from their predecessors, plain computing machines. Early input devices, besides keyboards, were mostly arrays of switches, thus decoupling the interface from the underlying sound producing action. First computer music instruments were no traditional instruments at all but rather machines to transform a musical idea into an abstract mechanism. Many composers were influenced by Busoni’s “Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music” (1911), and have come to see the keyboard and the well-tempered tuning to be too constraining. Consequently, instruments with continuous controllers like the Telharmonium or the famous Termenvox seemed a desirable path to go. So especially in the early days of electronic music, there was an urge to use the expressive possibilities of new instruments to escape the rigid boundaries of conventional music, and to escape the patterns of well-tempered tuning and straight time signatures. But many of these first electronic instruments, like Spielmann’s Superpiano, the Celluphone, the Welte Licht-ton Orgel and others, which were based on the photo-optical principle and imitated traditional instruments, used mainly keyboards as their interface, to satisfy the commercial mainstream. An exception was the Rhythmicon, featuring a keyboard as interface but in a completely different way, as its different keys trigger rhythmic partials, loops (for more on the history of electronic instruments see Cann 2011). Years later, with the appearance of more powerful computers, new forms of interaction appeared. The UPIC System, designed by the architect and composer Iannis Xenakis, was a long-awaited physical embodiment of the idea of an interactive environment intended for a sound-oriented, multi-scale approach to composing and generating music. This was the same as the ANS Synthesizer by Evgeny Murzin, one of the most successful graphic-based composition machines in the early days of computer music (Smirnov 2020, 109). But as many of the early electronic computer musicians were technophiles or musically interested technicians, used to grids of well-ordered switches, LEDs and punching cards, they made the grid the dominant interface. When in 1951 the RCA Synthesizer I and II emerged, we clearly see the grid as a row of knobs and switches, an engineer’s heritage. Thus, for many years, the keyboard and some knobs or switches where the main interface for computer music.

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Figure 7.3: Pure Data Help Patch.

At this time, electronic and computer music instruments where exotic, and hard to get one’s hands on. Only big institutions, telecommunication companies or broadcasters could afford and provide such studios, such as the WDR in Cologne or the GRM in Paris; and there was no influence from a large consumer base, pushing for a userfriendly interface. Only in the sixties of the last century, inventors like Robert Moog or Don Buchla came up with electronic instruments for wider use. Initially, these instruments were only affordable by institutions or rock stars, but gradually they became more affordable and widespread. Even being pure analog in the beginning, the interfaces and building schemes clearly relied on grids, while Don Buchla’s modular synthesizers were even omitting the keyboard. Due to the modular structure of these synthesizers, a grid layout was the most reasonable design. This modularity and the use of patch cables, as in early telephone switchboard systems, led later to a new software paradigm in music software, especially in Max or Pure Data. Superficially without the grid, these data-flow programming languages relied on the modular and net paradigm. Nevertheless, we recognize the urge to organize the graphical items alongside a non-visible grid in well-designed patches or programs, and as in drawing software we can display a grid for better alignment (Fig. 7.3).

Synthesizer for all: Emergence of the Favorite Software Since its launch in 1983 the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer has dominated the market, reasonably priced, and with its special sound being heard everywhere (Cann 2011). Programming the DX7 itself was complicated, but as it was easily controllable and programmable via MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), this led to the increasing popularity of editing and sequencing software (a sequencer is a device or software

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that can record, edit and manage note and performance information). On account of the lack of processing power, this was just the method for controlling electronic instruments by software. This leads us to take a closer look at sequencer software like Steinberg’s Pro-16, one of the most common sequencers at the time, revealing a grid-based interface dominated by numbers and characters. Using this tool led to compositions of larger structures of synthesizer sounds, combined with samples from a so-called sampler, which is a piece of electronic musical equipment to record and manipulate sound (Russ 2011). Popular music produced with these resources therefore resulted in more pattern-based music (Fig. 7.4). With the rise of affordable computer power in the 1990s, recording and cutting of longer sounds was available to a broader audience. A simple cut still might take minutes, thereby producing compositions similar to those produced earlier with tape machines, where not much interaction was possible. At this time software tools for live interaction and sound processing in real-time demanded dedicated DSP-cards or extremely powerful computers. Because of the high costs only a few found their way on stage, instead hardware loopers and effects were used to gain some level of interaction. With the advent of affordable, powerful laptops, cutting, recording and manipulating of sound in real-time became increasingly accessible, digital DJs showed up on the scene, mostly playing and mixing sound files. But no killer application for real live performance was still available ‒ not until Ableton Live was introduced onto the stage. What an influence on aesthetics and performance practice this would have was not foreseeable at the time (Fig. 7.5). Ableton Live was the design of Robert Henke and Bernd Roggendorf. Deeply rooted in their experience as live electronic musicians before, they used self-made software and prototyped audio devices with the MAX software. They performed dub-influenced techno under the name Monolake and the influence of their needs for performing this style live on stage is self-evident. It is interesting that the painter Torsten Slama was involved in the development of the Lives original interface. In Ableton Live, the main screen and interface, the “Session View” is clearly grid-based

Figure 7.4: Steinberg Pro 16.

Figure 7.5: Ableton Live.

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and live-oriented, for interacting with and manipulating so called “Clips” in real time. Their software merged audio-clips and loops, midi and samples in a universal, easyto-use grid. Ableton Live was immediately successful and took the stage by assault. Part of its success may also be, that the creators of this DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) did not have much if any formal musical training. This led to this very application-oriented software, which was not influenced by theoretical concepts, but instead supported beats, rhythmic patterns and loops in particular; thus also fulfilling the needs of many laptop musicians without much previous musical knowledge.

Screen Design, Drum Machines, Grid Controllers In the beginning, the screen design of music software followed pragmatic rules and the esthetic preferences of programmers. With better graphic resolution, a strange skeuomorphism took place. Instead of searching for the most appropriate way to interact with the means of mouse and keyboard, physical input devices resembling mixing desks and outboard effects where mimicked and still are. As posited by Gerhard Behles, “Skeuomorphism is a natural response to the frightening abyss of possibilities to a new medium” (Behles 2017, 50). Operating a knob via a mouse is not really the ultimate solution. When in the beginning screen design based on grids was a necessary evil for most musicians, after these over-boarding digital affordances it became the ultimate tool in Ableton Live. But the user-experience of interacting with this grid with the mouse and keyboard led to new demands for controllers, and established the grid in the imagination of performing artists as a very useful tool for performing. Grid controllers have in common, that they enable non-musicians or non-keyboarders, from professionals to beginners, to create working musical structures. The grid became the big enabler: “There is a reason why the keyboard is so prevalent ‒ it’s a great design for playing notes. But the customization element of a grid, plus the fact you can do a bit more with it, like show color for example, makes it feel a bit more fun and a little less daunting” (Bjørn 2017, 217). Thus, grid controllers freed users from learning traditional instruments and led to the development of special skills, like Finger Drumming or Controllerism. Controllerists are artists using mainly hardware controllers to create music, mix or scratch it. The scope of these controllers ranges from ordinary midi keyboards to self-made devices, as these artists have a strong connection to the DIY-scene. As the buttons of the controllers are freely programmable, using them follows the “Input Controller -> Mapping -> Sound output” paradigm. This is especially important for grid controllers because due to their isomorphic layout, the mapping can be completely arbitrary. Grid controllers can be also used to trigger single drum samples, arpeggios, chords, visuals and are not bound to tempered scales or whatever, “the challenge is always”, however, “to remember where the individual samples, loops or effects reside on the grid” (Bjørn 2017, 217).

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In drum-machines, the grid controllers’ ancestors or siblings, this problem was not so evident. This is because they mostly had at least a certain predefined mapping of sounds. Drum-machines belong to the oldest species of music machines, from the oldest known ones in the twelfth century to modern standalone production and performance instruments like Maschine+ by Native Instruments. They fulfill an important basic task, to structure time with a basic grid of (percussive) sounds. The first drum boxes were either for pure pleasure, accompanying or experimentation ‒ e.g., Al-Jazaris “Drinking Boat for Delightment”, Lev Thermen’s Rhythmicon for creating experimental rhythms, or the Chamberlin Rhythmate for family sing-alongs. The great breakthrough came with the Linn-M1 Drum Computer. This was the first ever drum machine using digital recorded samples of natural drum sounds. It has not conquered the mass market, was too expensive, but became famous for being the main drum machine used on Prince’s records in the 1980’s and influencing all following drum machine programming. Sliders and buttons neatly arranged in grids helped programming the machine, and its success was based on the possibility to quantize the punched-in rhythms to a stark grid. However, the first commercial electronic instrument using pads in a four-to-four grid was the AKAI MPC 60, hitting the market in 1988. Sounds could be directly manipulated on the instrument, recorded, sequenced and synchronized. This machine was popular early on, but it would also sustain its place in Hip-Hop for years to come. This model was used, for instance, on Warren G’s “Regulate” in 1995, DJ Shadow’s sampling masterpiece Endtroducing in 1996, and continued to be used by DJ Premier into the 2000s (Boardway and Laughton 2017). The MPC 60 evolved through many iterations like the MPC 2000XL, MPC Live or MPC 60 and MPC Renaissance. All have the four-to-four grid in common, adhering to the common division into four beats. Here we see how “four on the floor” was cast in hardware, thus urging the musician to produce beats. An integral part of drum machines are sequencers, which also exist as a standalone device or in software. Starting with step sequencers playing strict patterns of notes using a grid of four, eight, sixteen or more buttons or switches, these patterns can be chained together for longer compositions. Here the grid determines the rhythms, seldom producing odd ones, often not possible due to the design of the hardware. Even software sequencers followed this paradigm simulating their hardware counterparts, but due to the demand of contemporary composers, polyrhythms and out of curiosity, new concepts surfaced, chaotic, Euclidian or circular ones, all trying to be off the grid (Kirn 2011). The Akai MPC 60 influenced a whole genre and was the first device truly relying on the four-to-four grid. But for the rise of grid controllers a something new was needed, the monome. It was the first hardware interface which explicitly relied only on the grid metaphor as display and controller at the same time. And it was open source, as such it was another example of an idea released to the commons, pushing a whole new category of artifacts. Basically, the monome is like the interface counterpart of a blank canvas. It is not designed for anything special, or for the use with some special

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Figure 7.6: 8×8 Monome.

software. Thus, this 16x16 grid is a surface capable of being instantly reconfigured by any host software for whatever purpose. This expands the musical and design possibilities enormously, even if it brings with it the danger of getting bogged down with programming (Cabtree 2017). Here, the grid is an enabler for idea driven interaction, mostly musical, but also visual or haptic (Fig. 7.6). Not long afterwards, Novation launched a commercial device with many similarities to the monome, the Launchpad, which triggered the advent of many more grid-based controllers and instruments. The specialty of the Launchpad was that it was tailored for use with Ableton-Live, cementing further the grid as the main metaphor for interacting. And combined with the knobs from LaunchControl, it provided the physical counterpart to Ableton Live’s virtual Grid on the computer screen. As a final example, Yamaha’s Tenori-on (Yamaha Corporation, online source), is to be discussed here as it is unique in the family of grid controllers. It is a hardware grid providing 16x16 LEDs in a matrix on both sides of circular buttons. It appeared in 2007 and was transferred to software in 2011 as an I-pad version. Its different modes, like Bounce mode, Draw mode, Random mode, Score mode or Solo mode provide the user with physical reactions, like bouncing of notes, the possibility to draw lines of notes, and so on. It is the offspring of a collaboration between the media artist Toshio Iwai and interface designer Yu Nishibori. From the beginning of their design process, the question was what to do musically with the 16x16 grid. Having a synthesizer and speakers on board, the Tenori-on is a true self-contained instrument, incorporating the grid in the form of a complete musical instrument that produces sound and image, with immediate feedback to the musician and audience.

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Coda and Conclusion This chapter showed how grids have become increasingly popular in electronic music, that grids are everywhere in music production: full of light, full of color and full of promise. To borrow the words of the designer Kim Bjørn, “The grid is literally a digital frontier” (2017, 216). The modern grid controllers used in electronic music are display and input device at the same time. By their neat order grid-controllers communicate an ordered and manageable world, perceptually pleasant. In order to meet this quality, the design “[…] demands both simplicity of interaction and the potential for complexity and richness in its output” (Wang 2018, 208). We saw that grids have been in music since the beginning of notation, and indeed, notation won a chapter in Hanna Higgins’s The Grid Book, being crowned by her as one of the ten most important grids for mankind (2009, 6). To be able to orientate oneself more easily in the tonal space, instruments incorporate grids in the form of fretboards and keyboards. This design constrains the possibilities of such music production, but also leads to crossing frontiers to expand the artistic expression, and to escape the grid. The same principle applies to music machines and music software. The grid constrains the possible artifacts, but provides very practical means to interact with the machines, whether hard or software. This chapter also has exemplified this with sequencers where the hardware design determines the output, with Digital Audio Workstations, which lead to “tape-music”, and live-techno which leads to Ableton Live, which was expanded in all directions, which lead to the invasion of grid controllers and more grid and anti-grid-music. In Martin Russ’s book, Sound Synthesis and Sampling (2004), which has covered all the relevant topics of that time ‒ the grid controllers didn’t exist. In Kim Bjørn’s Push Turn Move (2017), they have their own dedicated chapter. This now seems to be dissolving in MIDI Polyphonic Expression, instruments like the Lynnstrument, where the grid is still visible, but expanded by the possibility to sense subtle actions on each field. These newest developments of instruments resemble more a touchscreen than an MPC 60’s pad grid, but still echo the grids of the past. Thus, the constant circle of tool shaping, being shaped by the tool, reshaping the tool is continued, like in the image of an Ouroboros.

References Adeney, Roland. “The HarmonyGrid: Music, Space and Performance in Grid Music Systems.” PhD diss., Queensland University of Technology, 2011. Bjørn, Kim. Push Turn Move. Frederiksberg, Denmark: Bjbooks, 2017. Boardway, Colin, and Jay Laughton. “A Brief History of the Akai-MPC.” Accessed October 24, 2020. https://reverb.com/news/a-brief-history-of-the-akai-mpc. Busoni, Ferruccio. Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music. New York: G. Schirmer, 1911. Cann, Simon. How to Make a Noise: Frequency Modulation Synthesis. New Malden, UK: Coombe Hill, 2011.

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Crab, Simon. “120 Years of Electronic Music.” http://120years.net. Accessed February 12, 2021. Crabtree, Brian. “Nothing into Everything.” In Push, Turn, Move, edited by Kim Bjørn, 222‒225. Frederiksberg, Denmark: Bjbooks, 2017. Culkin, John. “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshall McLuhan.” The Saturday Review, March 1967: 51‒53, 70‒72. Accessed February 10, 2020. http://www.unz.org/Pub/SaturdayRev-1967mar18-00051. Higgins, Hanna. The Grid Book. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009. Hummel, John, and Irving Biederman. “Dynamic Binding in a Neural Network for Shape Recognition. Psychological Review 99 (1992): 480‒517. Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Penguin, 2012. Kirn, Peter. “Circles and Euclidean Rhythms: Off the Grid, a Few Music Makers that Go Round and Round”, 2011. Accessed October 4, 2020. https://cdm.link/2011/03/circles-and-euclidianrhythms-off-the-grid-a-few-music-makers-that-go-round-and-round/. Medina, Ismael. “And the Beat Goes on: The Story of the Drum Machine”, 2017, Capstone Projects. Accessed February 4, 2020. https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/caps_thes_all/98. Moogrisge, Bill. Designing Interaction. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Russ, Martin. Sound Synthesis and Sampling. Burlington: Focal Press, 2004. Smirnov, Andrej. “UPIC’s Precursors.” In From Xenakis’s UPIC to Graphic Notation Today, edited by Peter Weibel, Ludger Brümmer, and Sharon Kanach, 97‒112. Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2020. Wang, Ge. Artful Design Technology in the search of the Sublime. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018. Ware, Colin. Visual Thinking for Design. Burlington, USA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2008. Yamaha Corporation, “Tenori-On.” Accessed December 26, 2020. https://www.yamaha.com/en/ about/design/synapses/id_005/.

Frank Bauer

8 On Grids of Contemporary Art Production: A Convergence of Artistic, Computational, Craft and Performative Making Abstract: This chapter discusses the convergence of four disciplinary grids and their corresponding ontologies: (a) the making of artistic intent; (b) digital model making; (c) instrument making; and (d) performative making. Along the example of the Resonator series by German artist Nevin Aladağ, it inquires into the conditioning of CAD/ CAM-driven art production workflows from their material, operational and authorial bases. Its argument builds upon a notion of disciplinary grids as cultural constructs which are constitutive, formative and persistent. The fabrication workflow is approached firstly through the media-philosophical concept of “operative ontologies”, investigating realities and relations of its making across both human (drawing, interpreting, executing) and non-human (storing, converting, interpolating) actions. Secondly, such creative interferences are analyzed from within the experimental system of an interdisciplinary setup, merging insights from participatory observation with terminology borrowed from technical anthropology. Thirdly, their interlaying follows a cultural technique perspective on designing as an inherently trans-disciplinary endeavor, which fosters innovation by crossing frontiers and fields of knowledge at once. By doing so, the chapter proposes the grid as a novel authorial category for digital production and suggests how distributed authorial networks and disciplinary convergences within problem-specific and individual workflows may instigate potentially complex and seminal solutions in design and architecture. Keywords: CAD/CAM; cultural technique; convergence of disciplinary grids; Denk­ zeug; Nevin Aladağ; instrument making; art production

Introduction Recent years have witnessed an ongoing engagement with the making of fine arts, inquiring into the material and processual dimensions of artistic production in their manifold problems, prospects and perspectives. Both within and without the closer art historical discourse, such contributions have begun to ask how computational logics induce unprecedented, collective forms of authorship (Adamson and Bryan-Wilson 2016), how creative work is conditioned by its material and operational basis (Lehmann 2018, 214–215), or how artistic practices are entangled within the “digital turn”, industrial production realities and traditional craftsmanship (Gerber 2017, 9–11). To the same extent that such investigations focus on motives of process,

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Figure 8.1: Nevin Aladağ, Resonator Wind, 2019, D 80 × 80 × 100 cm, brass, bamboo cane, mouthpieces of different wind instruments, various metals.

performance or production, it appears that traditional and individualized categories of art historical analysis (e.g., author, work, exhibition) are put into perspective (Weltzien and Volkmann 2003, 7) in favor of more complex, diffuse and distributed concepts. Though more slowly, there is a growing awareness of what relevance computational means of production hold for the sphere of fine arts (Paul 2013, 8‒13), and how the fabrication of sculptures may become the next testing ground for digital workflows themselves (Lynn 2013, 17). Against this background, this chapter presents disciplinary and professional “grids” – conceived as culturally construed and constitutive epistemic categories1 – as an alternative authorial category of the matter. Based upon the hypothesis that a critical revision of the broader cultural, social and esthetic dependencies of Computer-Aided Desig­n/Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAD/CAM) partly remains in its infancy, it uses art production as an atypical vantage point and catalyst for open questions about such discourses. In its analysis of Nevin Aladağ’s Resonator Wind (2019) (Fig. 8.1) as an example at the threshold of (a) the making of artistic intent; (b) digital model making; (c) the craft of instrument making; and (d) the final interpretation through performative making ‒ this approach seeks inspiration in trans-disciplinary

1 While this working definition chooses to approach “grids” as a framework of material and operational networks and agencies, it does not attempt to challenge but rather to amend existing conceptions that informed the terminological starting point ‒ notably cultural scientist Bernhard Siegert’s definition of “grids or gridirons as a cultural technique, which allows for practices of representation and economization or governing of people and things to intertwine and work hand in hand” (Siegert 2018, 13. See also Siegert 2003, 93‒95). This and all following translations are by the author unless noted otherwise.

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inquiries which foreground innovational and investigative logics. Regarding method and layout, it is thus arguing from three sources of inspiration: At first, referring to media theorists Lorenz Engell and Bernhard Siegert and their concept of “operative ontologies”, this chapter exemplifies “how manifold forms of making also res­ult in manifold forms of being” (2017, 6). Along ever more complex processes of design and manufacture in contemporary art production, information about artworks, their conception and fabrication is obtained, structured, translated and communicated. While these practices involve a broad range of customs, traditions and practices relative to the involved technologies, trades and disciplines, the given text attempts to exemplify this interplay at the realization process of a contemporary piece of art. Secondly, approaches from Actor-Network Theory (ANT) have revealed the roles of manifold, human and non-human design agents (such as materials, processes, fabricators, availabilities) (Latour 2011, 64–69)2 – how they manifest themselves in increasingly distributed authorial networks and collaborative processes (Rheinberger, Krauthausen and Nasim 2010, 146). Assuming that such processes of artistic creation relocate agency, one may facilitate a better understanding of how, by whom, and where such relocations take place. To fully understand designing from its actors and networks will then mean to acknowledge how all this “embraces a complex conglomerate of many surprising agencies” (Latour and Yaneva 2008, 86). Just as much as information and insights on these interferences, under normal circumstances, hardly leave the settings of creative production, it appears reasonable to conduct research inside these experimental systems themselves. As a result, this inquiry is most consciously employing logics where “sci­entific objects and the technical conditions of their production are inex­tricably interconnected” (Rheinberger 1997, 2), conducting research not from without, but from within. Thirdly, the chapter attempts to dissect the cultural-technique of artistic production into an interlaying of four grids, whose reciprocities inform an understanding of designing as an inherently cross-disciplinary “practice of transcending” (i.e., Ver­fahren des Übers­chreitens) (Hauser 2013, 376). Deriving from the twofold meaning of the German Übers­chreiten  – that is, the transcendence of disciplines and of what is known – this will apply to how cultural historian Susanne Hauser states that “cu­ltural technologies and designing constitute and inform themselves mutually and hence define each other always anew” (Gethmann and Hauser 2009, 9). In its very essence then, designing needs to be fully understood and analyzed as an integrative endeavor in the first place. It can be an attempt to merge so-far unrelated strands of knowledge, often as a response to technological shifts and

2 How these epistemic things (the tentative objects of research) and technical things (the environments where the former occur, their experimental setups or instruments) can be read with respect to the respective production of knowledge, becomes key interest of such work (Halsall 2016).

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side-lining epistemic voids – such as the “digital moment” (Zardini 2017, 9–13) that all design professions are facing. It remains important to mention, however, that the presented grids of making are studied as anything but strictly disclosed categories. Much more, their employment as an analytical working tool will only help towards a better understanding of how such custom production processes are also interrelated and dependent. What becomes evident through the four-fold analysis, after all, is ultimately the constant and continuing transcendence of these grids. The chapter therefore contributes to a necessary development of what has been framed an “esthetics of production as a scientific instrument” (Weltzien and Volkmann 2003, 8), a process-based discussion of the discursive, instrumental and operative dimensions towards unexpected, qualitative and cross-disciplinary merit.

The Making of Artistic Intent The individual making of an artwork, at least since its Renaissance inception as “disegno”, has long been a somewhat ephemeral process of high mysteriousness and little accessibility. Linked to its etymological basis (in Latin, designare means to scheme, to find), designing was displaced to an individual moment of epiphany, an act fundamentally grounded in artistic creativity.3 While those notions have been contested at large and across art and design theory (Mareis 2014, 41‒47), this chapter follows Siegert and Engell in their recent argument on how contemporary understandings of creation should be emancipated from their anthropocentric bias and rather “inquired as the historical result of discursive, technical and institutional practices” (2012, 5). To approach artistic production before this background, first and foremost, requires revising the image of art as an immaculate act of creativity. In the example of Resonator Wind (Fig. 8.2), this means, on the one hand, to complement the ubiquity of brilliant imagery of pristine pieces by galleries and museums; to replace the notion of an enigmatic genius (the artist as a black-box) with what art historian Barbara Wittmann framed as the “exteriorities of designing” (2018, 13), the various conditions, media and tools in effect. On the other hand, this discussion may learn much from more thoroughly explored sources of artistic creation, namely research into material and processual qualities, which most consciously choose “to conceive of the production process not as something ephemeral or accidental, not as a product of craftsman-

3 In his prolific overview on the matter, design theorist Heinz Hirdina offers a broad discussion of the transformations of notions of “disegno” to design, summarizing how “with alternating meaning, disegno may become a theoretical or formal principle, the principle of design and its execution, principle of invention or mimesis, the offspring of all or merely an ideal” (Hirdina 2000, 42).

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Figure 8.2: Nevin Aladağ, Table Santouri, 2017, wood, strings, Santouri mechanism, two ornamental plates in horn, D 58.5 × 77.5 cm, Music Room, Athens.

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Figure 8.3: RESONATOR_II_F, preliminary working rendering of Nevin Aladağ, Resonator Wind, 2019 by Büro Vogel Bauer GbR.

ship, but as the key condition of the art work as such” (Bushart and Haug 2018a, 18). While this may help to specify the various locations of artistic making more closely, it also holds prospects for the means and methods of computational design and manufacturing in general. An important reference, in that respect, is how art theorist Ann-Sophie Lehmann recently proposed to analyze artistic or design practice through multiple “layers of significance”, as a “reconstruction of the material engagement” (2015, 36), so to speak. Notably, this led her to approach material layers (or interlaying grids, if you wish) of the famous Utah Teapot – a generic item welcomed as a stateof-the-art test specimen at the outset of computational visualization environments – as an “inscription of making into the digital image” (2012b, 180). Whereas Lehmann differentiates teapot materialities into “code”, “making” and “all-material”, among others, it is also within Aladağ’s piece, that manifold conceptual, formal and processual layers enter into a process and dialogue en route to an artistic artifact. Assemblage and play with elements from varying cultures and identities are often remarked as recurrent themes throughout Aladağ’s oeuvre (Mühling 2018, 8). And also, within the Resonator series, she merges motifs from disparate and heterogeneous musical traditions and cultures. Interestingly, her works do not attempt to reconcile or confuse these circumstances, but rather, overtly expose their hybrid nature. To speak with curator Rachel Jans, these pieces of the artist “dismantle the sovereignty of a single resonating body and reimagine the possibilities of form through unexpected combinations” (2009, online). As an outcome of this initial step of creation, a rough sketch towards the idea and appearance of the pieces is defined for the following translation, appropriation and materialization in subsequent steps of the process. To

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that extent, the Resonator musical sculptures do not stand isolated within the wider context of Aladağ’s oeuvre: already throughout the Music Room series (Fig. 8.3) or her contribution Raise the Roof to the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, she explored processual and social relations of structure, space and sound in various ways. While counting “fluxus” references beyond her more important sources of inspiration (Aladağ 2000), it is interesting to note how production of all these pieces, however, hardly stops at the gates of the atelier or museum. Artistic making as the making of artistic intent, usually assumed to denote some preliminary initiation or sketch, is much more dislocated, is re-located towards processes of exhibiting and interacting with visitors, performers and staff. At second glance, this extended concept of production has strong roots in a more general relation of traditional sculpture and sound art as a whole, from the imaginary instruments of futurism to more recent precedents in contemporary art. While current research seems mainly occupied with electronic or digital prospects of sound art (Maes and Leman 2017, 27‒39; Emmerson 2017, 427–437), art historian Helga de Motte-Haber highlighted the special importance of physical instruments for such contexts. In this tradition, Aladağ’s pieces form a prime example for how pieces of instrument-based sound art may take up a special role as they “stress the spatial character, as they expand sculpture into time” (1996, 16).

Digital Model-Making Today’s careless use of the term “digital revolution” tends to cloud the view of our contemporary media reality as articulated in the arts: the coexistence of new and old – of analogue and digital – seems to be overlooked (Saxer 2019, 19).

As opposed to widespread and more positivist claims about the so-called digital re­volution of arts (Paul 2013, 8‒13), art historian Marion Saxer argues for a skeptical attitude to plain narratives of advancement – and interestingly does so at the opportunity of an earlier exhibition of Aladağ, the 2019 Schirn group exhibition Big Orchestra. It is fair to say that her remarks are quite unrelated to architectural and design discourses, as she engages with the very solitary realm of digital fine arts. The direction of her criticism, however, somehow indirectly speaks about what has been framed as the “digital turn” and its fascination with quantitative narratives of control, precision and optimization. To take artistic production as an external, largely peripheral perspective on contemporary CAD/CAM practices appears to be an appealing strategy on various grounds. For quite some time, observers would caution against “the loss of all political and social bearings” (Picon 2004, 19) in an often affirmative, self-con­tained innovation of computational workflows and tool sets, which arguably misses fully acknowledging both their constitutive and self-determinant logics. And although or

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Figure 8.4: Interior structure of Nevin Aladağ, Resonator Wind, 2019, fabrication by Ertl und Zull GbR.

just because many conventions and traditions of the architectural profession do not apply, the production of artworks forms an interestingly catalyst to argue “against such underestimation of the material and medial founding of design practices” (Wittmann 2018, 17–18). Specifically within the highly customized working process of the Resonator musical sculptures series, digital tools and workflows were used without real precedent. This is not surprising, as at the present day the traditional craftsmanship of instrument making rarely relies on CAD/CAM; and so too, present program environments and fabrication machines have hardly any record in the production of musical instruments. The few academic accounts of the employment of computational methods in the fabrication of musical instruments, however, seem primarily interested in optimizing the reconstruction of cultural heritage. As a result, they show no substantial interest in its creative applications (Schetelich 2006) and exclude precisely those matters of agency and process, which form the starting point for the given endeavor. While architectural modeling and rendering is evidently subject to trends, traditions and tendencies, true conventions on how to depict virtual sketches of artwork hardly do exist (Fig. 8.4). The present inquiry consciously draws on this seeming lack of experience. It suggests that there may be good reasons to argue how an abandonment of existing discip­linary customs, whether necessarily or deliberately, in favor of problem-specific and indi­ vidual solutions, may instigate complex and innova­tional design solu­tions. In that regard, this approach follows a working concept by design educators Hannah Gron-

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inger and Thomas Schmitz, the separation of tools or devices for making (in German, Werkzeug) from devices for thinking (Denkzeug). More precisely, it is based upon the hypothesis that instances of unplanned creative applications for unexpected purposes, eventually redefining given programming, may foster innovation in their transcending of the former to the latter: “The Werkzeug, which is used as opposed to its conception, for other purposes and thus gets deconstructed, may at any time become a Denkzeug” (2012, 20). The reprogramming of CAD/CAM, again, has a strong record of its own, which is only making such moves more likely. From the emergence of surface-based modeling in the post-war engineering and aeronautical industries to the development of early computer-aided curve-based drawing environments, the original contexts of digital design, planning and manufacturing, tool sets have altered and been diverted at multiple times (Farin 2002). Whereas their original emphasis was put more on notions of computational engineering, analysis and calculation, notably their appropriation within frameworks of product and architectural design highlighted their capacity for open, creative and playful application – before taking yet another turn towards matters of precision and optimization (Denari 2013; Hughes 2014). Before this background, it appears reasonable that the reprogramming of highly bespoke and specific devices and processes of CAD/CAM across Aladağ’s pieces may lead to an especially inspirational outcome, as they are employed partly according to, partly different from and partly even contrary to common uses within their original realms. Along their computational planning process, sketches or initial drafts for each sculpture are subject to further, assisted planning in virtual environments. Through 3-dimensional experimentation in the widespread modeling software Rhinoceros 3D, the planner and artist can further develop and determine the instrumental volumes as rearrangements or collages with a new and uncommon esthetic morphology, as instrumental individuals, so to speak. In terms of ergonomics, this appears to be an especially expedient strategy as this particular software works on a boundary representation (BREP) basis, making it well suited to meet the artist’s wish to work with elementary 3-dimensional forms such as cylinder, sphere, pyramid, cone, cube, etc. (Aladağ 2020). The intrinsic ontologies of software and those of the artwork go hand in hand, as it were. To approach such inherent links of software environ­ments and design logics, to incorporate the “digital ontolo­gies” (Panagiotis 2017, 110) of designing and making, becomes crucial. On a very different example, yet in order to grasp very related intrinsic logics, Ann-Sophie Lehmann readily refers to the “affordance theory” by American psychologist James J. Gibson. Affordances are considered as offerings made by materials or tools, as suggestions on how to employ and direct them towards solutions or results. Reverting to anthropocentric theories of action and creativity, Lehmann is able to show how this introduction of affordances into a media sociology may extend current applications of ANT in arts and design discourses and interestingly names software as an especially illustrative example of her point (2012a, 83) –while this is

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topic to another article, however, software appears to be just as much a discursive “blind spot” as her own example, the discussion of oil as a mediating agent of artistic working processes across history (85). In anticipation of the following fabrication process of Resonator Wind, models from the design phase were then translated into manufacturing models. Notably, the actual construction of an artistic vision, its instrumental body and acoustic potential as a future instrument needed to be weighed up against each other. In accordance with traditions and customs of craft production, this encompasses the solution of constructional or material questions on a closer scale, that is with growing proximity to the 1:1 at which the pieces are construed and built physically. Depending on the addressee, this may involve traditional shop drawings just as much as the definition of manufacturing data for computer-aided workflows. Such installments of production realities are merciless, because all but only all necessary information has to be implemented unambiguously, be it for human or machine. At the same time, they are also highly productive, “because”, in the words of the literary scholar Jutta Voorhoeve, “construction eliminates all that which is not truly relevant for the purpose of realization” (2011, 8‒9). One may argue how digital making implies the formative and productive category of fabrication knowledge, perceived as a cultivation of materialand fabrication-based agencies. To do so, means nothing less than renewing attention to those medi­ations from idea to material, which have actually always accompanied the history of build­ing as “translations from drawing to building” (Evans 1997, 154‒157), the making of projections from the virtual to the physical.

Instrument Making To reactivate historical techniques, however, not only means to posit oneself to the past and its relation to the contemporary. It also encompasses acquiring knowledge on seemingly obsolete practices and adapting them to altered conditions of production and concepts of form (Bushart and Haug 2018b, 7).

In their recent volume Unzeitgemäße Techniken (Outmoded Techniques), art historians Magdalena Bushart and Henrike Haug delineate a growing “technical turn” of contemporary artistic production realities and their inspiration from the past. Whereas the prospects of what has been framed as “technical art history” (Hermens 2012, 151– 165) continue to push the limits of the art historical discipline, they readily declare the search and reading of traces of work to be their key interest. As mentioned above, there rarely appears any craft exercised with such sophistication and continuity with historical roots than that of the instrument maker – reasons for which are to be found in the traditions of musical performance, in the strong stand of classical music, in instrumentation and musical ensembles, to name but a few. As a result, the making of instruments, at least outside of industrial mass-production, largely withstood the

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Figure 8.5: Mouthpiece fitting in the workshop, fabrication process of Nevin Aladağ, Resonator Wind, 2019.

influence of computational production environments, and is usually exercised using traditional skills to the present day. From Abraham Chanin to Jean Tinguely, the instrument as a creative and largely imaginary vehicle of fine arts has a history of its own (Motte-Haber 1996, 12–17); interestingly even in Berlin, where Gunter Demnig’s Three Black Towers (Drei schwarze Türme), a 330-cm high installation of nine whistles in the Berlin Academy of the Arts 1996 exhibition, could count as another precedent both in its formal and performative nature, challenging simultaneously the borders of sound and fine arts (Barthelmes 1996, 50‒51). At one generation’s distance, Aladağ’s pieces, however, also hardly fit into conventional instrument categories. As they are custom assemblages of musical instrument families, they require customized means and forms of production. In the manufacturing of a classical wind instrument, distinct materialities and historically-evolved forms result in a shape that merges acoustic quality, common appearance and trained handling. In doing so, they rely largely on tradition. In Aladağ’s work, various alternatives of construction and detailing (Fig. 8.4), either inspired by or con-

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sciously breaking with this traditional archetype need to be found, discussed and adapted in order to arrive at one final instrumental piece. Just as much as it places singularity over tradition, this outcome is affecting matters of, amongst others, artistic expression, acoustics, construction, cost and safety. The Berlin-based fabricator of the structure as well as the participating instrument maker largely contributed to this process, both informing the planning and execution as well as the experimenting with and mounting of instrument parts. To the same extent that all contributors could not rely on traditional joints, they had to find custom solutions in particular for connectors and detailing. One example of such inventiveness, for instance, would be the fixing of the mouthpieces, which usually requires very specific conditions and materials to function in a traditional sense. In this case, alternative solutions and fixes had to be developed to allow for the mounting into a structure with a completely different internal organization and make-up, in a close dialogue between artist, planner and those carrying out the work. Interestingly, Aladağ herself describes this cooperation with the craftsmen, instrument makers and assistants as a very traditional form of working in sculpture (2020). The production of an initial physical mock-up in the workshop is followed by subsequent stages of refinement on the piece under constant supervision of the artist (Fig. 8.5)  – involving the order of specimens, the building of prototypes or mouthpiece fittings, to name just a few examples. Acquired experience and information will then feed back into the digital model, eventually informing machines and craftsmen alike. As a complement to 3D modeling experimentation of the prior phase, the actual physical testing and adaption appears as a crucial process for the project. As a prime example for the importance of such cross-overs of professions, reduces the grid to something all-too-obvious, it is involvement of various stakeholders that renders dialogue between them and the instrument makers increasingly important.

Performative Making Sound art, to a large extent, relies on its performative qualities, to be understood as an interaction of performer, piece and audience at a given time and place. To understand Resonator Wind as an exceptionally apt example to follow such manifold, performative and interactive qualities are almost suggested by Rachel Jans herself, being curator to the piece’s 2019 SFMOMA exhibition New Work: The artworks are responsive entities, not passive objects, and when plucked, stroked, strummed, or puffed into, they answer with vibrations. They possess an enchanting power to instigate interaction, drawing performers to explore and experience their noises […] These relationships among individual parts and between performer and sculpture are intertwined with Aladağ’s sense of play (2019, online).

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Figure 8.6: Mouthpiece detail of Nevin Aladağ, Resonator Wind, 2019.

Already in its elemental form, citing something between a balloon and a puffer fish, as the artist describes it (Aladağ 2020), Resonator Wind repeats such motives of activity and action. Inviting visitors and performers to take part, to further inflate the piece, its circumferential mouthpieces (Fig. 8.6) lead us to actively engage in an exhibition as an ongoing process of artistic creation. Within and throughout the unrolling of the exhibition, Aladağ’s works develop themselves in various formats such as performances, workshops and sessions. Notably, professional performers offer special events (such as sound experiments) (Fig. 8.7), which are to be conceived as individual encounters not only of performer and instrument, but also of exhibition space and audience. As they challenge and push the borders of the instrument, their recordings and experiences feed back into the further development of the series. If one listens to descriptions by the artist herself, Aladağ would always stress that her musical sculptures were first and foremost to be activated (2020). Phillip Demandt, curator of a 2019 exhibition of Aladağ’s Music Room Athens in Frankfurt, remarked how far “a voice is being attributed to the objects themselves: they become actors, tell their stories, or randomly perform choreographies to their intrinsic logic” (2019, 7). By doing so, her pieces are multiplied, mirrored and repeated, by a wide set of involved artists, be it dancers, musicians or performers. To the same degree that the musical individuals do differ from traditional instruments, however, the performative outcome is anything but certain. Resona-

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Figure 8.7: Sound experiment with Nevin Aladağ, Resonator Wind, 2019, exhibition “New Work: Nevin Aladağ”, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2019‒2020.

tor Wind, for instance, does offer mouthpieces from varying wind instruments, but neither common options for holding the instrument, nor for handling or manipulating its sound. While Aladağ stresses the importance of involving professional musicians, this vice-versa openness of what form and sound may be or become appears as a central element to her work. The physical instruments clearly have a stake in the creation of artistic intent. They develop an agency of their own, as they take part in an authorial network that becomes increasingly more distributed, to speak with Latour (2011, 64–69). Aladağ’s works are “objects that cry out to be used”, as the art historian Matthias Mühling (2008, 12) framed it. And while such active, agent quality of an exhibition clearly allows specifically for more complex understandings of Aladağ’s oeuvre, it also sets the stage for different approaches to the relation of artifact, exhibition space and artist on a more general level ‒ forming an additional, equally important framework to the present inquiry.4

4 As part of the recently introduced, Berlin-based Cluster of Excellence “Matters of Activity – Image Space Material”, this research draws heavily on dynamic, distributed and augmented notions of agency developed within this framework, and chiefly on its “Object Space Agency” section (Matters of Activity 2019, online).

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Conclusion Whereas common positivist claims about the so-called digital re­volution of arts and architecture prevail, and appear largely grounded in an understanding of technologically-heightened individual authorship, this chapter suggests the ‘grid’ as an alternative authorial category. Aladağ’s Resonator series clearly marks how such processes do not necessarily delimit artistic agency and creativity, but rather require us to develop and implement other working logics – highlighting process and performance throughout the resultant pieces. Grids do make a difference, as they channel, alter and amend contemporary realities of making. It has also become obvious, however, how they remain porous, allowing and requiring the transfer of knowledge and techniques. Just as much as traditions and customs of traditional manufacturing do not suffice for the needs of project development, the present inquiry has shown fundamental innovative potential at various stages: from artistic practices fostering multiple human and non-human agencies, over more complex understandings of computational instruments as devices for thinking to the transformation of historical production techniques as repositories of manual and material knowledge. Still, this brief analysis leaves us with one question: how far may existing and future agencies turn out to amend or compete with each other? Insights into the planning and production of the Resonator series were able to disclose some of the more particular qualities of produc­tion practices between contemporary CAD and their material approbation through craftsmen. And with an outspoken in­terest for inherent links of software environ­ments, craft traditions and pro­duction logics, this revealed how both human (drawing, interpreting, executing) and non-human (storing, con­verting) translations con­stitute art  – from intent, through practice, to artifacts. There is reason to argue that novel perspectives towards creativity in the digital age need, more than anything, what has been described as “interdisciplinary experimental laboratories, which allow for an inter- and up-folding of distinct knowledge cultures in design processes” (Schäffner 2015, 209); and if so, the chapter may be considered one attempt to put this thought to practice. It substantiates this by cross-fertilizing usually disparate disciplinary frameworks and rendering the evolving constraints and logics productive, instead of suppressing or smoothing them. By doing so, it raises the question as to how far computational art production may address the ontol­ogical di­vide along the con­scious convergence of artistic, planning, instrumental and performative realities of making. Although or just because of dealing with a largely peripheral example from the field of fine arts production, this may also teach designers and architects to extend both the scope and interest of such translations with and through devices for thinking (“Denkzeug”), for approaches truly innovating concepts of process, materiality and agency.

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Acknowledgments The author wishes to thank Studio Nevin Aladağ and all contributing artists, craftsmen and collaborators for their cooperation. He appreciates the support of the Department of Digital and Experimental Design at Berlin University of the Arts and the Commission for the Allocation of Elsa-Neumann Doctoral Grants of Berlin. In particular, the author acknowledges the support of the Cluster of Excellence “Matters of Activity. Image Space Material” funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy  – EXC 2025 – 390648296.

References Adamson, Glenn, and Julia Bryan-Wilson. Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing. London: Thames and Hudson, 2016. Aladağ, Nevin. Interview with the artist by Frank Bauer (2020), private archive. Barthelmes, Barbara. “Gunter Demnig.” In Klangkunst, edited by Akademie der Künste Berlin, 50–51. München, New York: Prestel, 1996. Bushart, Magdalena, and Henrike Haug. “Die Historisieurng küstlerischer Techniken.” In Unzeitgemäße Techniken. Historische Narrative künstlerischer Verfahren, edited by Magdalena Bushart, Henrike Haug and Stefanie Stallschuß, 7–28. Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau, 2018a. Bushart, Magdalena, and Henrike Haug. “Spurensuche/Spurenlese. Zur Sichtbarkeit von Arbeit Im Werk.” In Spur Der Arbeit. Oberfläche und Werkprozess, edited by Magdalena Bushart and Henrike Haug, 7‒24. Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau, 2018b. Demandt, Philipp. “Foreword.” In Big Orchestra, edited by Schirn Kunsthalle, 7‒10. Frankfurt: Snoeck, 2019. Denari, Neil. “Precise Form for an Imprecise World. Contingencies (Editor´s Notes).” In Digital Workflows in Architecture: Design – Assembly – Industry, edited by Scott Marble, 28‒44. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2013. Emmerson, Simon. “Performance with Technology: Extending the Instrument – From Prosthetic to Aesthetic.” In The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art, edited by Marcel Cobussen, Vincent Meelberg and Barry Truax, pp. 427‒437. New York, London: Routledge, 2017. Engell, Lorenz, and Bernhard Siegert. “Editorial.” Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 3, 1 (2012): 5‒9. Engell, Lorenz, and Bernhard Siegert. “Editorial.” Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 8, 2 (2017): 5–10. Evans, Robin. “Translations from Drawing to Building.” In Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, compiled by Mohsen Mostafavi, 153‒194. London: Architectural Association, 1997. Farin, Gerald. “A History of Curves and Surfaces in CAGD.” In Handbook of Computer Aided Geometric Design, edited by Gerald Farin, Josef Hoschek and Myung-Soo Kim, 1–21. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2002. Gerber, Marina. “Einleitung.”In Das Wissen der Arbeit und das Wissen Der Künste, edited by Marina Gerber and Daniela Fugellie, 9‒16. Munich: Fink, 2017.

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Gethmann, Daniel, and Susanne Hauser. “Einleitung.” In Kulturtechnik Entwerfen. Praktiken, Konzepte und Medien in Architektur und Design Science, edited by Daniel Gethmann and Susanne Hauser, 9‒18. Bielefeld: transcript, 2009. Halsall, Francis. “Actor-Network Aesthetics: The Conceptual Rhymes of Bruno Latour and Contemporary Art.” New Literary History 47 (2016): 439‒461. Hauser, Susanne, “Verfahren des Überschreitens.” In Wissenschaft Entwerfen. Vom forschenden Entwerfen zur Entwurfsforschung der Architektur, edited by Sabine Ammon and Eva Maria Froschauer, 363–384. München: Fink, 2013. Hermens, Erma. “Technical Art History: The Synergy of Art, Conservation and Science.” In Art History and Visual Studies in Europe: Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks, edited by Matthew Rampley, 151‒165. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Hirdina, Heinz. “Design.” In Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, edited by Karlheinz Barck, M. Fontius, D. Schlenstedt, B. Steinwachs and F. Wolfzettel, vol. 2, 41‒63. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 2000. Hughes, Francesca. The Architecture of Error: Matter, Measure, and the Misadventures of Precision. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Jans, Rachel. “New Work: Nevin Aladağ.” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2019. Accessed March 15, 2021. https://www.sfmoma.org/essay/new-work-nevin-aladag. Latour, Bruno. “Why Do Architects Read Latour? An Interview with Bruno Latour.” Perspecta 44 (2011): 64–69. Latour, Bruno, and Albena Yaneva. “’Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move’. An ANT’s View of Architecture.” In Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research, edited by Reto Geiser, 80–89. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008. Lehmann, Ann-Sophie. “Das Medium als Mediator.” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 57, 1 (2012a): 69‒88. Lehmann, Ann-Sophie, “Taking the Lid off the Utah Teapot. The Materials of Computer Graphics.” Zeitschrift für Medien und Kulturforschung 3, 1 (2012b): 169–184. Lehmann, Ann-Sophie. “The Matter of the Medium: Some Tools for an Art Theoretical Interpretation of Materials.” In The Matter of Art: Materials, Technologies, Meanings 1200‒1700, edited by Christy Anderson, Anne Dunlop and Pamela Smith, 21‒41. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014. Lehmann, Ann-Sophie. “Taking Fingerprints: The Indexical Affordances of Artworks’ Material Surfaces.” In Spur Der Arbeit. Oberfläche und Werkprozess, edited by Magdalena Bushart and Henrike Haug, 199‒219. Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau, 2018. Lynn, Greg. “Everybody’s an Architect These Days.” In Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital, edited by Ronald Labaco, 14‒19. London, New York: Black Dog Publishing, 2013. Maes, Laura, and Marc Leman. “Defining Sound Art.” In The Routledge Companion to Sounding Art, edited by Marcel Cobussen, Vincent Meelberg and Barry Truax, 27‒39. New York, London: Routledge, 2017. Mareis, Claudia. Theorien des Designs zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius, 2014. Cluster of Excellence. “Matters of Activity. Image Space Material: Object Space Agency.” Accessed March 15, 2021. https://www.matters-of-activity.de/en/research/projects/124/objectspace-agency. Motte-Haber, Helga de la. “Klangkunst – eine neue gattung?” In klangkunst, edited by Akademie der Künste Berlin, 12–17. München, New York: Prestel, 1996. Mühling, Matthias. “Musikzimmer.” In Musikzimmer. Raise the Roof. Nevin Aladağ, edited by Astrid Nielsen and Hilke Wagner, 12–13. Dresden: Albertinum 2008. Panagiotis, Michalatos. “Design Signals. The Role of Software Architecture and Paradigms in Design Thinking and Practice.” Architectural Design 2, 243 (2017): 108–115.

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Paul, Christiane. “Objecthoods from the Desktop.” In Out of Hand: Materializing the Postdigital, edited by Ronald Labaco, 8–13. London, New York: Black Dog Publishing, 2013. Picon, Antoine. “The Ghost of Architecture.” Perspecta 35 (2004): 8–19. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg, Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg, Karin Krauthausen, and Omar Nasim. “Papierpraktiken im Labor: Interview mit Hans-Jörg Rheinberger.” In Notieren, Skizzieren: Schreiben und Zeichnen als Verfahren des Entwurfs, edited by Karin Krauthausen and Omar Nasim, 146. Zurich, Berlin: Diaphanes, 2010. Saxer, Marion. “What is an Instrument? Or: Hybrid Media and the Unity of Hearing and Seeing.” In Big Orchestra, edited by Schirn Kunsthalle, 7–21. Frankfurt: Snoeck, 2019. Schäffner, Wolfgang. “Interdisziplinäre Gestaltung. Einladung in das neue Feld einer Geistes- und Materialwissenschaft.” In Haare hören – Strukturen wissen – Räume agieren. Berichte aus dem Interdisziplinären Labor ‘Bild Wissen Gestaltung’, edited by Horst Bredekamp and Wolfgang Schäffner, 199–213. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015. Schetelich, Friedrich, and Christian Schöne. “Rechnergestützte Konstruktion, Simulation und Fertigung von Musikinstrumenten”, Musicon Valley – Report (2006): 23–30. Schmitz, Thomas H., and Hannah Groninger. “Über projektives Denken und Machen.” In Werkzeug – Denkzeug Manuelle Intelligenz und Transmedialität kreativer Prozesse, edited by Thomas H. Schmitz and Hannah Groninger, 19–30. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012. Siegert, Bernhard. “(Nicht) Am Ort: zum Raster als Kulturtechnik.” Thesis 3 (2003): 92–104. Siegert, Bernhard. “Raster.” In Werkzeuge Des Entwerfens, edited by Barbara Wittmann, 195–224. Zurich: Diaphanes, 2018. Voorhoeve, Jutta. “Technische Zeichenmanöver. Verfahren der Konstruktion.” In Welten schaffen. Zeichnen und Schreiben als Verfahren der Konstruktion, edited by Jutta Voorhoeve, 7–16. Zurich: Diaphanes, 2011. Weltzien, Friedrich, and Amrei Volkmann. “Vorwort. Modelle des Schaffensprozesses. Beiträge zur methodischen Produktionsästhetik.” In Modelle künstlerischer Produktion. Architektur, Kunst, Literatur, Philosophie, Tanz, edited by Friedrich Weltzien and Amrei Volkmann, 7–10. Berlin: Reimer, 2003. Wittmann, Barbara. “Denk- Und Werkzeuge. Ein Entwurf.” In Werkzeuge Des Entwerfens, edited by Barbara Wittmann, 7–36. Zurich: Diaphanes, 2018. Zardini, Mirko. “Eight Million Stories.” In When Is the Digital in Architecture?, edited by Andrew Goodhouse, 9–22. Berlin: Sternberg, 2017.

Alex Schnaider, Zantedeschic Grid, paperwork, interweaving and unwinding, dyeing, 2020 (courtesy of the artist)

Part III: Kinetic Grids: Bridging, Digging, Floating

Zantedeschic Grid represents a mysterious fabric that lays the foundation for future construction and allows for ongoing work. Made of a grid of threads and paper, this artwork relates to a poetic quality and in its form and symbolism fits well with the three contributions in this Part. Its grid-ladder structure can be conceived as a horizontal bridge connecting between different historical periods and between art and science in line with Orestano’s chapter. This structure, when positioned vertically, echoes the semi-archaeological uni-disciplinary depth developed in Tawil’s chapter, with encounters with other disciplines through the ladder stages. Moreover, similarly to the maritime symbolism that dominates Nielsen’s chapter, Schneider also borrows inspiration from the ocean. According to him, the grid-form of this artwork converses with a deep-waters sponge, the Venus Flower, within which strong structure lives a symbiosis of a certain type of shrimp. The artwork’s title, Zantedeschic Grid, also refers to an Araceae (leaf-like) flower that the Japanese “paper boats” resemble to, named Zantedeschia.

Francesca Orestano

9 Searching for the Grid at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century: When Art and Science Shared their Fragments Abstract: The grid is indeed a strong image and concept, almost a utopian idea if we contemplate it as a form completed and saturated in its several elements. But insofar as the experience of reality ‒ whether in literature, science, and religion ‒ contains fragmentary bits of discourse, unfulfilled intervals, gaps and arbitrary measureless jumps, the value of the grid consists in its scaffolding system. This system is made to contain what is well-known, while at the same time leaving space for the yet unknown. Moreover, its periodical nature allows for prediction; its realization implies the reciprocity of a two-way (if in a bidimensional universe) epistemic movement. The core of this chapter addresses such intervals, occurring in the epistemic grid at the turn of the previous century, and it considers the gaps as interesting as the filled spaces of knowledge. Scientists – Dmitri Mendeleev the case in point, but then also Marie Curie – and artists of the English avant-garde, dwelt at once on the periodical table of the elements, and on the periodical grid of history and art, that allowed them to include obscurity, ignorance, absence, and blindness as elements as fruitful for their investigation as enlightenment, knowledge, presence, and vision. Keywords: Victorian grids; architecture; chemistry; literature; analogy

Recent Evidence1 A recent exhibition at the National Gallery in London, “Young Bomberg and the Old Masters” (November 2019 to March 2020) brought to the foreground the element on which the core argument of this chapter is built. David Bomberg, an artist active in the London avant-garde, was fascinated by the Old Masters, especially Botticelli and Michael Angelo, but also felt the need to translate their formal lesson into a new language. His solution was simple and brilliant: the language of modernity would be built upon the structure of a grid, containing at once the lesson in composition of

1 The text of this chapter is a revised and updated version of the article that appeared as “The Transformative Power of the Arts in Victorian and Edwardian Culture and Society”, in: Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens, 89 (2019), edited by Christine Reynier and Luc Bouvard. The author thanks the Editors for their kind permission. She is also grateful to Michael Hollington for pointing up the importance of the David Bomberg exhibition, and for organizing the visit.

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the Old Masters and his modern elaboration of form. Bomberg’s paintings, like the statements by Virginia Woolf on Roger Fry (1940) and T. S. Eliot (1975), used the grid to connect tradition and innovation, past and present, realism and abstraction, within a structure borrowed from science, allowing spaces to situate gaps and fragments.

Arts and Sciences: Mutual Transformations During the first decades of the twentieth century artefacts, subjects, styles previously ignored, and periods previously considered “unartistic”, entered art discourse and art criticism. Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and the art group around them, were aware of dynamic forces at work shaping and enlarging the artistic horizon and introducing concepts and methods traditionally excluded from the discourses of art, and rather tributary to the field of science. The artistic horizon tended to coincide with the epistemic horizon, described by Fredric Jameson as a feature of post-modernity. Thus, the role of science – and of chemistry especially – comes to the foreground, together with the suggestion that such transformations had their origin in the Victorian age. The grid was to become the apt container of such transformative processes, but had also been, as this essay suggests, a structural, ordering device of Victorian culture. Since the Great Exhibition of 1851, the grid had been the most effective device for the organization of diversity into a cluster of regular spaces where objects not necessarily sharing a common origin, nature, or history, could find a rational place, equal role and status. But the grid would also become the mark of modernity. The grid is indeed a key concept, belonging at once to the forces that shaped modernism and, simultaneously, to the cultural and scientific background of the Victorian age. Blurring the borders between art and non-art, the visual and the verbal, the original and the replica, the very ancient and the very modern – not to mention the atomic numbers of the chemical elements ordered by Dmitri Mendeleev in his periodical table  – the grid paved the way to ulterior transformations occurring, in seamless fashion, between the Victorian, Edwardian, and twentieth-century periods.

Victorian Grids: From Paxton to Mendeleev Two grids seem deeply connected with the analogy between art and science. One was architectural and the other visual. They were embodied by the Crystal Palace, which expressed the Victorian thirst for universal knowledge, the demand for spectacular shows, and the economics of capitalism. Such was also the project and plan of The Great Exhibition of Arts, Commerce, and Industry of All Nations, that took place in London in 1851. The Great Exhibition, as well as Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace housing it (Fig. 9.1), can be considered as agents of transformation because

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Figure 9.1: Plan of the Crystal Palace.

Figure 9.2: Crystal Palace, design and plan by Joseph Paxton.

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of the sheer size and inclusivity, which mark both projects – container and contents as well  – as resulting from a kind of epistemological bulimia, political imperialism, shrewd contaminations, in the name of commerce between art and a myriad of mass-produced artistic objects (Briggs 1988; Orestano 2015). The Great Exhibition was an international affair because of the number of exhibitors, and the huge variety of the exhibits, arranged according to categories, such as: “Raw Materials; Machinery; Manufactures; Textile Fabrics; Metallic; Vitreous and Ceramic; Miscellaneous; and finally, Fine Arts.” The guide to the Crystal Palace provided a reliable guide to the many exhibits, according to nation, industry, product. But the Crystal Palace itself looked like the materialization of a grid, a giant synecdoche of its systematic inclusive nature (see Fig. 9.2). In terms of visual technology – the Crystal Palace and its contents were represented in Baxter’s newly patented color prints, in the engravings for the catalogue, in stereoscopic images and magic lantern slides, which amalgamated commerce, industry, science and the arts of industrial production. The items on display, whilst providing evidence to the progress of technology and industrial machinery, were also tokens of the recent achievements in chemical knowledge (Briggs 1988; Orestano 2015). Chemistry proved fundamental to the entire project, especially in the manufacturing of modern objects on display: cheap replicas of genuine marble and porcelain, electroplated material, printed carpets, metal casts of all sizes and shapes. But chemistry did not only affect whatever was on display within the grid: it would acquire unprecedented importance owing to its intrinsic grid. Arguably the leading science of the Victorian age (Schatzberg, White and Johnson 1987; Weininger 1998), chemistry moved into modernity owing to a grid structure. Such is the periodic grid, which provided a tabular arrangement of the chemical elements, ordered according to atomic weight, electron configuration, and recurring chemical properties, and whose adopted structure shows periodic trends. Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev first published the periodic table in 1869 (see, for instance, Fig. 9.3). Soon scientific institutions all over Europe acknowledged his work. In 1882, he was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society and awarded, in 1892, the Davy Medal from the Royal Society of London (Gordin 2004). The organization of the periodic table indicated existing relationships between the distant properties of alreadyknown elements, and it also predicted the chemical properties and atomic potential of yet undiscovered elements. These unknown elements were to fall within the blank spaces provided by the grid, whose periodical structure could contain what was yet undiscovered, yet predictably existing. These two Victorian grids, the Crystal Palace and Mendeleev’s periodic table, would transform the means for the dissemination of culture, and the appreciation of art. While the Great Exhibition, from the point of view of architecture, organization, representation, and for the efficient staging of the visitors’ experience, was modeled like a grid; the leading science of the age, chemistry, regulated the knowledge of all the known and unknown elements. Mendeleev’s table established the primacy of chemistry as one of the leading sciences of the Victorian age, which conditioned and

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Figure 9.3: A version of Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table.

shaped not only scientific thought, but also notions and the lexicon proper to the processes of transformation, combination, and amalgamation that would condition what McFarlane defined as “the mind of modernism”, in which science and poetical conceit operate simultaneously (Weininger 1998; Gordin 2015).2

2 In his historical overview of the development of chemical signs, Weininger discusses the central role of the Table as a representational device; the intensely iconic and symbolic language of chemistry mimics many features of natural languages, including the ability to construct fictional worlds. Mendeleev arrived at his discovery through a search for the “grammar” of the elements, based on the principle of isomorphism (Weininger 1998, 3–27).

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The Victorian past would include the statements by John Ruskin who, while admitting that “no progress more triumphant has been made in any science than that of Chemistry” (1903–1912, vol. 22, 147), was concerned that in his age “there is no God but Chemistry” (vol. 22, 262). Ruskin used the comparison with chemistry not only to discuss crystallization and geological strata, or to digress on the economic and social value of its products, but also to argue that the imaginative and associative faculty of the mind is analogous with the simultaneous action of chemical elements. In addition to this, he used the chemical analogy to describe the character of Gothic art and architecture, and its impure nature (Orestano 2015). Ruskin finally compared chemistry with the soul of art, thus hinging on its transformations of psychology and emotions, for instance: Let us go back for a moment to our chemistry, and note that, by defining a mineral by its constituent parts, it is not one nor another of them, that can make up the mineral, but the union of all […] So in the various mental characters which make up the soul of Gothic (Ruskin 1903‒1912, vol. 10, 183).

Literary discourse also adopted such analogy. The grid metaphor would make sense of the complexity of the modern world and its heterogeneous nature (Hagen and Vibe Skagen 2013). In his essay “Pan’s Pipes” from 1881, Robert Louis Stevenson remarked (1925) on the “elective affinities” of his age: “The world in which we live has been variously said and sung by the most ingenious poets and philosophers: these reducing it to formulae and chemical ingredients, those striking the lyre in high-sounding measures for the handiwork of God” (Stevenson 1925, 125). In 1884, Vernon Lee used chemistry to describe the Renaissance, as a period when magic and religion, antiquity and modernity, had created strange reactions and new compounds: And the Renaissance has interested and interests me […] for the manner in which the many things […] acted and reacted upon each other, united in concord or antagonism; forming, like the gases of the chemist, new things, sometimes like and sometimes unlike themselves and each other; producing now some unknown substance of excellence and utility, at other times some baneful element, known but too well elsewhere, but unexpected here (Lee 1884, vol. I, 7‒8).

Like other writers, Lee adopted the analogy with chemistry, as it offered her a model, a structure – albeit evanescent like a gaseous reaction – that allowed to describe the transformative energies at work within the field of art. Much had already been suggested by Walter Pater, who used the analogy with chemistry as a tool to evade the moral issue of beauty in art. Indeed, the category of analogy, materialized by the structure of the grid, empowered scientists, artists and critics alike by ordering the potentially unlimited number of elements that entered the fin-de-siècle epistemic horizon. This discursive adoption of scientific tropes seemed to satisfy three requirements: (a) science provided the aptest simile or metaphor through which transformations could be described; (b) science seemed to be the reign of a kind of illuminated rationality, a quality energetically sought after by artists refusing the taint of degeneration, and yet

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standing on the ruins of the principles of causality that had guided nineteenth-century arts; and (c) science seemed to offer some formal tools for analysis, as well as a formalist approach to representation, which, already present in fin-de-siècle aestheticism, would well interact with the scientific Weltanschauung of the modern age. One last point accounts for the full import of the admission of science within the field of art. Both art production and art criticism, often the work of the same author, captured and appropriated the strength of scientific discourse by dwelling on visual evidence, materially embedded and validated by mass visual culture (Crary 1993). Statements about art, critical responses to artworks, and visual accounts emphasized to what extent optical technology and mass visual culture allowed the moderns to set the classic artwork side by side with the new products of industry and commerce, and side by side with art reproductions ordering within the same slide, or on the same page, old and new forms. New ways of seeing were to alter the moral primacy of the eye (Jay 1995). The category of analogy would come to the foreground as the key concept of the transformative powers mingling literary and scientific culture. In addition to chemistry, modern optical technology also shaped art criticism, art evaluation, and art history, by enhancing the perception of significant forms in the hallowed masterpieces of antiquity, and in primitive art.

Modern Artists and “The Troper Stuff of Art” Two discourses  – science and art  – traditionally antagonistic, showed consistency rather than rupture. Such consistency would stand on the discursive implementation of scientific concepts, which became possible when the epistemic horizon of science intersected with the horizon of the arts. Such a dialectical relation was described by James McFarlane in his pioneering essay on “The Mind of Modernism” (1976), and subsequently by Gillian Beer in Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996). When the critical accent fell no longer on realism, the category of analogy was summoned to explain the non-mimetic aspects of art in terms of scientific laws. “An unspoken loyalty to traditional notions of causality, even determinism, still persisted, though the mechanics of it were no longer narrowly positivistic” (McFarlane 1976, 82). Behind such choices there were forces at work that determined the relevant changes, and empowered with epistemic relevance the field of art, thus disposing of degeneration and decadence, and galvanizing the new century with energetic and vibrant proposals. This chapter owes to Rosalind Krauss’s The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths (1986) in terms of the suggestion that the grid provided structure, emblem, icon and concept to the multiplicity of heterogeneous objects that would characterize the period defined as modernism. The modernist grid would engulf the lumber room of Victorian culture, where – this is my point – grids were

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conceived, realized, and implemented. The inclusive energy of the grid operated for the mind of modernism both in a spatial and a temporal way. It helped enclose in analogous slots the original and the replica, high art and base imitation, craftsmanship and the mass production of industry; within the temporal dimension, it allowed aligning on a simultaneous plane instances of the extremely old and of the contemporary, Homer and Joyce, Magdalenian art and Picasso’s drawings. Scholars of Virginia Woolf will notice the quote from her essay on “Modern Fiction”, where she traces, tentatively, the nature, objects, and elements, not only of modern fiction but of modern art at large (Woolf 1993, 5‒12). In fact, artists, writers, critics, in the first decades of the new century faced the question: is twentieth-century art very modern or very ancient? Is art invested and transformed by progress, like science and technology, or is it static, unchangeable, classical, secluded in the pure aesthetic domain of its forms? Photographic reproductions enhanced to an unprecedented degree the field of interaction between aesthetic discourse and visual culture, owing to the wealth of images made available by modern technology (Orestano 2011; Fawcett 1986). Walter Benjamin argued that technological reproduction deprived the artwork of its aura, whilst shaping a new concept of masterpiece standing on its popularity across the media rather than on the hand of the master (Benjamin 2008 [1936], 19‒56). In Museum without Walls (1947), André Malraux added that art reproductions deprived objects of their material qualities, “such as texture and scale, and [fostered] an analytical and comparative approach to every kind of art that undermines traditional hierarchies of aesthetic value” (Malraux 1999 [1947], 302). Similarly, the history of the avant-garde contains plenty of statements that challenge traditional art hierarchies. In 1918, on first seeing a painting by Cézanne (Fig. 9.4) bought by John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf thought of a chocolate slab:

Figure 9.4: Paul Cézanne, Apples, 1878.

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This morning I went to Gordon Square with [Roger], and there we met Nessa and Maynard […] Nessa left the room and re-appeared with a small parcel about the size of a large slab of chocolate. On one side are painted six apples by Cezanne. Roger very nearly lost his senses. I’ve never seen such a sight of intoxication. He was like a bee on a sunflower. Imagine snow falling outside, a wind like there is in the Tube, an atmosphere of yellow grains of dust, and us all gloating upon these apples. They really are very superb. The longer one looks the larger and heavier and greener and redder they become (Woolf 1976, 230).

Beside the shape of the canvas, in order to account for Cézanne’s apples, Woolf used the romantic conceit of the bee on the sunflower; she evoked yellow grains of dust, a storm of sublime perceptions investing the viewers. While the painters discussed the oil colors employed by Cézanne, Woolf compared her sensations with the wind in the London tube. To her, Cézanne’s apples exceeded all realistic comparison: they seemed to grow in size, weight, color, escaping all traditional flat mimetic appreciation. Some unknown force was latent in them – indeed sublime. A similar strategy would be used in 1930 by Woolf in “Foreword to Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell”: Nessa’s paintings were made of “masses and passages and relations and values of which we know nothing” (Woolf 1993, 97‒100). Sublimity allowed Woolf to fill the discursive gap. T. S. Eliot’s 1919 essay on Tradition and Individual Talent offers another interesting statement on the relationship between different materials that escape traditional periodization, extending the field of art to unknown, sublime eras and distances: The poet must be […] quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe […] is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen (Eliot 1975, 39).

Prehistoric shelters had been discovered both at the Abri de la Madeleine, in Dordogne, and in Spain at Altamira in 1879. Named Magdalenian, after the French place, they were dated to the upper Paleolithic (Fig. 9.5). The discovery of the prehistoric

Figure 9.5: Altamira, bison.

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caves opened up an immense patrimony of images that were to unsettle in a profound and disturbing way not only the visual arts, but also criticism and literature. In 1936, Walter Benjamin’s comment on art history and its two polarities, “the artwork’s cult value and its exhibition value” (2008 [1936], 25), simultaneously amalgamated the magical cult value of prehistoric art with modern methods of technological reproduction that enhanced its exhibition value. The magic of prehistoric art would achieve artistic merit owing to its exhibition potential – in fact, owing to its visual dissemination in the museum without walls of modernity, where primitive artefacts would find their space side by side with classical and contemporary art. T. S. Eliot’s simultaneous vision achieved order and sense owing to his analogy with the chemical process, which prevented him from taking the past as a “lump, an indiscriminate bolus” (Eliot 1975, 39), while salvaging the poetics of impersonality: It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. I shall, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide […] When the two gases […] are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid […] The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum (Eliot 1975, 40‒41).

Such extended simile foregrounds the importance of science, chemistry specifically, as the catalyst allowing to operate on apparently disparate elements: The […] elements which enter the presence of the transforming catalyst, are of two kinds: emotions and feelings […] The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together (Eliot 1975, 41).

The analogy between art and the chemical process was extended by Eliot to include the conditions under which the fusion of elements takes place. The modern critic looks at the past with fascination and horror, as if he were a kind of Dr. Jekyll discovering that the Hydes who painted the Magdalenian caves were indeed full-fledged artists. T. S. Eliot appreciated the Metaphysical poets because they “possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience” (1975, 64): John Donne could deal with love and loss, and at once feed his lines with heterogeneous notions of astronomy and metallurgy, geology, geometry, and optics. Finally, in “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923), T. S. Eliot argued that the modern novel found its form and significance in ancient myth: It is here that Mr. Joyce’s parallel use of the Odyssey has a great importance. It has the importance of a scientific discovery. […] If it is not a novel, that is simply because the novel is a form which will no longer serve; […] In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own […] investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving

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a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. (Eliot 1975, 177)

Modern artists, members of the literary avant-garde, the Bloomsbury clique, tried to include in their vision the modernity of Cézanne and the antiquity of Magdalenian cave drawings. In order to come to terms, simultaneously, with the present and the immensely ancient they resorted to the field of science as to the epistemic terra firma wherein not only the anarchy of history but also the chaos of perception, its aberrations and volatile oscillations, could find an anchor, a rational status. To describe this chaos as a shower of atoms involved a decided step toward the ordering metaphors of science: Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms (Woolf 1993 [1919], 8).

Art and Science: Fry’s Analogies The statements by Woolf and Eliot, when read within the epistemic horizon of science, were part of a two-way reciprocal process, insofar as “new concepts in science more and more took on the nature of poetic conceits” (McFarlane 1976, 84) – and the reverse. While notions of unpredictability, ambivalence, a-logicality, a-causality affected scientific thought, the perception of the artwork, infected by the same lack of control, validated its recourse to chemistry. Walter Pater, Woolf’s “absent father” (Meisel 1980), and Roger Fry, her mentor and father to a generation of modern artists, after acknowledging the primacy of perception, had moved to the analogy with chemistry in order to explain their response to art. In the Preface to The Renaissance (Hill 1980), Walter Pater had compared the response of the aesthetic critic to a chemical process leading to the discovery of some new element: And the function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, to analyse, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture […] produces this special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of that impression is, and under what conditions it is experienced […] as a chemist notes some natural element (Hill 1980, xx–xxi).

In Roger Fry. A Biography (1940) Woolf remarked that Fry was not “a born writer” and that “there were no words” (Woolf 1940, 106) to describe modern art: she attributed to Pater Fry’s ability to shape the vocabulary of the modern art critic. Commenting on Fry’s prose, Clive Bell had added: “If such terms as ‘plastic sequence’, ‘plastic unity’, ‘inner life’, ‘structural planes’ keep cropping up, that is because they are the only symbols available for subtle and complex things” (Bell 1956, 75). In Vision and Design (1920), Fry’s essay on “Art and Science” (1919) is relevant to my argument. Fry

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intended to strengthen the value of his own theory, whose goal was “the perfection and complexity of the unity attained.” Science was the logical analogy capable of connecting the concept of significant form with the desirable formula: The aesthetic value of a theory is not really adequate to the intellectual effort entailed unless, as in a true scientific theory (by which I mean a theory which embraces all the known relevant facts), the aesthetic value is reinforced by the curiosity value which comes in when we believe it to be true. But now, returning to art, let me try to describe rather more clearly its analogies with science (Fry, in Woolf 1940, 70; my emphasis)

The rhetorical figure of analogy provided the conceptual link between two domains; “analogy” was Fry’s keyword, and like significant form it had the power to combine heterogeneous experiences with the need to control and order them, to give them significance and status, and eventually “truth.” Focusing on science, Fry maintained that “[b]oth of these aspects – the particularizing and the generalizing – have their counterparts in art. […] None the less, perhaps, the highest pleasure in art is identical with the highest pleasure in scientific theory” (Fry, in Woolf 1940, 70, 73). As a consequence, Fry’s Vision and Design includes essays on “The Art of the Bushmen”, “Negro Sculpture”, “Ancient American Art”, side by side with essays on “The French Post-Impressionists”, “Paul Cézanne”, but also “Giotto”, “Claude”, and “Renoir.” The effort of including complexity in a unified whole is remarkable. The analogy between the art of the Bushmen and the Altamira drawings is solved in formal terms, through the timeless visual category of significant form. Like T. S. Eliot, Fry was challenged by Magdalenian art: he had to decide where, in his account, it should figure, whether among the immensely modern or the vertiginously old. In the caves of the Dordogne and of Altamira in Spain, Palaeolithic man has left paintings which date from about 10,000 B.C., in which, as far as mere naturalism of representation of animals goes, he has surpassed anything that not only our own primitive peoples, but even the most accomplished animal draughtsmen have ever achieved. Fig. 9.5 shows in outline a bison from Altamira. The certainty and completeness of the pose, the perfect rhythm and the astonishing verisimilitude of the movement are evident even in this. The Altamira drawings show a much higher level of accomplishment than those of the Bushmen, but the general likeness is so great as to have suggested the idea that the Bushmen are descendants of Palaeolithic man who have remained at the same rudimentary stage as regards the other arts of life, and have retained something of their unique power of visual transcription (Fry, in Woolf 1940, 81‒82).

Vision and Design was enriched by illustrations  – the outline of a bison from Altamira – meant to stimulate the reader’s aesthetic response to formal values that acquired unprecedented importance because, as Fry argued, […] the emotion which accompanies the clear recognition of unity in a complex seems to be so similar in art and in science that it is difficult not to suppose that they are psychologically the same. […] the unity-emotion […] may not improbably be of an identical kind in both art and science (Fry in Wolf 1940, 73).

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Figure 9.6: Heinrich Wölfflin, art lecture with two magic lanterns.

The element of visual perception cannot be overemphasized. Enhanced by photography, itself a product of chemistry, as testified by the wet-collodion process, it was considered indispensable in the modern art classroom. Magic lantern slides were of capital importance for art critics like Jakob Burckhardt and Heinrich Wölfflin (Orestano 2011): optical tools transformed art criticism, determining a move away from biography and anecdote, and a focus on form (Fig. 9.6). Magic lanterns and art reproductions fostered new trends in art history based on formal appreciation assessed on a wide horizon of visible artefacts (Witcombe 2008; Pehlivan and Karaaziz Şener 2014). An acknowledged masterpiece could be shown side by side with an anonymous object of common everyday use, provided there existed a formal quality suggesting an analogy of structure, a possible sequence, and similarity in diversity. In the context of this essay, a letter by Roger Fry, requesting in 1912 a magic lantern in order to deliver his lecture on art, acquires a special significance. Thanks to modern technology, significant form – a concept promoted by Clive Bell and Roger Fry – did take precedence over the orthodoxy of conventional periodization and national borderlines. An immense panorama of diversity would be opened up, in which owing to analogies of form and despite evident gaps, elements of diverse origin and unequal value would be equally considered. The solution offered by David Bomberg, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, included fragments of traditional mimesis and the structure of a grid. In his painting “Ju-Jitsu” (c. 1913) Bomberg divided the canvas into a 64-square grid, in which the subject splinters into near-abstract fragments, enhanced by vivid and contrasting colors. Also the “Study for the Hold”, preliminary to his painting “In the Hold” (c.1913‒1914), shows the squaring-up grid, the geometrical framework dissolving his subject into dynamic angular facets. This exhibition confirms that modern artists chose the grid as the connecting element between the art of antiquity and modern art. It suggests, furthermore, that the grid functioned as an epistemic tool, where art and science conspired to build a structure that combined the knowledge of tradition, the abstract beauty of numbers, and a visible critique of the conventions of realism.

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As a final comment on the contents of this chapter, I should like to insert a quote from Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1947). As a child, Nabokov was fascinated by the magic lantern; subsequently, as a novelist and entomologist, by the microscope. In his memories he speaks of both instruments, and the powers they contain and symbolize: [w]hat loveliness the glass slides as such revealed […] – translucent miniatures, pocket wonderlands, neat little worlds of hushed luminous hues! In later years, I discovered the same precise and silent beauty at the radiant bottom of a microscope’s magic shaft. […] There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world, a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic (Nabokov 1998, 130‒131).

This final comment aligns science and art: the grid being the inclusive container of such wide horizon.

References Beer, Gillian. Ope Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Bell, Clive. Old Friends. Personal Recollections. London: Chatto & Windus, 1956. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” [1836] In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty and Thomas Levine, 19‒55. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2008. Briggs, Asa. Victorian Things. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and Individual Talent.” In Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, edited by Frank Kermode, 37–44. London: Faber & Faber, 1975. Fawcett, Trevor. “Graphic versus Photographic in the Nineteenth-Century Reproduction.” Art History 9, 2 (1986):185–212. Gordin, Michael D. A Well-ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and The Shadow of the Periodic Table. New York: Basic Books, 2004. Gordin, Michael D. Scientific Babel: How Science was Done Before and After Global English. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Hagen, Margareth, and Margery Vibe Skagen (eds). Literature and Chemistry: Elective Affinities. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2013. Hill, Donald L. (ed.). Walter Pater: The Renaissance. Studies in Art and Poetry. The 1893 Text. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Jay, Martin. “Photo-unrealism: The Contribution of the Camera to the Crisis of Ocularcentrism.” In Vision and Textuality, edited by Stephen Melville and Bill Reading, 344–360. London: Macmillan, 1995. Kohl, Allan T. “Revisioning Art History: How a Century of Change in Imaging Technologies Helped to Shape a Discipline.” VRA Bulletin 39, 1 (2012). Accessed February 12, 2021. https://online. vraweb.org/index.php/vrab/article/view/120

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Krauss, Rosalind E. The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986. Lee, Vernon. Euphorion: Being Studies of the Antique and the Medieval in the Renaissance, 2 vols. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1884. Malraux, André. “Museum without Walls.” [1947] In Art and Its Histories: A Reader, edited by Steve Edwards, 302–307. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. McFarlane, James. “The Mind of Modernism.” In Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930, edited by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, 71–93. London: Penguin, 1976. Meisel, Perry. The Absent Father: Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980. Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. London: Penguin, 1998. Orestano, Francesca. “La ricezione di Burckhardt nel mondo anglosassone: fascino del Rinascimento, forma significante e forma simbolica.” In La formazione del vedere: a partire da Burckhardt, edited by Andrea Pinotti and Maria Luisa Roll, 149–172. Macerata: Quodlibet, 2011. Orestano, Francesca. “The Chemistry of Taste: Aesthetics, Literature, and the Rise of the Impure.” English Literature 2, 2 (2015): 177–202. Orestano, Francesca. “Pan between Renaissance and Fin-de-siècle: The Lesson of Jacob Burckhardt.” In Literature and Cultural Memory, edited by Mihaela Irimia, Dragos Manea and Andrea Paris, 203–217. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2017. Pehlivan, Serdar, and Dilek Karaaziz Şener. “Photopgraphy and Art History: The History of Art Born from Photography.” Procedia: Social and Behavioral Sciences 122 (2014): 210‒214. Ruskin, John. The Complete Works of John Ruskin. Library Edition, edited by Edward Tyas Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. London: George Allen, 1903‒1912. Schatzberg, Walter, Ronald White, and Jonathan Johnson. The Relations of Literature and Science: An Annotated Bibliography of Scholarship, 1880‒1980. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1987. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Virginibus Puerisque and Other Essays in Belles Lettres. London: William Heinemann, 1925. Weininger, Stephen J. “Contemplating the Finger: Visuality and the Semiotics of Chemistry.” HYLE – International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry 4,1 (1998): 3–27. Weininger, Stephen J. “Chemistry.” In Encyclopedia of Literature and Science, edited by Pamela Gossin, 77–79. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. Witcombe, Christopher. “Bye Bye, Slides, Bye Bye, Carousels, Hello, Internet, I Think I’m a Gonna Cry-y.” In Teaching Art History with New Technologies, edited by Kelly Donahue-Wallace, Laetitia La Follette and Andrea Pappas, 14‒22. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. Woolf, Virginia. Roger Fry. A Biography. London: The Hogarth Press, 1940. Woolf, Virginia. The Question of Things Happening: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1912‒1922, edited by Nigel Nicholson and Joanne Traumann. London: The Hogarth Press, 1976. Woolf, Virginia. “Modern Fiction.” [1919] In The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, edited by Rachel Bowlby, 5‒12. London: Penguin, 1993.

Yoël Tawil

10 Depth as Grid: An Improvisational Actor’s Perspective Abstract: Multiple disciplines, especially in the social sciences, have long emphasized the human mind’s universal natural elective affinity for a dichotomous, symmetrical, and well-delineated topography of human knowledge. In a grid inspired by this preference, inter-disciplinary professional dialogues are constructed as a proactive overcoming of longitudinal distances and defined professional boundaries. The chapter challenges this interpretation and highlights the importance of “depths” as cross-pollinating disciplinary intersections. Specifically, like uncovering different and sometimes precious geological layers and formations when digging deeper in a single confined space, digging deeper within a given discipline ‒ as opposed to “looking sideways” for collaborative opportunities  – produces “sideways”-like results, often of unexpected nature. This approach is exemplified here through the personal experience of professional improvisational acting. The chapter argues that honing an actor’s craft entails a trajectory of multiple encounters with other domains of knowledge, which are an integral part of an increasingly deep understanding of acting. More generally, in the post-modern condition of the information age, any discipline makes meaningful encounters with other domains of knowledge that lie within a deeper understanding and mastery of itself. These encounters take place not necessarily across a grid; rather, the grid lies within narrow, highly professional corridors marked by an expertise which necessitates the opening of multidisciplinary doors. Keywords: acting; improvisation; grid; multidisciplinarity; creativity

Science is not only compatible with spirituality, it is a profound source of spirituality (Sagan 1995, 29).

Introduction The concept of the grid as discussed in this chapter can be introduced by referring to the lives and works of Paul Farmer and Albert Einstein. Paul Farmer is a medical anthropologist. Undoubtedly one of the most influential physicians of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, Farmer is often lauded as the doctor who went beyond mere medicine. Through his activism in impoverished areas of the world, Farmer (1992; 2003) formulated sensible and convincing theoretical approaches connecting poverty and illness, which contextualized personal narratives of ill health

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as inextricably linked to grand geopolitical power relations. Albert Einstein needs no introduction. However, it is worth noting that, as one of the most eminent and respected physicists of his generation, Einstein achieved popularity not only through his contributions to physics but also as an amateur philosopher. Many of his quotes – adapted to pop-format sensibilities and reflecting the spirit of Arthur Sasses’ famous photograph of him sticking out his tongue  – pervade the public sphere of popular and even, to some extent, “serious” science. Einstein was, of course, more than a highly intelligent and lovable “eccentric scientist”; his musings on, for example, the ominous nature of religion as a secular roadmap of the complex intricacies of the inquisitive mind (see Calaprice 1996) are bold, eloquent, and unequaled by most of his peers. Is Paul Farmer a medical doctor and a deeply engaged activist, equally knowledgeable in political economy as he is in medicine? Is Einstein a physicist and a philosopher? The approach to the concept of the “grid” formulated in this chapter contends that Farmer is a physician and Einstein a physicist. The interrelatedness of their work with purportedly “other” disciplines is merely a deep understanding of their work. The use of hyphens to describe these individuals (a scientist-philosopher, for example) largely stems from the human inclination to give a sense of purity to domains of knowledge as if they existed in and of themselves. This itself is deepseated in the human mind’s elective affinity for order and categorization or in the interest and subsequent power to construe clear and well-delineated boundaries. The reality is, however, more complex: deep within medicine, the physician is confronted with economics and the need to understand (and, perhaps, attempt to cure) illness by referring to the logic guided by political economy. On delving deep into the mysteries of science, the physicist inevitably comes to wonder about the nature of the divine. This reflects the interpretation of the concept of the grid presented here: by striving to achieve mastery of a certain discipline, individuals can, intentionally or not, achieve a surprising level of competence in seemingly unrelated domains of knowledge. The perceptive visualization of such a “grid” is, to a certain extent, counterintuitive. It is not “horizontal”, in the sense that it is not looking “sideways” for collaborative opportunities, but rather “vertical”; it “digs deeper,” in a professional space that apparently seeks no dialogue, only its own perfection.

Depth as Grid How does one envision a grid? My primary field of research is the anthropology of creativity. In academic and popular circles alike, for anyone interested in creativity studies or in the practice of creativity, the concept of a grid most likely invokes a visual representation of a multiplicity of possibilities: categories of knowledge spread across a topology of varying degrees of complexity, dynamism, and fluidity – a plethora of

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possible meaningful and valuable alliances that create new content. These alliances are facilitated by the fact that their constituents – individuals, social groups, ideas, or fields of research, which may be located anywhere  – still share the same basic network. Therefore, the very definition of creativity can be seen to convey a visual imagery of a grid by implying cognitive complexity and thematic abundance. However, from an anthropological standpoint, the concept of a grid becomes somewhat simpler (perhaps unjustly as shown below). The universal preference and elective affinity of people from different cultures to dichotomies, order, and a clear taxonomy of social categories is well-documented. For example, Levi-Strauss, in his structural analysis of the human creation and understanding of culture (1966), famously argued that the most primal predisposition of the human mind is based on structures, specifically binary oppositions. More recently, in a similar attempt to reconcile biology and the social sciences and reconceptualize the creation of culture as a product of biological processes (with an emphasis on religion), Tiger and Maguire (2010) noted that the brain seems to enjoy a state of neurological homeostasis (or “soothing”) whenever presented with symmetry and certainty – the prominent features of religion. Alongside religion, other domains of knowledge, such as medicine, gender, kinship, caste systems, enmity, and additional sociocultural structures studied by anthropologists, are also firmly rooted in dichotomies. The most primal of these is the distinction between “nature” and “culture,” notably reinterpreted in Descartes’ famous distinction between “body” and “mind.” I argue that this dictates the conventional and commonsensical approach to grids: grids are perceptually envisioned as the former, namely, a multiplicity of possibilities, through the theoretical lens of the latter, namely, binarism. Like the theoretical paradigms that characterized classical anthropology in which the “other” (the subject of anthropological query) is “out there,” if the concept of a grid is used for creative problem-solving or as fertile ground for the creation of new content, then the natural and obvious conclusion of the human mind is that “another idea” lies “out there” rather than “in here.” Therefore, the idea of the vertical discovery of a grid in one’s thematic domain is largely counterintuitive. David Perkins’ concept of “Klondike spaces” (1995) is a good example of this. Perkins refers to gold prospecting as an analogy for problem-solving. The “gold” (the good idea) is rare, scattered, and isolated. Scoping out plateaus rarely provides clues as to where the gold may lie, and finding a small oasis may discourage the prospector from seeking elsewhere, in places where bigger gold deposits may perhaps be found. This metaphor is the template for numerous solutions, many of them referring the prospector to the use of systematic mapping or, alternatively, random chance to scope the entirety of the land. Therefore, in many scenarios of such “Klondike spaces”, which are, in fact, immense horizontal grids, the greater the distance covered – or, more accurately, the more significant the apparent separation of one point from another – the greater the chance of finding precious minerals. In such scenarios, the most counterintuitive (not to say mistaken) course of action would be to remain in one place and to keep digging with the willingness to engage with whatever is found in the

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depths of the confined space. The same theoretical critiques of classical anthropology argue in favor of such “depths.” Post-colonialism, especially with regard to ethnicity, denounces the falsehood of purity and asserts that hybridization has always been the norm (Bhabha 1994; Canclini 1995). In this sense, post-colonialist thought validates the claim that no domain of knowledge is ever “pure” and that what lies beneath the surface most likely differs from the surface itself. From another perspective, post-structuralism, famously Lacan, inversed the supposedly “logical” notion that the whole is composed of its parts and argued instead that any concept is nothing more than a fragment that has been separated from a greater polysemic whole (Nuyen 1989; Plotnitsky 2004). For example, physics (or natural sciences) was only artificially separated from philosophy (or humanities); therefore, a clear distinction and positioning of these domains of knowledge on different loci of a grid is a mere fabrication. These guiding principles are easier to discern in a world of knowledge heavily influenced by post-modernism, which encourages the reconsideration of power relations between different narratives and actors that compete in a shared public sphere and are, consequently, much more accessible. Over the last fifteen years, I have practiced the basic ideas outlined above in a hobby that has gradually turned into a profession: acting. Though becoming a professional was undoubtedly important, I do not refer to this grand trajectory as the only process of discovering depths. Rather, I highlight several points of relevance in my journey in order to show that the discovery of professional acting creates meaningful “grid-like” encounters. Lacking the initial proactive intent to engage in searching outside of the realm of acting, these encounters cannot be subsumed into a common visualization of a horizontal grid as depicted above but as depth. This journey is visually illustrated in Fig. 10.1.

First Steps I entered the realm of improvisational theatre in 2004 and have been practicing it professionally since 2010 in professional simulations, shows, workshops, and others forms of theatre. I became interested in acting classes around the same time that I began my graduate studies in anthropology. The classes were available on campus; while they had been available before and elsewhere, my studies made them stand out. The practice of anthropology is, formally, fieldwork, but performativity is, of course, inherent to culture. Hence, I thought that the study of human culture, the human condition, and its performativity as formulated by social scientists (Butler 1990; Goffman 1959) could benefit from experimenting with acting. Following Perkins’ analogy, my academic studies were the plateau on which I began to dig (see Fig. 10.1, A), with my interest in acting being the first layer I encountered. It differed somewhat from the first, since acting, while unquestionably inseparable from the study of humans, is not

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A

B

C

D E F

G H

I

Figure 10.1: Depth as grid (author’s illustration). [A] Anthropology studies; [B] Playback/ theatre basics; [C] Western psychology/mind/speech; [D] Body /biology /movement; [E] The animal world ‒ “humans as animals”; [F] Humanities (theology/ history /multiculturalism); [G] Philosophy and ethics – “humans as machines”; [H] Entrepreneurship ‒ interdisciplinary dialogue across a horizontal grid; [I] Other professions.

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an intellectual meditation on culture. Developing an interest in acting as a result of studying anthropology exemplifies the process of “digging.” My primary line of work was playback theatre, and this is where I studied improvisation with a wide range of teachers. Developed by Jonathan Fox and Jo Salas in the United States in the 1970s as a form of community theatre, playback theatre revolves around a troupe of actors (usually amateurs and sometimes professionals). The actors render some sort of “service” to the community by merging their strengths with their spectators’ biographical narratives (Fox 1994). In public performances, members of the audience are invited on stage to assume the role of the “storyteller” by sharing a personal story. The actors then improvise various short scenes inspired by that story. This is called “mirroring” in the sense that the scenes “mirror” various interpretations back to the storyteller and the rest of the audience. For example, a storyteller who recounts a moral dilemma may witness a theatrical rendition of an argument between an “inner angel” and an “inner demon.” The session then ends with the storyteller sharing their thoughts and feelings about the performance, thanking the actors, and rejoining the audience, from which another storyteller is then invited onto the stage. The troupe members meet regularly (in my case once a week) to practice and to share their own personal stories, which are then transposed into various theatrical interpretations. Due to the personal quality of these meetings, members often become very close and the atmosphere of these meetings is not unlike the gathering of a close family unit, thus allowing great openness and experimentation. In grid terms, our weekly meetings and the shows in which we sought to perfect our craft can be seen as our individual and collective quarry. Even in the early stages of our troupe’s formation, the notion of depth was already present. In the spirit of Stanislavski’s famous “method” approach to acting (Adler 1988), superficiality was interpreted as a form of “pretending” and counterposed to “authenticity.” For example, pretending to be sad was considered much less powerful than genuinely tapping into a painful personal memory while conveying sadness. Similarly, “deep” emotions denoted repressed suffering, while frivolity or comedic performance came to enjoy the same lucrative status much later. In both cases, the use of the word “superficial” was indicative of the preferred direction: inwards as opposed to sideways, into the self and into professionalism. It was there that other meaningful encounters were made.

Talking Heads and Dialoging Bodies From a more critical stance, playback is a peculiar mix of theatre coupled with the acknowledgement of the purifying and redemptive power of public confessions and amateur psychology. This is particularly important because a significant number of playback practitioners, not unlike actors, do harbor mild psychotherapeutic ambitions regarding their “patients” (the storytellers). They aspire to accurately diagnose

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the emotional narrative of the story and the storytellers’ visible and/or hidden conflict, and to help them achieve some sense of catharsis and relief. A certain verbosity marked our early days: first, because talking is the most readily available theatrical ability of neophytes, and second, and more importantly, because talking is culturally corroborated in psychotherapy and this concurs with the therapeutic aspirations of playback (see Fig. 10.1, B). Indeed, a logocentric approach undergirds conventional Western psychology, which postulates that speech is synonymous with mental health or even normalcy (Kidron 2009). Most of us therefore emphasized speech in our performances and, consequently, many of our teachers felt that some scenes were encumbered by unnecessary dialogue. They kept reminding us that drama is action and urged us to act instead of simply assuming roles and turning the performance into a boring “talking heads” scene, in other words, an amateurish, lame, and confused imitation of a drama therapy session. One of their very first pedagogic instructions was to challenge our overuse of language in the theatrical mirroring of stories: “Don’t talk away the scene!” “Quit the chitchat. Act!” Speech is, undeniably, a staple of most theatrical representations; however, this is precisely why it becomes quickly exhausted and somewhat tiresome. During some of our weekly sessions, we were encouraged to avoid speech and to use our bodies instead via mime, dance, and other physical gestures. Perhaps unsurprisingly (but new for us at the time), this led to a process of learning bodily features as part of experimenting with them (Fig. 10.1, C). For me, as well as for others, it was the first time I realized that a fuller understanding of the body’s biology was required in order to perform well. This understanding had both “protective needs” and “productive needs.” As measures of protection, I developed an awareness of the body’s weaker, more dangerous spots: eyes, neck, knees, back, and joints. I became aware of the need to develop the long head bicep in order to be able to choreograph a fall on sufficient muscle mass as to avoid injury. Measures relating to production including learning to speak fast without hyperventilating and learning to shout louder by creating a diaphragmatic outburst of air. A mindful awareness of the whole body encouraged a certain suppleness through which sensual encounters between characters on stage could be implied without any uncomfortable physical contact between actors. Both protective and productive measures that enhanced the body’s expression were conveyed and discussed in a more professional manner. The contribution of this articulate manner of speaking was twofold: in relation to content, it contained a significant amount of information that improved our performances considerably; in relation to form, it signified that the understanding of the body had to be taken seriously. In terms of depth, while it is ontologically evident that human biology underlies the proper use of the body, the need to study it – that is, “digging” – emerges only when the extent of the body’s primal use is exhausted by a practice that strives toward professionalism. In terms of grid, the reference to the mind/ body dualism is obvious, but the configuration of its components does not invoke separation; rather, the process of exhausting the “mind” practice uncovers the theatricality of the “body,” which is hidden by the immediacy of the former and revealed by digging.

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“Humans” and “Non-humans” The use of our bodies inevitably created other productive associations, chief among them being a link to animals and an interpretation of the human species as part of the animal world (Fig. 10.1, D). These were discovered, developed, and nurtured by uninhibited collective and individual theatrical experimentation in our permissive and open-minded weekly sessions. In this spirit of playfulness, we attempted to include increasingly unconventional behavior into our repertoire (such as acting on the floor, discovering various eccentric expressive sounds, and the like). Some of the results may be considered “animalistic”  – that is unbridled, raw, and intense. The intuitive deductions of this experimentation, namely, that animals can inspire human performance (and vice versa) are not in any sense new. They overlap with the main propositions of the academic literature on human‒animal relations that postulates that “human” and “animal” are not separate and impermeable categories. The similarities and the use of animals by humans, especially as symbols, invoke the reconsideration of their separateness (Mullin 1999). For actors, our work with the body serves not only to enact different human conditions such as age or health but also to construct identities that are informed by animals. This reference evolved over time: at first, we relied heavily on anthropomorphic representations of “animal characters”: for example, a strong and imposing character would be a “gorilla” type – proud, loud, territorial, and somewhat unsophisticated in its belligerent behavior. Gradually, we began to search for and share more sophisticated knowledge and incorporate it in more and nuanced ways: for example, the onstage characterization of a scoundrel or a femme fatale invoked feline movement – smooth, subtle, elegant, and walking on tiptoes to minimize noise just like a predator stalking its prey. Similarly, portraying an unblinking villain who seems unaffected by noise by mimicking the features of a cobra (which has no eyelids and cannot hear) allowed us to convey a slightly more menacing demeanor without actually revealing the source of inspiration. Not all of this information was known to all, and the research is a form of digging. The recourse to biological features was arguably anecdotal in nature, and this symbolizes a relatively thin geological layer within the grid. Nevertheless, its use still reflects a meta-message of seriousness due to the fact that it was referred to seriously and put to use and embodied with highly effective results for both the storytellers and the audience. The exploration (and eventual exhaustion) of human‒animal relations related to questions regarding the theatrical representation of non-human characters that are not animals. This was enriched by embracing insight taken from the humanities (Fig. 10.1, E). How, for example, should one represent an ethereal entity like God? In anthropomorphic terms that characterize a more primal understanding of acting, one would be tempted to speak in a deep, authoritative voice, arrange the stage so as to stand above the human character, or use props to dress as a wise old sage. As we gained experience from repeated demands to convey the character, we engaged with

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the more complex insights on the nature of God offered by theologians. For example, in his book The Idea of the Holy (originally published in German in 1917) Rudolf Otto emphasized what he referred to as “Mysterium tremendum” (terror) and “Majestas” (awe) ‒ the duality of dread and attraction in the face of sacredness. In theatrical terms, this calls for more confidence onstage and usually involves a lone actor displaying the contradiction between the face (fear) and the body (attraction) while delivering a monologue from which the audience can infer what is being insinuated by the invisible, inaudible, and superior entity. On one occasion, a storyteller specifically asked for God to be present onstage, and I was given the task to portray God. Due to my interest in theology – which was part of my studies in anthropology but reinforced by acting – I was reminded of Rabbi Lawrence Kushner’s interpretation of God at Mount Sinai. Kushner speculated that the voice of God was conveyed directly to the consciousness of each individual as their father’s and mother’s voices speaking in tandem (Myerhoff 1993). I whispered to a female colleague onstage to repeat my words as accurately and quickly as she could and then proceeded to speak slowly to the human character played by a third actor. Kushner’s forceful metaphor drew from us a commanding yet non-threatening androgynous representation that was both human and ethereal. What about humans who are “non-humans”? An actor from another troupe told me that a story required him to play Hitler. If Hitler is seen (justifiably) as a monster, then, for many, he is also by definition “not human.” Indeed, actors, as a rule, feel uncomfortable with this character (among others) and are inclined to distance him from the realm of humans by adopting the maniacal tics and furious rants and speeches with which he is most associated. However, this specific actor relied on Hannah Arendt’s (1963) concept of the “banality of evil” (originally referring to Eichmann). Fully aware of Arendt’s arguments, he chose to portray Hitler as mild-mannered and polite, expressing his love of children, and even environmentally conscious – the latter aspect motivated by Hitler actually being a vegetarian at some point in his life and looking to create as a subtle allusion to possible parallels between the character and the audience. He recalled that the audience, who did not expect to be confronted with counter-stereotypical realism, was stunned into complete silence. I did not ask why the actor had read Arendt’s book, and although it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the act of digging (such as learning about the depiction of deities in various faiths or researching specific animals) from prior knowledge (which was most likely the case regarding Hitler), the two share an important aspect: they shape the actors’ understanding that an increasingly high level of literacy is required from the increasingly professional actor. Even if the totality of other domains of knowledge may lie “elsewhere” geographically speaking, these layers or the requirement to uncover them lie within a deepening mastery of the profession. This idea was powerfully exemplified by all that concerns multiculturalism and, especially, foreign languages. Cross-cultural differences, primarily the accurate mimicking of an unknown language, emerged as another issue when stories about tourism

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or multinational encounters were told. One of our teachers, who worked in improvisational (but not playback) theatre, told us that his troupe would meet to watch films and other media in foreign languages – eight to twelve hours for each language. This practice enabled them to discern the phonemes that constitute various languages (as well as the pace, tone, or mood), for example, Japanese or Italian. They would then regularly converse in their invented versions of these languages. The actors were able to convincingly mimic Japanese or Italian “gibberish” (that is, sound without content) just by having acquired the ability to distinguish the constituents of a language through continuous exposure to its sound. Our teacher’s personal ability was indeed impressive, and one of his colleagues went on to study two more languages as a way of increasing his income. After a few years in playback theatre, our troupe began to attract commercial interest and we were invited to perform more frequently in front of various audiences. Our storytellers gradually became customers, and we became some kind of service providers. This new commercial environment divided the troupe from a moral standpoint: those who were more inclined toward deontological ethics and those whose ethical inclination was more consequentialist (Fig. 10.1, G). In the specific case of a similar story being recounted in two different shows (as often happens), an ethical question arose concerning whether it was acceptable to “recycle” ideas from the first show for mirroring in front of the audience of the second show. The deontological viewpoint gives precedence to the creative process and highlights the “free-spiritedness” and “authenticity” of acting. In this sense, it reflects the cultural consensus in Western culture that “true” and “new” (in process) and “good” (in morality) are synonymous in art (Bowden 1999; Gell 1992). For the deontologists among us, self-plagiarism is little more than a thinly disguised artistic sin – a lie to the storytellers who have been led to believe that the performance was entirely improvised. For the consequentialists, self-plagiarism is morally neutral; if it helps the storyteller to achieve a more forceful catharsis at the expense of inspired artistry, this is the preferred path. Of course, not everyone holds consistent consequentialist or deontological views, but the fluid moral identities negotiated by the troupe members benefited from reformulating the arguments some of us wished to make by involving these terms and their concomitant philosophies. These (sometimes tense) debates within the group were facilitated by myself and two other members: one, a political activist deeply interested in the question of ethics and the other, naturally gifted at mediating conflicts. The very act of performing frequently thus uncovered an additional layer relating to the morality of the performance. Even more so, it reflected a deeper question that questioned the very essence of human improvisation: our spontaneity. If performances increasingly relied on selective sampling, standardization, and adjustment based on feedback to obtain maximum efficiency – features reminiscent of a machine-like imagery – had we delivered an improvisational performance at all? Were the actors really artists who created “ex nihilo,” as suggested to the audience (and as we ourselves tended to believe), and, in so doing, celebrated their very humanity? Or, conversely, were we

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turning into clever generators who often had access to enough preprogrammed material from which many sketches could be composed? Just like the previous human‒animal dichotomy, the human‒machine dichotomy was questioned here, too. Perhaps ironically, “non-human” professionalism subverted the very essence of improvisational theatre that many of us held so dear. However, coming to terms with this aspect (that is, “human as machine”) also legitimized other forms of creative practices, many of which contributed to our ability to be prolific and to offer diversified theatrical services such as workshops and simulations.

Not Acting The process of digging, however rewarding, eventually exhausts itself. Metaphorically, the gold prospectors’ findings become, in some way, entangled in other ventures or domains of knowledge. As an anthropologist conducting fieldwork among Israeli high-tech entrepreneurs, digging into acting provided me with a peculiar circularity. In 2017, I taught an introductory course in anthropology during which I mentioned that I was also a scholar of creativity studies. At the end of one class, a student came and asked me for a definition of creativity. I was scheduled to perform that night and answered almost immediately: “any activity that combines above-average intelligence [referring also to knowledge] with the willingness to risk public humiliation.” I was unaware at the time that I had provided a definition of creativity that composed of being, like me, both a scholar and an actor – a seemingly unlikely reconciliation of opposites. However, this is also, I believe, a legitimate definition of acting. In terms of digging in acting, this particular definition, at the time it was formulated, was largely tautological and redundant, as it relied primarily on a recombination of pre-existing components. This definition, while revealing nothing new to me, found new life outside of acting. When shared with interlocutors in the high-tech world, many of them were delighted by it, seeing it as embodying the very essence of the entrepreneurial spirit (Fig. 10.1, H). In other words, it evokes both the erudition that is requisite for technologically inclined people in the capitalist labor market and the penchant for recklessness that many of them celebrate in both their successes and their failures. In the theoretical framework I present here, gaining experience and experimenting with acting uncovered one of the narratives closely associated with entrepreneurship, namely, digging. Nevertheless, unlike the conventional digging presented thus far, it had to be validated serendipitously in another domain of knowledge located elsewhere on a horizontal grid since, in its own domain, it provided little new information. While the information extracted was insightful when coupled with other “depths,” the initial depth ceased to meet the requirements of a fertile grid. Another aspect of exhausting the depth is far more brutal and straightforward. In acting, a significant number of my colleagues never settled for being mere actors or,

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alternatively, came to realize that the profession wasn’t self-sustainable. Indeed, it is widely known that acting is a legitimate profession only in as much as it is practiced successfully or, as in my case, serves as a secondary source of income. Therefore, alongside acting, which they often called “the profession of the soul,” many of my actor colleagues also trained in more employable skills (Fig. 10.1, I). In many cases, these overlapped with acting: some became teachers, coaches, or tour guides. Others had different ambitions, such as computer programing or even law. This process too is part of what I am referring to as digging, but it is not the same enrichment depicted above. Rather, the choice or necessity to not rely solely on acting for income is rooted in and reflects the inner truth that the profession is rarely economically sound. Therefore, the very idea of finding a new means of income unrelated to acting is part of exhausting the practice itself, sometimes even before the fact. In my own occupational biography, other means of earning an income preceded my interest in professional acting, but I was always acutely aware that acting would always be provisory and insufficient. For many of my colleagues, the “other” occupations lie, so to speak, “within acting.” Both examples depict the exhaustion of the field of knowledge, as the limited depth refers to itself through other thematic fields which attract the practitioners’ interest. In my first example, the accumulated knowledge of acting introduced itself to other actors on the grid through an understanding of entrepreneurship harvested from within the depths of acting. In the second example, the meta-knowledge of acting, that is, the awareness of its fragility as a viable occupation, called forth other professions. It could be argued that aside from corresponding to a firm understanding of acting, limitations also reveal the actual vastness of the rest of the grid and constitute an invitation for its exploration.

Conclusion My theoretical argument here is that professionalism in the information age creates a meta-message of seriousness about dilettantism and produces a multidisciplinary grid within professions – the discovery is “in here” as opposed to “out there.” For any given professional working in an apparently well-delineated field of knowledge, it may be tempting to counterpose their profession to other supposedly unprofessional forms of knowledge for the sake of taxonomical clarity. However, these same professionals may discover and evaluate unrelated insights and even develop a surprising level of competence as part of their own expertise. Personally, and referring back to the introduction, it could be argued that I was never an anthropologist and an actor – only a dedicated anthropologist. The insights garnered individually or collectively through digging and validated by other professionals, either in person or via various media outlets, are symptomatic of the information age and the post-modern condi-

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tion. Indeed, in present times (and likely in the future), the collapse of boundaries between different domains of knowledge enables multidisciplinary encounters which can be still retained by a single individual practicing a single profession. These are ideally characterized by a dual approach that understands the value of multidisciplinarity but is also capable of a certain self-restraint (in the sense that, for example, an actor never becomes a biologist). I have referred to this process as “digging.” In terms of depth, vertical quarries are incorrectly constructed as the totality of a certain thematic domain and professionalism in the utmost sense of the term. However, the actual practice of professions reveals a more complex reality: from a metaphorical geological standpoint, the complexities of landforms in the information age are shaped by significant geological events, such as the digital revolution, that render a state of thematic purity virtually impossible, if, in fact, it ever existed. Therefore, the act of digging deeper within a certain discipline reveals smaller (and precious) layers of other textures, forms, and structures which may lie in greater proportions elsewhere. Such findings are examined and brought to light (and life) by working in an environment saturated with accessible information – a definition which applies to most environments today. This chapter both criticizes and enriches Perkins’ original idea. It begins with what may be termed a “Klondike space error” on the part of the prospector, namely, not scoping out the plateau and refusing to look for gold. In this sense, a conservative reading of a grid may diagnose vertical depth as a misuse of a grid: that is, an alleged a priori abandonment of the large majority of surfaces and of multidisciplinarity. This calls for a certain confidence that the prospector will be professionally rewarded by the requirements and the findings that lie below the surface and entails an invitation to tame the temptation for a proactive search of meaningful and more gratifying alliances due to their immediacy. The exhaustion of each layer reveals the next and, for each prospector, a grid unveils which is, at least phenomenologically, both deeply personal and highly professional (see the illustration of the entire process above). This grid does not, of course, replace the agency of individuals on any type of grid. Rather, it is a reminder that in present times, the nurturance of multidisciplinarity is neither a choice nor a necessity; it is, more than anything, an inevitability.

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Calaprice, Alice. The Quotable Einstein. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Canclini, Nestor Garcia. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City: Doubleday, 1959. Farmer, Paul. Aids and Accusation: Halti and the Geography of Blame. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Farmer, Paul. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Fox, Jonathan. Acts of Service: Spontaneity, Commitment and Tradition in the Non-Scripted Theatre. New Paltz: Tusitala Publishing, 1994. Gell, Alfred. “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology.” In Anthropology, Art and Asthetics, edited by Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton, 40–67. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992. Kidron, Carol. “Toward an Ethnography of Silence.” Current Anthropology 50, 1 (2009): 5–27. Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. Mullin, Molly. “Mirrors and Windows: Sociocultural Studies of Human-Animal Relationships.” Annual Review of Anthropology 28, 1 (1999): 201‒224. Myerhoff, Barbara. “Pilgrimage to Meron: Inner and Outer Peregrinations.” In Creativity/ Anthropology, edited by Smadar Lavie, Kirin Narayan and Renato Rosaldo, 211‒222. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993. Nuyen, Anh Tuan. “Wholeness and Différance.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 3,1 (1989): 26‒38. Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. London: Oxford University Press, 1923. Perkins, David. “Insights in Minds and Genes.” In The Nature of Insight, edited by Robert J. Sternberg and Janet E. Davidson, 495‒533. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. Plotnitsky, Arkady. “The Différance of the World: Homage to Jacques Derrida.” Postmodern Culture 15, 1 (2004): 1‒13. Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted Word: Science as a Candle in the Dark. New York: Random House, 1995. Tiger, Lionel, and Michael Maguire. God’s Brain. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 2010.

Lara D. Nielsen

11 How to Do Things with Grids: Anarchitectures of Navigability Abstract: This essay draws on polyphonic resources to elicit the profoundly ambivalent equivocalities of the grid complex. The author takes her cue from Gordon Matta-Clark’s urban architectural interventions (“social sculpture”), whose practices at the boundaries of architecture and contemporary art radicalize habits of doing and undoing grid spaces. Pivoting from cities to seas, Nielsen re-sets today’s grid dispensations to the cartographic returns of more fluid yet no less built social spaces. Linking the disavowals of debilitation (Jasbir Puar) with sprawling geographies of systemic brutalisme (Achille Mbembe), Nielsen discusses Forensic Architecture’s multidisciplinary digital forensics research that also takes the grid back to the seas, with Forensic Oceanography. As triptych, Nielsen’s analysis turns attention to the force and parry of the grid’s essentially kinetic pact, and to the futures of “social sculpture”, floating theories of infrastructure, movement, and migration. The theater for this essay is the Western Mediterranean. Keywords: the grid complex; architecture; cartography; geometry; social sculpture; built spaces; line; cities; seas; infrastructure; digital forensics; 3D modeling; debilitation; brutalism; migration; rhumb lines; the Western Mediterranean

Grid, Plane, Diameter, Sphere Look to the drawing board. Like cartographers, astronomers, and physical cosmologists of yore, architects project visions of the physical world onto a flat plane, working from the three-dimensional world to sketch two-dimensional settings. Initially, the grammar of geometry in the draftsman’s illustration is not hard for the interloper to follow: a line is a connection between two points. As a convex connection between three points, a triangle is a simple polygon. Non-convex polygons, or star polygons, connect points in different ways: as a pentagram, for instance, instead of a convex pentagon. The same basic idea repeats with the grid, which can be configured as both closed and open at the same time: a container of square spaces (a non self-intersecting, or convex form), and, a coordinate of line segments that forever exceed the boundaries of the polygon. In the end, a line is both a connection between two points and an endless accumulation of many aligning points; as boundary and partition, it offers a set of propositions. All manner of chart-makers and space-makers (statesmen, architects, cartographers, geographers, and itinerant map-makers too) will make use of such propositions.

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In architecture, pedagogical manuals supply a glimpse of the basic dynamics. While a square is said to be static and stable, a circle has an infinite number of radii and is therefore both omnidirectional and nondirectional: a round or cylindrical building addresses every surrounding point equally, and, none whatsoever. No matter what the shape, rows of structural columns provide a grid for organizing space (network theory takes it from there). Figure-ground theory requires thinking about the spaces that figures and grounds make, an exercise in perceiving space. Solid-void theory applies the same idea to three-dimensional space, where volumetric or positive space (any space that has a threshold between inside and outside) is as important as the objects and figures that are in it. A figure (an object, form element, or positive shape) is a shape placed on a page, ground, or field. An interface is any point of contact between complex fields. To the end, resolving circulation between fields remains the architect’s key concern (Frederick 2007). This chapter is not much concerned with perspectival grids (post-Renaissance representational brethren), but instead considers the expanded field of the grid complex, a transversal set of relations which include spatial and space making operations, among other phenomenal propositions (Krauss 1979). Across the spatially attuned medias of the grid complex (architecture, dance, music, sculpture, installation, theatre, weaving), a distinctive grid hermeneutics takes hold by the 1960s, when a brew of Conceptual Art and Minimalism fulsomely releases art makers from the task of creating yet another representational “object”, in favor of exploring the systems, structures, and patterns that might frame, move, and filter them. Better said, artists threw off the load.1 Broadly, the shift to the grid complex draws reflexive attentions to spatial fields and the ways matter and movement transform them (and are transformed by them), showing strategic attitudes to spatially realized systems and resources. The question of how to do things with grid systems involves the dynamics of how things sequence and move (and are made to move). “The transition from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture”, as the sculptor Jack Burnham put it (1968, 31), means paying attention to structural feedback practices in real space and time. But while Burnham wrote in favor of systems arts that relate to the flows and patterns of information in network grid contexts, this essay proceeds with the understanding that it is neither possible nor desirable to extricate such things from the materiality of the spatial grid complex, or even its essentially circulatory and kinetic imperatives. As interdependent processes, Hans Haake observes, both kinds of systems are “real” (Kastner 2020). To track strategic attitudes towards the ample folds of the grid complex, I will hold to the line that as dispositif, the grid’s story includes geometricization and fugitivity, so that wherever the grid expresses spatial fields (an architectural drawing, a

1 Sol LeWitt’s riposte: “Recently there has been much written about minimal art, but I have not discovered anyone who admits to doing this kind of thing” (1967, 80).

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map, a built field, a ramble), it also harbors mutinous and renegade affordances (an unbridled exchange of inputs and outputs). As I have written before, What Deleuze and Guattari call “fugitives from geometricization” are nothing less than lines that escape geometry  (Fer 2004, 55–56; Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 499). Another way of saying it is that grids always also double as network sabotage. The mathematical correlate is Menger’s Theorem, the optimization principle of connectivity that holds the key to breaking networks: if you can identify the rule that makes a grid cohere, you can disrupt it. The grid’s reason warps and woofs, if you can master it (Nielsen 2018, 287).

Today we find ourselves in an era flush with the stacked aggregations of grid systems, networked and otherwise, as well as new forms of scattering and flux. To paraphrase Chinua Achebe, even as new worlds beckon, things are falling apart (1958). Given the exigencies of the fourth (digital) industrial revolution, it could be said this is an age of negentropy, a heated speeding up of the structural organization of things. Yet negentropy is closely countered by the unceasing turmoils of entropy – the irreversible dissipation of systems, energies, and binding threads. The life and death of societies, after all, proceed by way of law and latency; command and commotion; measure and mutiny. Because life hangs in the balance, it turns out that the question of how to do things with grids does not only pertain to architecture, analytical geometry, cartography, or systems theory. The gambit of this essay is that to better respond to the ever-tightening vise of grid controls, we must look back to the equivocal affordances of the grid complex again – and above all, to the testimony of disfluencies that can be found there.2 I take my cue from Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Anarchitecture”, whose practices at the boundaries of architecture and contemporary art radicalize habits of doing things with grids, including the directive to undo grid structures with grid strategies.

Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark (1943‒1978) PASSING THROUGH THE BOUNDARIES PASSING AWAY WITH A PIECE TO GO CHOOSING AND CLEARING OUT. A CRITICAL POINT IN STRESS AND WORKING BETWEEN REDUCTION AND COLLAPSE […] THE JOY OF GETTING AWAY WITH IT A COMPLETE DEVOTION TO GETTING

2 George Canguilham defines disfluency as not just performing a lack, a break or a disruption that occurs in the flow of speech (a ripple of stuttering, for instance), but a practice of transgressing social and moral codes of speech. “There is no difference between the birth of grammar […] and the establishment of the metric system” (1991, 150).

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AWAY WITH IT. PASSING THROUGH MOVING IN AND GETTING AWAY WITH IT (Gordon Matta-Clark, in: Bessa and Fiore 2017, 14)

The term “Anarchitecture” was first assembled by a multidisciplinary research group in New York City in the early 1970s that included architects, dancers, musicians, sculptors, photographers, video and performance artists, and painters engaging with site-specific performance and installation art in artist-run spaces.3 Unlike most architects, Gordon Matta-Clark is known for working experimentally, on-site, and with his hands ‒ slicing, drilling, cutting, spiraling, and carving life into uninhabitable spaces. Simultaneously a site-specific social sculptor, an experienced construction worker, and a deconstructive demolitionist, Matta-Clark’s “Anarchitecture” works on built environments using familiar architectural tools in unfamiliar ways – lines, squares, rectangles, polygons, arcs, and cones that are also three-dimensional solids and voids, with insides and outsides – and at sizeable rather than miniature scale (in 1970 he apprenticed to land artist Robert Smithson). As a result, Matta-Clark is best known for his literally cutting approach to architectural units: breaking through the floors and ceilings, for instance, of a derelict housing development in the South Bronx, New York. “Undoing”, the maverick declares, “is just as much a democratic right as doing” (Bessa and Fiore 2017, overleaf). These are not cavalier or spontaneous shows; the work is as conceptual as it is unapologetically physical. Matta-Clark uses notes, photography, and film to diagram, document, and display his undoings. He compares a cut building to a dance partner; rhymes and puns about “thresholes” (Richard 2009). Attuned to fleshing out the “unvisible”, his work seeks out ways of “MAKING THE RIGHT / CUT SOMEWHERE / BETWEEN THE SUPPORTS / AND COLLAPSE.”4 Made without any kind of permission, Bronx Floors (1972‒1973) takes aim at the modernist urban housing and renewal strategies changing his hometown turf (New York City) amidst the downturns of urban deindustrialization in the early 1970s. “Work with abandoned structures began with my concern for the life of the city. The availability of empty and neglected structures was a prime textual reminder of the ongoing fallacy of renewal through modernization” (Moure 2006, 141). Of course, those very same pockmarked city blocks (institutional failure) that so attracted Matta-Clark also show Neoliberal designs “undoing” things, too, converting neighborhoods into highways, for instance, and morphing public to private modes of governance (Brown 2015). Art in America Associate Editor Rachel Wetzler (2018, online) explains:

3 Laurie Anderson, Tina Girouard, Carol Goodden, Suzanne Harris, Jene Highstein, Bernard Kirschenbaun, Richard Landry, Richard Nonas, and Gordon Matta-Clark. 4 See Gordon Matta-Clark, “Making the Right Cut Somewhere between the Supports and Collapse”, https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/search/details/collection/object/369441

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For Matta-Clark, the appeal of the Bronx was partly pragmatic: these interventions could take place without permission because there was rarely anyone to ask. As property values plummeted, thousands of building owners stopped paying their mortgages and simply walked away. (Others set the structures on fire for the insurance money.) As the artist recalled in a 1977 interview, the buildings he explored in the South Bronx were “not part of anybody’s protective property motive”, leaving them free for the taking.

With a resume of creative cuts and voids that include collaborative and participatory projects, Matta-Clark’s Bronx Floors stages architectural actions that use material components to fight for the right to the city (Lefebvre), exposing, in a word, precarity: the thin lines dividing neighbors (people), between upstairs and downstairs (classes), occupation and eviction (the unhomely), good and bad building codes (municipal services). The work also labors between square, polygon, and circle (forms), wood and linoleum (materials), and finally the matter of memory and oblivion (let’s call it dasein, to do with being and time). As “social sculpture”, Matta-Clark replays the open secret of urban infrastructure as the critical thing to be exploited, challenged, and changed.5 Moving from static to dynamic compositions, Matta-Clark uses architectural tools to revise and rework infrastructural disavowals of space itself. Those disavowals are, in a sense, Matta-Clark’s primary material: “the unseen.” Ruin and destruction are no accident; they come of seriality and systems, they are made to happen. The “organic” jagged outlines of those quadrilaterals and polygons ripped from the surrounding torn plaster ornament Matta-Clark’s volumetric study with object lessons of violence ‒ state violence. “The city is just waiting for the social and physical condition [of the South Bronx] to deteriorate to the point that the borough can redevelop the whole area into the industrial park they really want” (Wetzler 2018, online). If architecture is a regulating system, Matta-Clark denounces its everyday monuments with “destructural punctuation”; he wants to reroute it. “What I do to buildings is what some do with languages and others with groups of people: I organize them in order to explain and defend the need for change” (Moure 2006, 120). Treating anarchitecture as a field of permeable structures reveals its propensities to both pull apart and to bind: a grid complex that is riddled with openings.6 If the element of social critique stands out in Matta-Clark’s architectural sculpture, it bears repeating that its conceptual and formal interventions into making way for new spaces to emerge are no less rigorous. “FOOD”, for instance, served as a reconstruction site, a local and low-cost restaurant, a collaborative meeting place for artists, and a source of employment. The architectural actions of Matta-Clark’s “building cuts” creates new and three-dimensional openings, sightlines, and circuits

5 For discussion of the affinities between Matta-Clark and the “social sculpture” of Joseph Beuys, see Jordan 2017. 6 See Gordon Matta- Clark, “Photograph for Series A (Bronx Floor), 3A.” https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/search/details/collection/object/378345

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of movement ‒ ventilation, sound, light, volumetric flow, breathe, sustenance ‒ suddenly drawing connections between previously blocked and seemingly disconnected spaces in the grid complex. Instead of inhabitable spaces, the questions of access and passage to the habitable emerge. The structural exposure draws attention to the material production of things, and to the possibility of changing nervous and unhomely conditions. Literally and figuratively, vertigo is as central to this anarchitectural kinetic sculpture as dance and hard labor, its aerial lift floating skywards meeting the counteracting downwards force of chainsaws and hammers, while the sheer plunging canyons of unsurvivable depths are met with a rising disquiet, confounding the differences between interior and exterior spaces as intimately constructed political conjectures. In art historian Pamela M. Lee’s deft reading, “Matta-Clark’s work is a politics of things approaching their social exhaustion and the potential of their reclamation.”7 As a whole, Matta-Clark’s anarchitecture adroitly summons a gripping problem called non-locality, which in Physics holds that separated particles communicate with each other constantly despite being far apart ‒ the kind of scientific paradox that “may force us to revise our entire understanding of the structure of space itself” (Al-Khalili 2020, xvi). Typically, objects in the physical world are directly influenced only by their immediate surroundings. If one thing, or point, in space effects the other it is because there is something in the space between those points, such as a field that mediates the action. In the cut shafts of Bronx Floors, distant parts can be perceived as connected, and as exacting force on other elements, despite the conventional designs that would separate and isolate them. Matta-Clark’s cutting exposes three dimensional openings, sightlines, and circuits of movement that redirect public attention to the built environment as a thing that is made up of tiered, or stacked, layers of materials that are also tiered and stacked layers of systems. Those stacks have something to say to each other, and there are correspondences and connections between otherwise denied points and blurred plots.8 Looking between the layers of floors and walls and doors and stairways ‒ and chutes that have no name, save for vectors of volumetric void ‒ reveals such disavowals as material properties, lethal forms of debilitation in the grid complex.

7 “It is a politics of the art object in relation to property; of the right to the city alienated by capital and the state, of the retrieval of lost spaces; of communities reimagined in the wake of their disappearance; a politics of garbage and things thrown away” (Lee 2001, xvi). 8 See Haacke 1971 (2021, online), a series of photo-and-text panels indicting New York City slumlord Harry Shapolsky.

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Forensic Architecture / Oceanography: Of Mesh and Mutiny Motion is the source of pattern making (Lucy Lippard and John Chandler 1971, 256).

Founded in 2010, Eyal Weizman’s award-winning multidisciplinary research group, Forensic Architecture, supplies another approach to debilitation and displacement detection. Investigating human rights violations around the world, Weizman explains Forensic Architecture began with the Palestine conflict, where “crimes were committed in the most basic gesture of architecture – lines drawn on paper” (2018, 137). Based at Goldsmiths University in London, Forensic Architecture is also a new field of cartographic study that applies forensic data collection capacities (typically associated with the powers of state surveillance and security agencies) back onto the sites and crimes of state violence  – making it a “counter-forensics” operation. For Allen Sekula, “Counter forensics, the exhumation and identification of the anonymized (‘disappeared’) bodies of the oppressor state victims, becomes the key to a process of political resistance and mourning” (1993, 54). Another way to put it is that Forensic Architecture “deals with the application of architectural facts to legal problems” (Paegelow 2001), by presenting their findings at international courts, truth commissions, human rights reports, and increasingly, museums (in Spain, Mexico, Italy, Sweden, Germany, England, China, and the US).9 Focusing on built environments, Forensic Architecture’s oceanographic team, Forensic Oceanography (2011), conducts investigations about the topographies of displacement that are both spectacular and hidden on the seas. Founders Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani write, “If geography expresses in its very etymology the possibility to write and therefore read the surface of the earth, the liquid territory of the sea seems to stand as the absolute challenge to spatial analysis” (2014, 657). Taking it as their mission to respond to such a formal challenge, Forensic Oceanography reports seek to show how state and nonstate actors systematically violate migrant human rights, mapping the knowable evidence of migrant and EU digitalities in place and time with things like vessel tracking technologies and distress signals. Subsequent writings further dispute EU border control attempts to make the Mediterranean an unknowable site of “irregular” mobility, in which migrant risk is made to appear as grotesque charade of unfathomable invisibility (Heller et al. 2017). For instance, with “Death by Rescue: The Lethal Effects of Non-Assistance at Sea” (2016) Forensic Oceanography synchronizes evidence showing the movements of air-

9 On February 19, 2020, Weizman was denied entry to the US, on his way to Forensic Architecture’s first major US exhibition (in Miami, Florida), Forensic Architecture: True to Scale.

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Figure 11.1: Death by Rescue Report 1, 2017.

craft as well as commercial, state, and migrant sea vessels to document responsibility for the clearly avoidable deaths of over 1,000 migrants in the Central Mediterranean Sea in April, 2015 (see Fig. 11.1). The crime has happened before and will be repeated again. The lesson (morally and legally normative) is clear: “Migrants do not only die at sea but through a strategic use of the sea” (Heller and Pezzani 2014, 658). While Forensic Oceanography emphasizes the chances migrants take by crossing the Mediterranean in small boats, no less important is the staging of trans-Mediterranean migration as a risk to Europe itself. Treating data as witness testimony, teams of architects, filmmakers, artists, scientists, software developers, journalists, and lawyers produce “evidence files” that include interviews, field work, archival research, open source data, smart phone data, sonar, radar and lidar scanning, photogrammetry, meteorology, digital images, animations, video analysis and 3-D models (for example) to produce interactive cartographies that replay specific sequences of events in space and time.10 Surveying such repositories of information, Forensic Architecture and

10 What’s not on the map: black sites and black operations (black ops), hiding prisoner of war camps, rendition centers, zones of detention made to disappear from public view (see Thompson and Paglen 2006).

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Forensic Oceanography clearly demonstrate that all kinds of information systems are “real.” Weizman avers, “We do not have at our disposal the same access to technologies and information that rich states, corporations, and their militaries might be able to muster. We sometimes have only weak signals at the threshold of detectability with which to disrupt the flood of obfuscating messages and attempts at denial” (2018, 128). None of it would be possible without using tools developed by state and commercial data collecting and surveillance powers, or, without the use of simple perspectival grids. Weizman explains how the photogrammetry process works to combine the two: Unlike the randomly disturbed grains of analog photography, digital images, such as satellite images, are divided into a grid of equal square units, or pixels. This grid filters reality like a sieve or fishing net. Objects larger than the grid are captured and retained. Smaller ones pass through and disappear. Objects close to the size of the pixel are in a special threshold condition: whether they are captured or not depends on the relative skill, or luck, of the fisherman and the fish (2018, 27).

Let us not be fooled by fish stories; usually, they are allegories of authority (Sekula 1995, 183). There is no doubt that integrating the physical and material with digital realities is the game of the future11; or, that the promise of biometrics is as compromised by the controls of state agencies as it is by commercial interests. While the use of dragnet geofence warrants remains controversial, nongovernmental migrant rights organizations such as Heller and Pezzani’s WatchTheMed also use what digital data they can for humanitarian ends. It is in such contexts that Forensic Architecture  / Oceanography’s new cartography aims to map the complicated plurality of legal structures and jurisdictions defining Mediterranean nomoscapes; and, to cross-reference multiple evidentiary data systems, the better to locate spatial understandings of cross-Mediterranean movement that are otherwise hidden ‒ no small feat on either count. Layering such polysemous stacks of information into 3-D digital models allows Forensic Oceanography to present the Mediterranean, for instance, as a built environment, a useful intervention (see Fig. 11.2). In a sense, Forensic Architecture’s signature approach to data mining and reenactment with 3D modeling is also an act of mimicry, the assimilation of clandestine state and commercial data flows used for surveillance repurposed to expose and challenge those very same powers ‒ as if serving notice to the intelligence agencies and technology corporations that power the Five Eyes Consortium (for instance) that they “have company.” That mimicry has its drawbacks ‒ namely, repeating the optics

11 In MIT MediaLab parlance, the technological utopianism of “being digital” (Negroponte) accelerates into the twenty first century rush of “being material”, programming the mesh of organic and other things with software, like engineering the connecting points of DNA on a string ‒ one geometric line and algorithmic step at a time (Boucher 2019).

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Figure 11.2: Death by Rescue Report 2, 2017.

politics of the FRONTEX border spectacle, which only addresses migration control strategy at Europe’s geographic frontiers.12 The question of which spatial techniques can be martialed to counteract spatial controls anticipates the necessity of thinking (again) in terms of “social sculpture”, which is to ask, what phenomenology of proximity and distance obtains? In whose interest? (Padrón 2021, online). It is fair to say that Forensic Architecture’s appropriation of digital capture and modeling techniques puts machinic vision to work for social justice, but then again, those things can be put to just about any use. First developed for the television and film industry’s virtual reality applications, 3-D modeling is now also used by police and military intelligence agencies to record and detect three-dimensional information in the real world, sur-

12 UNHCR figures also report arrivals by land and sea, but FRONTEX statements to the effect that the Western Mediterranean “is the most frequently used route into Europe” are misleading. Airlines deliver the majority of asylum claimants to Spain: in 2019, nearly 80% of Spanish asylum claims were made by people fleeing Venezuela, Honduras, Colombia, and El Salvador (over 118,000 people). “Irregular” migrants landing by sea numbered far fewer (32,000), although it is difficult to assess how many more plan to apply for asylum in Spain, and how many died at sea. Meanwhile, in 2019 Spain granted 8,061 “golden visas”, mostly from China, India, Russia, the US, and Brazil (Aranda 2020, online).

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veying faces, crowds, cities, and the seas. Largely as a result of such policing, global publics grow increasingly aware that computational models are severely limited by what’s programmed into them, altogether distorting “justice.” As grid method, 3-D digital modeling synchronizes evidence to produce detailed maps of information. Using 3-D “meshing”, computer-aided digital engineering tools simulate forms by breaking them up into smaller geometric pieces, “stitching” them together to build a whole polygon mesh of solid forms ‒ like people, pateras (small vessels carrying migrants), cargo container ships, Coast Guard rescue ships, and the swelling sea itself. Geometric modeling software uses algorithms to detect, measure, and record fields of motion; and to generate mathematical descriptions of meshed shapes. Research dedicated to the problem of mesh-to-mesh intersections and self-intersections point out that 3-D modeling requires the correct computation of “meshed” parts: the problem is how to get the grid right. Pythagoras or even Mercator might have said the same, whether calculating the geometry, or, coordinating the research that could be stitched together on large scrolls containing highly coveted (and fiercely protected) information. In Forensic Architecture / Oceanography cartographies, then, there’s a definite ripple of Westphalian stuttering, not just where the laws and logistics of rescue, rights, and sovereignty blatantly double back again to repel, detain, and control populations, but in the strategic redeployment of small armies of machinic eyes, as well. In that stutter and non-blinking eye pass an eternity. What does it mean when “vision loses importance and is replaced by filtering, decrypting, and pattern recognition?” (Steyerl 2016, online). That poignant question gestures towards a history of disavowals in the grid complex that includes and precludes forcibly displaced peoples. What we see today is “a form of massification” that is state violence ‒ one Jasbir Puar explains as a targeted debilitation process that works by foreclosure, deliberate processes of political, economic, and social exclusion involving “the slow wearing down of populations” (Puar 2017, xv‒xvii). The point is to make the unwanted so debilitated (by poverty, and social death) that they disappear. As the Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe puts it, “The great contemporary problem is what to do with those considered to count for nothing, or not for much, and whose contemporary figure is that of the migrant. What juridical status, what mechanism, what treatment should be put in place for those who are, in practice, reduced to the level of mere waste?” (in Confavreux 2020, online). Floating nomads no more, Mbembe protests the making of Mediterranean crossers into disposable peoples. Such observations gel with the idea that “massification” functions at the level of the machinic eye, as well, treating everything in its field as objects of computation – and even as hyperobjects (which is a name for the treatment of masses of things that are so vast in their impact and so largely dispersed that they can be interpreted as things that are severed from habitual ways of knowing, making it difficult to place them in specific place and time), even as they are viscuous, and touch everything (Morton 2013; emphasis added). The equivocalities of evidentiary testimony thus grow more, not less,

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ambivalent (Nielsen 2018): that “the sea itself can be turned into a witness for interrogation” (Forensic Architecture 2014, 658) is as chilling as it is potentially enlightening (Steinberg 2013). And what is to be done about the fact that “an error is sometimes more truthful than a faithful Cartesian description”? (Weizman 2020, online). In any case, it is readily apparent that narratives about those on the move only hint at the question of how migrants themselves do things with grids, though we can infer both visibility and invisibility strategies: tapping into AlarmPhone, for instance, is a way to send out geolocated distress signals (call +33 4 86 51 71 61). In the end, Forensic Architecture / Oceanography narratives deliberately focus their powers on states and their border control systems (rather than solely on individual, subjective experience or narrative) to advance humanitarian missions. Like fish stories, border stories supply the filter that reinforces what states seek to do with them (Davitti 2018). Any way you look at it, accounting for mobility is a filtrating business. In the telling of mobility stories, some things pass through while others are held back. Text is as textile does. Carefully, then, Shinyang curator Lu Zhao describes Forensic Architecture’s work as staging the conundrum of “bruised information, dwelling on the surface of the incident” (Wu Space 2020). On the one hand, the terms of Mediterranean governance are not altogether “new.” Historically seafaring powers that dominate not just landlocked but always seascape territorialities, Mediterranean thalassocracies were naval powers, with trade jurisdictions generating networks of landed nodes called ports, cities, and islands, as well as watery nodes of control (straights, bays, rivers, marshes). While there is much to say about the history of treaties that named seas “free”, thalassocratic nomoscapes only ever offered contingent passage. A sketch allows that the Dutch Mare Liberum (Hugo Grotius, 1609) and English Mare Clausum (English John Seldon, 1631) refer to two stages in a process of wresting the high seas from Spain and Portugal; the first a race to compete for Empire, and the second to retain control of the seas for themselves, establishing the concept of territorial waters (and protected fisheries). Like “free trade”, they are free in the sense that they are highly regulated spaces of state-led privateering, whose “logistics are one of the most heavily privatized areas of contemporary warfare”, then and now (Cowen 2014, 3). So while borders can be used to differentiate what falls outside from the inside (Salter 2004) ‒ border controls are no longer always situated at the line of territorial borders but at “regional disembarkation centers” (defacto detention centers). Such is the case when Spain draws up bilateral agreements with Morocco, for instance, to control Northward mobility before migrants even make it to the Mediterranean; or, when FRONTEX disembarks refugees in Senegal (Monroy 2020). Thus, the border is also made up of a sequence of connecting points, or “Integrated Border Management” propositions (like all lines are). The proliferation of “the border” as a network system whose institutions can operate anywhere projects the coordination of the line’s points as volumetric interface. So conceived, the border weaponizes not just the usual architectures (enclosures), but also lays siege to shatter zones and zones of refuge – previously out of the way places, James C. Scott calls them, for the marginal

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and mobile (2009). In Etienne Balibar’s reading, “As soon as borders become differentiated and multiple once again – once they begin to constitute a grid ranging over the new social space, and cease simply to border it from the outside – then the alternative lies between an authoritarian, and indeed violent, intensification of all forms of segregation, and a democratic radicalism which has as its aim to deconstruct the institution of the border” (2002, 84). Any way you look at it, border networks are the fruit of no single polysemic mesh. None of this is necessarily cast aside in the case studies of Forensic Architecture / Oceanography research. What Forensic Architecture  / Oceanography offers is a set of propositions aimed at specific constituents and audiences. For those on the move surviving Mediterranean hazards, it’s the chance to contribute to the story that is being told about them, and to have their testimony confirmed. For courts and jurists, the opportunity to change public policy. For lawyers and human rights organizations fighting state violence, it’s the sharing of collaborative resources to advocate for social justice. For historians, it’s material to interpret and record the history of state violences. For the teams of highly specialized professionals that work with Forensic Architecture /Oceanography, it’s the opportunity to make a difference. For technical workers (“computer geniuses”), it’s a chance to deliver on Norbert Weiner’s original cybernetic promise, which is the profound interconnectedness of systems with human agency: people, Weiner insisted, are the source and destiny of all systems design controls (1954). For the rest of us, museum exhibits keep publics in the loop, so that we may participate in some kind of collective assessment of what’s going on in the world. Detailed essays published in print and online accompany its practice. At issue is the question of scale. Forensic Architecture / Oceanography’s emphasis on layered tiers of evidence that are not generated by any single agency showcases the formidable powers of the machinic eye to control and issue spatial distance. Matta-Clark’s use of architectural tools to undo architectural controls, by contrast, deals strictly in human perception, where “social sculpture” mobilizes the grid complex to provoke the imaginary, and, local insurrection. I think the distinction is not inconsequential. This is not to debate the merits of human versus distributed perception; it is simply to notice that they are fundamentally different things. At the human scale, the matter of passing through the boundaries (crossing borders), choosing and clearing out (leaving for other futures), with a complete devotion to getting away with it (no matter what) arguably refer to mobility practices ‒ where motion is the source of new pattern making; mobility, the effort to deflect the violences of displacement; and mutiny, the apex of self-care and self-organization. They are recipes for action. Matta-Clark’s statements issue general guidelines and directions, a model and manual anyone could recognize and use, a series of destructural punctuation strategies to deploy ‒ in sum, they supply an open-ended exploration into the question of how to do things with grids. What Forensic Architecture /Oceanography do with the mapping of the networks of grid systems they redeploy, is to make those distancing systems and machinic eyes

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visible, as plotted things in themselves. Putting the spotlight onto vast and seemingly untouchable surveillance systems makes them into objects of material witness. Small wonder, then, that Mbembe adapts the monolithic architectural term, Brutalisme, as a way to describe the inescapable escalations of control paradigms redefining today’s global societies (2020). Brutalism refers, above all, to questions of scale. Building with raw concrete polygons is a Mediterranean cultural norm; but it is the Brutalist behemoth, gigantist construction blocks characterized by rigid geometric form that characterize Mbembe’s concerns. The raw art of “béton cru” refers to its chief building material, raw concrete. Briefly, concrete is made by the heated churning of raw materials (such as limestone, iron, silica, alumina, and gypsum) that are added to sand and gravel, ground into a fine powder, mixed with air and water, and pressed into molded form.13 Mbembe sees in such Brutalist utilitarian plasticity the designs of twenty-first century commercial and political institutions.14 Combining mechanical and digital powers, the processing of raw materials presents unprecedented scenario in which “there is no longer anything human that is not also consumable, that is to say, which escapes the realm of calculation […] Capital now seeks to extend its grip not only to the bottom of the ocean or to the stars, but also to atoms, cells and neurons” (Confavreux 2020, online). Such a revolution, Mbembe says, imposes a powerful new iteration of coloniality ‒ an algorithmic power that is directed towards the forcible capture of human among other natural resources. Thinking global pasts and futures together, it is the regime of brute force and remote calculability – the material combinations of physical and digital powers ‒ that sways Mbembe’s analysis, and Forensic Architecture /Oceanography reckons.

Rumbo a ‒ Refugees are the sharpest dialecticians. They’ve become refugees as a result of changes, and they spend all their time studying changes (Bertolt Brecht 2019, 153).

Taking the grid back to the seas demands a fulsome re-set and review of more than a few grid logics. The Roman designation, Mare Nostrum, for instance, refers to the imperial idea that the coastal peoples of the Mediterranean constitute a regional community, with centuries of commercial and cultural connections bonding them (Braudel 1966). At second glance, Mare Nostrum also contains within it AbdouMa-

13  As an “environmentally friendly” concrete alternative, the United Arab Emirates showcases sabkhas, salt flats created from salts and minerals extracted from waste brine, at the 2021 Venice Architecture Bienniale. 14 See “Toward a Concrete Utopia: Yugoslavia Architecture, 1948‒1980”, MOMA 2018.

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liq Simone’s unforgettable reminder that infrastructure is not made of borders, port cities, boats, or trading routes alone: people are infrastructure15, cueing mobility and motion as a source of grid architectonics (‘social sculpture’) and non-locality its score. Moving with Simone’s insight offers but one example of what it could mean “to alter a structure that still exists as a bad memory until it is transformed into something that gives way to hope and fantasy” ‒ Matta-Clark’s signature move (Richard 2019, 391). As to what that means for anarchitectures of navigability looking forward, I will close by saying this: it was not until 1537 that the Portuguese mathematician, Pedro de Nunes (1502‒1578, of Jewish origin), a specialist in spherical geometry studying navigation and nautical cartography, introduced the concept of the rhumb line: a spiral course, or curve, that would change navigation history by enabling ships to sail in a constant direction, for long periods of time. Because the rhumb line is a line between two points that intersects all meridians with a constant angle, it spirals. Unlike a great circle, which charts a course in the shortest line between points but at varying angles to the meridian, sailing the rhumb line is far easier to manage. Just four years later, in 1541, the Flemish cartographer Gerard de Mercator drew those rhumb lines on a globe. In a mathematical feat of cartography (“squaring the circle”), the Mercator map projected rhumb lines onto a flat plane in 1569 (Alves Gaspar and Leitão 2016). Of course, the projection is a fiction. The rhumb line is designed to plot a route, not to look at it ‒ it is a nearing and kinetic pact, a resolving of the circulation between fields that also enacts “social sculpture”, veering in the direction of (rumbo a ‒). While it was the challenge of navigating the high seas that brought the full force of the grid’s dispositif to history’s shores, I believe it is still the rhumb line’s kinetic pact (in and of the nearby) that steadies the grid’s material futures: MAKING THE RIGHT CUT SOMEWHERE BETWEEN THE SUPPORTS AND COLLAPSE.

15 Included in the Mediterranean’s pasts (and in the Africas of today), Simone explains: “A new urban infrastructure is being built with the very bodies and life stories of city residents, but what kind of city is being put together is not clear. This ambiguity is not only a reality that urban residents must face but also seem to author. In many cities, this process of making urban life opaque is reflected in the architectures of movement and dwelling. There, the layout of many quarters is meant to always confound those who try to make any clear statements about what is going on or clear plans for how these quarters should operate” (2003, 1).

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References Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. Portsmouth, NH: William Heineman Press, 1958. Al-Khalili, Jim. The World According to Physics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. Alves Gaspar, Joaquim, and Henrique Leitão. “How Mercator Did It: From Tables of Rhumbs to Cartographic Projection.” European Mathematical Society Newsletter, March (2016): 44‒49. Aranda, José Luis. «España batima por séptima vez el record de visados dorados: entregó más de 8.000 en 2019.» El País, May 19, 2020. Accessed May 19, 2020. https://elpais.com/ economia/2020-05-18/espana-bate-por-septima-vez-el-record-de-visados-dorados-entregomas-de-8000-en-2019.html Balibar, Étienne. “What is a Border?” Politics and the Other Scene, 75–86. London, New York: Verso, 2002. Bessa, Sergio Antonio, and Jessamyne Fiore. Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect. Bronx, NY: The Bronx Museum of Arts and Yale University Press, 2017. Boucher, Marie-Pier, Stefan Helmreich, Leila W. Kinney, Skylar Tibbits, Rebecca Uchill, and Evan Ziporyn. Being Material. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019. Bratton, Benjamin. The Stack: Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016. Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Trans. Sían Reynolds, vol. 1 (3 vols). New York: Harper Collins Press, 1972. Brecht, Bertolt. Refugee Conversations. London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2019. Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2015. Burnham, Jack. “Systems Esthetics.” Artforum 7, 1 (1968): 30‒35. Canguilham, George. The Normal and the Pathological. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Confavreux, Joseph. “Long Read: Africa, Strength in Reserve for Earth.” New Frame, July 30. 2020. Accessed February 2, 2021. https://www.newframe.com/long-read-africa-strength-in-reservefor-earth/ Cowen, Deborah. The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Davitti, Daria. “Biopolitical Borders and the State of Exception in the European Migration ‘Crisis’.” European Journal of International Law 29, 4 (2018): 1173–1196. Forensic Oceanography. “Death by Rescue: The Lethal effects of Non-Assistance at Sea.” 2016. Accessed March 7, 2021. https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/death-by-rescue-thelethal-effects-of-non-assistance-at-sea Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. New York: Penguin Press, 2004. Forensic Architecture. Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth. London: Sternberg Press and Forensic Architecture, 2014. Frederick, Matthew. 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007. FRONTEX. “Migratory Routes.” Accessed January 3, 2021. https://frontex.europa.eu/along-euborders/migratory-routes/western-mediterranean-route/ Haacke, Hans. Installation entitled “Shapolsky et al., Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971”, 1971. MACBA Foundation, 2021. Accessed February 3, 2021. https://www.macba.cat/en/art-artists/artists/haacke-hans/shapolsky-et-al-manhattan-realestate-holdings-real-time-social Heller, Charles, and Lorenzo Pezzani. “Liquid Traces: Investigating the Deaths of Migrants at the EU’s Maritime Frontier.” In Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, edited by Forensic Architecture, 657‒684. London: Sternberg Press and Forensic Architecture, 2014. Heller, Charles and Lorenzo Pezzani and Maurice Stierl. “Disobedient Sensing and Border Struggles at the Maritime Frontier of Europe.” Spheres: Journal for Digital Cultures, Media and Migration

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4 (2017): 1–15. Accessed September 7, 2020. https://spheres-journal.org/contribution/disobedient-sensing- and-border-struggles-at-the-maritime-frontier-of-europe/ Jordan, Cara M. “Directing Energy: Gordon Matta-Clark’s Pursuit of Social Sculpture.” In Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect, edited by Sergio Antonio Bessa, and Jessamyne Fiore, 37‒63. Bronx, NY: The Bronx Museum of Arts and Yale University Press, 2017. Kastner, Jeffrey. “A System is Not Imagined.” Places Journal August, 2020. Accessed February 3, 2021. https://placesjournal.org/article/hans-haacke-a-system-is-not-imagined/ Krauss, Rosalind. “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” October 8 (1979): 31‒44. Lee, Pamela M. Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999. Lefebvre, Henri. Le Droit a la ville. Paris: Anthropos, 1968. LeWitt, Sol. “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.” Artforum 5, 10 (1967): 79‒83. Lippard, Lucy, and John Chandler. “The Dematerialization of Art.” In Changing: Essays in Art Criticism, edited by Lucy R. Lippard, 46‒50. New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1971. Matta-Clark, Gordon. “Making the Right Cut between Supports and Collapse.” Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture /Canadian Centre for Architecture, Gordon Matta-Clark Collection, 1914‒2008, Textual Records: 1970‒1978. Gift of Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark. Accessed October 2, 2020. https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/search/details/collection/object/369441 Mbembe, Achille. Brutalisme. Paris: Editiones La Découvert, 2020. Monroy, Matthias. “Frontex Wants to Disembark Refugees from Senegal.” Security Architectures and Police Collaboration in the EU, March 1, 2020. Accessed February 3, 2021. https://digit.site36. net/2020/03/01/frontex-wants-to-disembark-refugees-in-senegal/ Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Moure, Gloria. Gordon Matta-Clark: Works and Collected Writings. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and Ediciones Polígrafa, 2006. Negroponte, Nicolas. Being Digital. New York: Knopf, 1995. Nielsen, Lara D. “This Kinetic World: Rethinking the Grid (Neo-Baroque Calls).” Performance Philosophy 3, 1 (2017): 285‒309. Nielsen, Lara D. “Freedom with Silence: Cryptoanalytics and the Differend in the Afterlives of Legal Things.” In Law and Performance, edited by Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglass, and Martha Merrill Umphrey, 156‒206. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018. Padrón, Ricardo. “The Phenomenology of Distance in Early Modern Hispanic Geopolitics.” Stanford Humanities Center’s lectures, February 24, 2021. Accessed March 9, 2021. https://shc.stanford. edu/multimedia/all-rising-humanities-next-ten-years-0 Paegelow, Dale. Forensic Architecture: An Introduction. Patterson: Cromlech Architect, 2001. Puar, Jasbir K. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Richard, Francis. “Spacism: Gordon Matta-Clark and the Politics of Shared Space.” Places Journal, March, 2019. Accessed November 15, 2020. https://placesjournal.org/article/gordon-mattaclark-spacism/#0 Richard, Francis. “Lexical Holes.” Canadian Center for Architecture, Gordon Matta-Clark Collection, 2009. Accessed February 4, 2021. https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/articles/924/lexical-holes. Salter, Mark B. “Passports, Mobility, and Security: How Smart Can the Border Be?” International Studies Perspectives 5, 1 (2004): 71–91. Scott, James C. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Sekula, Allan. “Photography and the Limits of National Identity.” CultureFront 2, 3 (1993): 54‒55. Sekula, Allan. Fish Story. London: MACK, 2018.

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Simone, AbdouMaliq. “For the City Yet to Come: Remaking Urban Life in Africa.” “Mapping Africa” conference lecture, Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, February 17, 2003. Steinberg, Philip E. “Of Other Seas: Metaphors and Materialities in Maritime Regions.” Atlantic Studies 10, 2 (2013): 156‒169. Steyerl, Hito. “A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis)Recognition.” E-flux 72 (2016), online. Accessed March 7, 2021. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/72/60480/a-sea-of-data-apopheniaand-pattern-mis-recognition/ Thompson, A.C., and Trevor Paglen. Torture Taxi on the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights. Hoboken, NJ: Melville Publishing House, 2006. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). “Refugees and Migrants Arriving in Spain”, 2019. Accessed February 10, 2020. https://data2.unhcr.org/en/country/esp Weiner, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings. Cambridge MA: Riverside Press, 1950. Weizman, Eyal. Forensic Architecture. New York: Zone Books, 2018. Weizman, Eyal. “The Architecture of Memory.” E-flux, November 7, 2020. Accessed November 8, 2020. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/confinement/357171/the-architecture-of-memory/ Wetzler, Rachel. „Gut Renovation.“ Art in America, March 1, 2018. Accessed June 6, 2020. https:// www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/gut-rennovation-63474/ Wu Space. “Forensic Architecture: To Pattern Bruised Information.” Exhibition presented October 9, 2020 to May 2, 2021. Curated by Lu Zhao. Shenyang, China.

Shaul Tzemach, Anti-morphia, Generative Interactive Animation Installation, 2020 (courtesy of the artist).

Part IV: Grids of Learning: Linguistic, Virtual, Visual

Similarly to the three chapters that compose this Part, Anti-morphia establishes a relationship between the virtual, visual and real worlds through learning experience. The viewer constitutes the center of the piece, who, in his very bodily gestures, triggers a series of processes that uncover the different layers of each of these two worlds and their conceptual contexts. In this way, the “grid”, which otherwise could be understood as a geometric linear structure, becomes associated with organic, biological and non-linear structures. These structures are embodied in logarithmic functions and scientific morphological principles (presented through a multifunctional VVVV software). In this way, the “organic” becomes elusive, undefinable, infinite. Anti-morphia’s immediate responsiveness to the bodily movements of the viewer and its real-time reaction and interaction with the viewer echo again some key themes that traverse the chapters of this Part. This is in terms of virtual realities, gamified activity, and applicable science education.

Nava Shaked

12 The Linguistics Relation in the Virtual Grid: A Digital Dialogue Abstract: In the digital world, language is undergoing a change effected by the technologies available to users in order to create a special interaction between humans and machines. This interaction is part of a new linguistic grid. A language grid that is based on dialogue involving intentions, inferences, and knowledge. Its occurrence in the virtual world is very much based on the pragmatics of the real world. This chapter will discuss the nature of this Digital Dialogue between humans and machines and show its bi-directionality. The freedom to express our thoughts and opinions through language forms a creative approach to digital interaction. We take elements from our virtual world back into real life and use them in a casual, everyday dialogue among humans. The globalization of language is a byproduct of this phenomena.  For instance, we borrow elements, such as linguistic structure, from the digital-world dialogue and adopt a machine-oriented syntax to create a new lexicon that is now a legitimate language in the real world. Similarly, in software language, we create objects to reflect a set of announcements and emotions (such as emoji or memes) which we deploy linguistically. What we see now, this chapter contends, is an evolution of over fifteen years of Internet, social networks, and instant messaging penetrating into every linguistic sphere of our lives. In this way, similarly to the era of the Industrial Revolution, the digital era has created new types of interactions. These include the huge amount of time we spend in the virtual worlds of gaming, social and educative entertainment, and infotainment. Using artificial intelligence “improves” all these interactions to the point that sometimes it is hard to determine which is the machine and who is the human. Keywords: Linguistics; Computational Linguistics; virtual world; human-machine interaction; Internet language; digital dialogue; computer-mediated communication

Language has no independent existence apart from the people who use it. It is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end of understanding who you are and what society is like (David Crystal in Lo-Dico 2010, online source).

Introduction: The Digital Era, The Change The Digital Revolution has already taken place and technology, apps, mobile devices, and avatars are now our daily companions. Millennials, or members of Generation Y (born after 1980), find that “smart” technologies are integrated into their work and

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private lives. Users live in a mobile environment based on state-of-the-art digital capabilities and look to interact intensively in order to receive information, collect data, obtain services, and perform actions. They aspire to flexible, efficient, easy-to-use interactions. In the digital era, language evolves side by side with technology, supporting its advancement and adapting new components required to leverage technological capabilities. All linguistic levels change to match the skills required for communicating in the digital space. We now witness the emergence of new lexicons, new grammatical/syntactic forms, slang, and professional terms, as well as the use of visual icons to reflect new dimensions of emphasis, emotions, and tone. The social changes brought about by the growth of this technological transformation are reflected in users’ habits and behaviors, as well as in the way they communicate, consume products, socialize, and interact. This means, for instance, that language is adapted to communicate in a digital dialogue with your Personal Assistant (PA), your Instant Messaging app (IM), or your health avatar, coupled with a friendly user interface that fits anywhere, anytime. The elderly population, which is growing massively, is creating a new balance of market forces acting on the interaction domain

Language

A Digital Dialog

Technology

Figure 12.1: Circles.

that requires the adaptation and adoption of new communication methodologies and technologies. The same is also true regarding children and challenged populations. Each segment has adapted different communication skills and digital languages (Shaked and Artelt 2016). The two powerful grids of language and technology have created an entirely new way of communication, that is, a third grid of digital dialogue and interaction. This chapter describes the communication grid resulting from the availability of technologies in the new digital environment. The digital dialogue has developed beyond the Internet language since we moved to platforms such as social media, bots and PA, gaming, and more. The digital dialogue is a bi-directional one, and on top of being associated with social and cultural interactions, it combines personalization throughout all types of platforms and users (Fig. 12.1).

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Language as a Grid The classical linguistic levels are phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. In each of these levels, Computational Linguistics uses algorithms and technological tools to transfer knowledge to the computer so as to enable it to process natural language (i.e., the field of Natural Language Processing, or NLP). The technological evolution in the digital era touches the basics of language characteristics and minimizes the differences between the spoken and the written forms. As Nadia Riabtseva puts it, “Thus, many specialists express their belief that Internet has become a generator of a discursive revolution that erased differences between oral and written speech” (2016, 70). The digital world creates new possibilities of interaction that did not exist before in real-world Face to Face (FTF) interactions between humans. The grid of digital interaction and dialogue includes four levels. The definitions below emphasize their relation to language processing and generation in the digital world. a. Human-Machine Interaction: users interact with different machines/platforms/ computers to perform tasks and to obtain information and services. Interactions can involve multimodal interfaces; however, they rely mainly on language skills (such as speech or text). b. Machine-Human Interaction: the ability of those machines/platforms/computers to participate in a digital dialogue that entails “understanding” users’ requests, performing them, and responding to users through different modalities, including generating speech, text, and structured language. Technologies such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Text to Speech (TTS), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are methods developed specifically to assist with language processing.

Spoken/ Written Language Characteristics

Digital Language Characteristics

– Mostly grammatical structure – Ambiguous terms – Text/ voice mainly – Intonation, punctuation, diacritics – Emotion is conveyed through prosody – Text sentiment – Highly inferential and pragmatic – Direct (requires an audience you know)

– Highly functional – Shortcuts & acronyms – Ungrammatical phrases – Text with visual cues – Emotions conveyed through emoji – Digital expressions – Dialog with a virtual entity – Less ambiguous – Minimum punctuation – Voice message or chatting – Using language to quickly connect people or events (links) – Sending your language “out there” (indirect)

Figure 12.2: Language characteristics comparison.

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c. Machine to Machine Interaction: machines communicate with one another in the digital space to carry out activities requested by users. An example of this is the interaction between two service bots scheduling a meeting. This type of interaction may require a programing language with a special structure, but this is beyond the scope of our present discussion. d. Human to Human Interaction: the ability of users to communicate with one another or in groups through machines/platforms/computers in the digital world involves the use of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), as opposed to Face-to-Face (FTF) interaction in the real world. This mode of interaction has different rules and characteristics, as exemplified in Fig. 12.2.

Internet Language and Computer-Mediated ­Communication (CMC) In terms of linguistic phenomena, the Internet is indeed a game changer. As noted by Abdu Al-Kadi and Rashad Ahmed, who research Applied Linguistics, “The Internet has given rise to what is arguably a new variety of English that differs from standard varieties” (2018, 727). One of the levels of the interaction grid portrayed in the previous section describes a type of inter-human communication that involves the use of two or more electronic devices. This refers to the general expression CMC, that is, a collection of methods deployed by users to communicate in the digital grid. When Sara Kiesler, Jane Siegel, and Timothy McGuire (1984) coined the term CMC, they were concerned with the effects of computing on the psychological and social behavior of users. The year was 1984, in the early days of personal computing, before the advent of social media and the mobile revolution. At that point in time there was no clear indication of the type of language that people would use when communicating with each other through device-based mediation. Nadia Riabtseva (2016) claims that an important social characteristic of Internet communication is the freedom of interaction, of expressing one’s own mind and opinions, the freedom of using speech to display individualism in terms of linguistic style and language creativity. Furthermore, David Crystal (2005; 2008; 2011) believes Internet English to be a linguistic revolution. Crystal, a well-known British linguist and a researcher of the English language, is of the opinion that these changes in English form and usage have given birth to a new branch of linguistics, which he calls Internet Linguistics. The potential for writing Internet English was crucial to the development of the term “Txting”, coined by David Crystal in 2008. “Txing” is a form of written language used in Short Text Messages (SMS) and other digital communications, such as emails, that is characterized by many abbreviations and typically does not

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follow standard spelling, grammar, capitalization, and punctuation. As Crystal says, “Texting may be using a new technology, but its linguistic processes are centuries old” (2008, 4). We later find the term “Netspeaks” (as coined by Para et al. 2016) referring to the language spoken/written by power users as an Internet jargon. In the same vein, Sali Tagliamon (2016) talks about the “digital natives” generation, claiming that young users are fluidly navigating a complex set of new written registers, which they fully command. In her article “So Sick or So Cool?” she researched and analyzed a corpus of Internet language representing data regarding the self-reported language of youth (17‒21) Internet users across different types of dialogue: IM, Email, and SMS. After a vast linguistic research, she concluded that “interactive CMC by youth writing to each other on a daily basis is a flagrant mix of formal and fashionable features. The differences across registers reflect fluid command of a continuum of different styles and practices and the students command them all” (2016, 29).

Technology and Language Fusion: Use Cases We bring two examples of how new language dialects were creatively created as a result of the development of two new technology platforms: Instant Messaging (IM) and Gaming.

Use Case 1: Instant Messaging Language Instant Messaging changed language forever. The impact of what started as “txtese” (Crystal 2008) developed into Computer-Mediated Communication and later into a multimodal interaction between human users in digital platforms. Without a doubt, the mobile revolution expedited the market penetration of these technologies. Texting on smartphone technology enabled Instant Messaging (IM). Looking at the development time line of IM and interaction tools (see Fig. 12.3), we see the growing need for more complex interactions and combinations of haptics, speech, video, and more. Some technologies started as Instant Messaging and developed into social platforms and media tools with sophisticated back-end processing of Artificial Intelligence algorithms. This market is growing and expanding. In fact, in smart mobile

1996

2003

ICQ

skype

2004

2006

2009

2010

2011

2013

Gmail, Facebook Twitter WhatsApp Instagram, Viber WeChat Telegram

Figure 12.3: Time line for IM platforms.

2021 Signal

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devices, a higher percentage of communication activity is carried out through IM rather than via phone conversations. According to US business statistics: US smartphone users send and receive five times more texts than they make and receive calls. On average, Americans spend 26 minutes per day texting compared to 21 minutes per day calling. Consumers in South Korea, India, Singapore and the US prefer SMS over voice calls for customer service. Three out of ten consumers would give up phone calls to use messaging. Over 68% of consumers said they text more than they talk on their smartphones (TextMagic Blog, online source).

Use Case 2: Gaming Language Deformation Gaming platforms paved the way for the creation of new jargon by a segment of digital power users who think fast, play hard, and are very proficient with their keyboard and in the early adaptation of new technologies. Gaming terms were created in response to the need for a very functional and fast mode of communication. Gaming terms reflect this mode, as seen in Fig. 12.4. Shud – Should

BK – Back

WIS – Wisdom

Farmed – Efficiently defeated

Gnite – Good night

Ownage – Completely owned

Mod – modification

Noob – Newbie

Griefing – irritating other players

Rekt – Wrecked

Aimbot – Automatic aiming bot

Easter Egg – A hidden message

Scrub – Loser

L – Loss

Turtling – Playing defensively

Cheese – An underhanded strategy

Figure 12.4: Gaming terms.

The world of gaming is a grid of its own in which virtual words receive an additional meaning. Communication within these platforms is no doubt a fascinating research topic, but also an important step forward in the Human-Machine interaction area. The fact that “gamers”, a defined user segment, are early adapters of technology allows them to comfortably adopt the digital dialogue, not only with the gaming platform itself, but also while communicating in real time with other players in the same platform (Bawa 2018).

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Digital Dialogue: A Fusion of Two Grids We distinguish between Face to Face (FTF) dialogue, Human-Machine Interaction (HMI), and Computer-Meditated Communication (CMC). The present chapter suggests that a new type of interaction is being formed, a “Digital Dialogue” that refers to the way we interact linguistically depending on our needs, tasks, and the type of technological components available to us in the virtual world. The Digital Dialogue in the virtual grid involves intentions, inferences, and knowledge, which are very much based on the pragmatics of the real world. This assumes that both sides of the dialogue (be they humans, machine) share the same linguist level of pragmatic knowledge. On the other hand, the Digital Dialogue is conducted within the framework of the linguistics grid and depends on language acts that determine how functional, emotional, and referential the use of language should be. It is the fusion between these layers that creates the complexity, on the one hand, but also the quality of the interaction, on the other. In addition, the use of technologies like Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence to enhance language abilities and create a user experience through an intuitive, smart, intelligent interface with the ability to learn improves and personalizes the interaction. This complexity is enhanced by the growing number and types of devices, applications and platforms in which the digital dialogue is now taking place: Personal Assistants (PA), various social media platforms, Gaming, Instant Messaging, Infotainment, wearables, and more. The full multilayer grid is described in Fig. 12.5.

Language Acts

Linguistic Levels

Technology Platforms for Interaction PA

Functional

Voice only

Dialog Style

Command & control

Social media

Gaming

Inst. Msg

Infotainment Phonetic

Minimal language New expressions

Morphological

shortcuts

Lexical

emojis

Emotional

Ungrammatical Referential

Shaming language

memes

The Complexity of Digital Dialog Figure 12.5: Technology platforms for interaction.

Syntactic Data entry

SematicPragmatic

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Use Case: Virtual Interactive Entities Virtual interactive entities developed in the digital media as representatives of service providers in self-service applications. They are excellent examples of HMI at its best, the ability of machines to create an intelligent dialogue with a human ‒ a digital dialogue. Personal Assistants such as Siri entered our life in 2011 with Apple iPhones. Amazon’s Alexa appeared in 2014, and Google Assistant is currently one of the most used application in Android smartphones. We also find that Chabots and Avatars are now used on-line to provide information, knowledge, and access to services. This phenomenon is so broad today that industry provides several platforms to operate and create your own virtual entity. The language used to describe these interactive entities varies along a continuum of names: Service/Chat Bot, Virtual/Personal Assistant, Virtual/ Conversational Agent, Avatar, Humanoid. What they all have in common is the ability to create a digital dialogue of different qualities. We claim that is it possible to categorize the multiple existing interaction entities, and propose a grid-based framework based on their different features or characteristics, Fig. 12.6 is just an example of such a grid, which can be enhanced with more features as technological development progresses. Qualities Visual – Personification Type of VA

Voice Enabled

Text Enable

Service Bot

V

V

Chat Bot

ML-Based Dialog

V

V

Virtual Assistance Personal Assistance Conversational Agent Virtual Agent

V

V

Simple/Min Personal 3rd Party Interaction -ization Agent Options

Multimodal /Effective Interaction

V

V V

V

V

V

V

V

V

V

V

V V

Avatar

V

V

V

V

V

Humanoid

V

V

V

V

V

Figure 12.6: Types of interactive virtual dialogue – an illustration of possible qualities of different virtual entities in the virtual world.

To conclude, the Internet language is a term coined by David Crystal a while ago. But todays’ language is not only about Internet and text, or even social media, correspondence. The virtual grid is part of our everyday action: from personal assistance, to online shopping and infotainment, to medical services, digital learning, gaming platforms, and bots and avatars. Users determine what they need in order to express their intents or complete their tasks at each level of the virtual grid. The various plat-

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forms and the technological advancement make possible a complex digital dialogue that includes various layers of interaction and allows users to decide which layers they want to employ. Segmentation effects this choice clearly, as do the task and functional needs, of course. Language is a tool, and as seen in the next section, it is becoming a global tool of interaction enhanced by other communication features like visual characteristics.

About the Globalization of Digital Language We are witnessing the globalization of the digital language across cultures and geographies, as well as throughout different segment of user population. The globalization of the Internet language relates to two areas of linguistics simultaneously: firstly, Sociolinguistics ‒ the science of language in the context of society and culture; and secondly, Computational Linguistics ‒ an area that enables the processing of spoken and written language into various levels of computer understanding. Undoubtedly, the language usage in the digital space is based predominantly on English. This has a major effect on two linguistics phenomena: (a) the dominance of English over “digital terms” connected with operating the virtual grid across different levels ‒ whether in commercial, social, or gaming platforms; and (b) the fact that these terms become part of the local language and culture and subsequently are adopted into the local grammar and core lexicon. Danet and Herring (2003), who come from a sociology, communication, and information science background, discuss the multilingual Internet, and claim that most research on Computer-Mediated Communication has focused almost exclusively on English, neglecting the phenomena of populations communicating online in other languages “in a sociocultural context in which English is no one’s native language, yet is used as a lingua franca” (2003, online source). The multilingual Internet raises questions ranging from the borrowing of terms and expressions into the native language, to their adaptation and customization according to the native language’s grammar rules. In the next session we exemplify the related phenomenon of “language globalization” which shows the natural development of a multilingual community of native Internet language-speaking users.

The Effect of Multilingual Internet: Examples In general, Hebrew contains many foreign words due to the multiple languages spoken in Israel. However, given the dominance of English in the virtual world, a significant number of words in this language have entered the colloquial dialect.

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Regarding digital usage, we find many examples of words that have been borrowed form English because there is no suitable match in the Hebrew lexicon. Some of them show a full adaptation to Hebrew syntax rules, although very few were generated by the Hebrew Language Academy specifically for that matter (see Fig. 12.7). In another example, Tatsiana Shulha (2016) looked at the adaptation of a “digital lexicon” from English and German into the Belarusian language and noticed that, following the adaptation, a foreign word which originally entered as a term is subject to the process Hebrew Academy words for Adaptation into Hebrew syntax Borrowing Internet expressiInternet expressions (based on of Internet expressions ons as is and transcribing to MG Web, 2011, online) Hebrew Server – ‫ שרת‬/ sarat

To Google –‫ לגגל‬/ legagel

Email – ‫ אימייל‬/ imeil

Internet – ‫ מרשתת‬/ mirSetet

Application – ‫ אפליקציה‬/ aplikatzya

Modem – ‫ מודם‬/ modem

Talkback – ‫ תגובית‬/ tguvit

Digital – ‫ דיגיטאלי‬/ digitali

Webinar – ‫ וובינר‬/ webinar

Blog – ‫ יומן רשת‬/ yoman reset

Surfer – ‫גולש ברשת‬ / goleS bareSet

Like – ‫ לייק‬/lik

User – ‫ משתמש דיגיטאלי‬/ miStameS digitali

Selfie – ‫ סלפי‬/ selfi Bug – ‫ באג‬/ bag

Figure 12.7: Effects of globalization on the Hebrew language.

she calls “determinologization.” Once a word (in this case, an English borrowing) is transformed into a jargon word, and in some cases becomes a slang word, it is no longer a computer term but becomes a common word in the local language. Are there other signs of globalization of language used in the digital grid? In examining the visualization of language as a bridge toward a more universal dialogue, let us look at the story of emojis and memes.

The Use of Emoji and Memes: What’s the Story Here? Throughout ancient history, before writing systems appeared, people drew pictures and created symbols to communicate, tell stories, and preserve history. Emoji are the visual characters of the Digital Era. Marcel Danesi (2016) tells us that the designer of emoji, Shigetaka Kurita, emphasized the rise of digital communication, a medium which doesn’t easily allow for sentiment and emotion, as the event that required the use of emoji to replace facial expressions, tone of voice, and gestures so readily used

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Figure 12.8: Emoji palette.

in Face to Face communication (see Fig. 12.8). In his book The Story of Emoji (2016), Gavin Lucas claims that emoji were the first collection of symbols and icons to be widely available through the keyboards of mobile communication devices, which are nowadays found in the pocket of every user, both young and old. Regarding the role of emoji in the globalization of the virtual dialogue, Danesi (2016) states that emoji allow people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds to communicate and interact with each other more concretely, as part of a “connected global intelligence.” Emoji can be used irrespectively of language or cultural background, and can help solve problems of comprehension. How long will we be using emoji? As Danesi points out, this will depend considerably on the future form of new technological developments. For example, if voice interaction takes over, what will the role of emoji be? Will emoji be replaced by another modality? Julia Ostanina-Olszewska and Aleksandra Majdzinska-Koczorowicz (2019) talk about another visual phenomena called “memes.” Internet memes are a specific type of Internet communication that combine image and text (see Fig. 12.9).1 Memes

1 In the context of the Internet culture, a “meme” is defined as an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online, especially through social media (Merriam-Webster, online).

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Figure 12.9: Meme examples.

evolved from earlier types of multimodal communication, such as comics and satirical drawings, in order to facilitate communication and perception: “Memes are artifacts that bear both cultural and social characteristics, reflecting current events or problems of everyday life and fulfilling among others, such functions as commentary, criticism, protest or entertainment” (Ostanina-Olszewska and Majdzinska-Koczorowicz 2019, online source). Memes are both a cultural and a sociolinguistic phenomenon combined with very creative visualizations, textual humor, and intertextuality.2 Memes depend on pragmatic knowledge, but also on their transfer from one user to another, and on their enhancement and change to creatively create more of them. Memes are spread via the Internet, often through social medial platforms, and especially for humorous purposes or in order to express an opinion, criticism, or commentary. They reflect the multimodality of language, and this phenomenon is related to other technologies enabling communication via a combination of text, speech, video, music, etc. The fact that users are allowed to be completely creative is reflected today in applications such as TikTok, which are flourishing and increasingly beat Instant Messaging apps in terms of market penetration, especially in young segments. To sum up, the globalization of digital language, dialogue, and CMC is truly an important issue now that most of the world is connected through the same social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. We have described above a few global phenomena that encourage the globalization of the Internet language: the utilization of well-defined global terms across all languages; the usage of visualizations like emoji and memes; and the fusing of several modalities together to communicate a creative and meaningful, yet global, message.

2 Intertextuality is the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text.

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Conclusions and a Word about Ethics The digital dialogue in the virtual grid involves intentions, inferences, and knowledge, which are very much based on the pragmatics of the real world. This chapter shows the development time line of language in the virtual grid of the digital era. We distinguish between Face to Face (FTF) dialogue, Human-Machine Interaction (HMI), and Computer-Meditated Communication (CMC). The chapter suggests that the virtual grid requires a new type of interaction, i.e., “the digital dialogue”, which refers to the way we interact at different levels and using different technological components. We employ language to convey ideas, perform tasks, create relations, and connect with other entities, be these human or virtual agents.

Real World Dialog Human to Human (FTF) Text/ Speech/ Gestures

Virtual Interaction Bi-directional Effect

Human to Machine Machine to Human Machine to Machine

NLP AI

Digital Dialog

ML Figure 12.10: The fusion of grids.

Although the real-world Face to Face language is different from the one used in virtual dialogue, it is nevertheless affected by it. Its bi-directionality is reflected in the usage of new lexicons, terms, and structures. These two forms of language are not mutually exclusive, but rather support each other (see Fig. 12.10). Moreover, the interaction with virtual entities like Bots and Avatars, Personal Assistants, and Virtual Agents allows us to use a range of language modalities and to enhance textual language by means of visual icons, memes, and emojis, all in the name of a holistic format for transferring ideas, emotions, and intentions. I suggest that if we design our digital dialogue well, we will be able to form a relationship with those entities in the same way that we create relations with a “human user” at the other end of the keyboard. Last but not least, language has always been connected to ethics. At present, we are facing a new area of Digital Ethics in which language in the virtual grid plays a

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major role. The use of language, combined with technology enhanced by Artificial Intelligence algorithms, enables us to create phenomena such as Fake News and Deepfake using language and linguistic levels for manipulation and deceit in order to create a new social situation and influence culture. As we design more intelligent and more effective digital dialogue systems, we need to take these issues into consideration. Deploying computational linguistics components responsibly will help maintain the digital ethics of language usage.

References Al-Kadi, Abdu Talib, and Rashad Ali Ahmed. “Evolution of English in the Internet Age.” Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics 7, 3 (2018): 727–736. Barlow, Jeffery. “Txting: The Gr8 Db8.” Interface: The Journal of Education, Community and Values 8 (2009): 303‒307. Bawa, Papia. “Massively Multiplayer Online Gamers’ Language: Argument for an M-Gamer Corpus.” Qualitative Report 23, 11 (2018): 2714‒2753. Crystal, David. “The Scope of Internet Linguistics.” In Proceedings of American Association for the Advancement of Science Conference, edited by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 17–21. Washington, DC, 2005. Crystal, David. “Texting.” ELT Journal 62, 1 (2008): 77–83. Crystal, David. Internet Linguistics: A Student Guide. New York: Routledge, 2011. Danesi, Marcel. The Semiotics of Emoji: The Rise of Visual Language in the Age of the Internet. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016. Danet, Brenda, and Susan C. Herring. “Introduction: The Multilingual Internet.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 9, 1 (2003), online source. Accessed February 16, 2021. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2003.tb00354.x Kerslake, Laura, and Rupert Wegerif. “The Semiotics of Emoji: The Rise of Visual Language in the Age of the Internet” (Book Review). Media and Communication 5, 4 (2017): 75–78. Kiesler, Sara, Jane Siegel, and Timothy W. McGuire. “Social Psychological Aspects of Computer-Mediated Communication.” American Psychologist 39, 10 (1984): 1123–1134. Lo-Dico, Joy. “Watch What You’re Saying!: Linguist David Crystal on Twitter, Texting and Our Native Tongue.” The Independent, March 14, 2010. Accessed February 16, 2021. https://www. independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/watch-what-you-re-saying-linguist-david-crystal-twitter-texting-and-our-native-tongue-1919271.html Lucas, Gavin. “The Story of Emoji.” Creative Review 36, 5 (2016): 74–81. MG Web. “What has Happened to the Hebrew in the Internet”, December 13, 2011. Accessed February 16, 2021. [in Hebrew] https://www.mgweb.co.il/news/post/%D7%94%D7%A2%D7 %91%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%AA_%D7%91%D7%90%D7%99%D7%A0%D7%98%D7%A8% D7%A0%D7%98 Ostanina-Olszewska, Julia, and Aleksandra Majdzińska-Koczorowicz. “A Cognitive Linguistics Approach to Internet Memes on Selected Polish Internet Sites.” Cognitive Studies | Études Cognitive 19 (2019), online source. Accessed February 16, 2021. https://doi.org/10.11649/cs.1939. Para, Iulia, Daniel Dejia, Gyde Hansen, and Peter Sandrini. “Online Communication–Netspeak: The Internet as a Facilitator for New Ways of Communication and the Impact on Our Language.” In Language in the Digital Era. Challenges and Perspectives, edited by Daniel Dejica, Gyde Hansen, Peter Sandrini, and Iulia Para, 189–200. Warsaw: De Gruyter Open Poland, 2016.

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Riabtseva, Nadia. K. “Internet Communication: A Linguistic and Cognitive Perspective.” Russian Linguistic Bulletin 4, 8 (2016): 70–73. Shaked, Nava, and Detlev Artelt. “The Use of Multimodality in Avatars and Virtual Agents.” In Design of Multimodal Mobile Interfaces, edited by Nava Shaked and Ute Winter, 125–144. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016. Shaked, Nava. “Avatars and Virtual Agents: Relationship Interfaces for the Elderly.” Healthcare Technology Letters 4, 3 (2017): 83–87. Shulha, Tatsiana. “Internet Linguistics: Vocabulary Internationalization and Loanwords Adaptation.” Literature and Arts Review, n.v (2016): 26–28. Slangit. “Online Gaming Slang”, 2021. Accessed February 16, 2021. https://slangit.com/terms/ online_gaming Tagliamonte, Sali A. “So Sick or so Cool? The Language of Youth on the Internet.” Language in Society 45, 1 (2016): 1–32. TextMagic Blog, The. Accessed February 16, 2021. https://www.textmagic.com/blog/text-messaging-statistics-for-businesses/

Tom Peeters, Kristof Timmerman, Jeroen Cluckers, Stephen Hargreaves

13 Storytelling in Virtual Reality: A Multidisciplinary and Immersive Experience using Grid Methodology for Students Abstract: In this new and complex world, diversity and technology have become increasingly more important. Students need to be trained for a wide range of twenty-first century skills in order to deal with essential innovative technologies that are characteristic of this new era. State-of-the-art technologies such as virtual reality are being implemented but still have to reveal their full potential. Holding on to familiar technologies we already comprehend, threaten a clear perspective on exploring new opportunities for the new ones ready for exploration. Currently the breakthrough of immersive storytelling in virtual reality poses challenges on both the production and user side (Roth and Koenitz 2016; Slater and Sanches-Vives 2016). To overcome these challenges, students with different backgrounds and behaviours such as artists, engineers, journalist, nurses and designers have been gathered and trained to innovate using the grid methodology. Our multidisciplinary approach and integrated workflow have proved to be effective tools in the complex development of virtual reality experiences. The sense of being immersed in a multidisciplinary team has expanded the capacity of the capital twenty-first century skills students need to innovate the future. Keywords: innovation; virtual reality; the grid; multidisciplinary teams; immersion

Introduction Our world is getting smaller and more complex, and there is more diversity and technology around. To face these challenges more teamwork is necessary as teams need to acquire twenty-first century skills to support out-of-the-box thinking. Twenty-first century skills are essential functions to work in the digital world. These skills involve critical thinking, problem solving and teamwork. Twenty-first century skills prepare students to work in the rapidly evolving digital world. Students need to understand technology but also have to be aware technology is an instrument people use. Making trade-offs is part of the process to develop technology. At AP University of Applied Sciences, an immersive storytelling multidisciplinary course is organised to meet these aims. Students learn about immersive storytelling and gain insight into the definitions of virtual reality and immersion and build real-world virtual reality cases in

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various domains. They learn to organise, monitor and critically evaluate the workflow of a virtual reality project. In this workflow a group of students from different fields of study, learn in a collaborative way, i.e. work in a team and learn from and with each other; the learning outcome is directly applied in an authentic project. Every discipline contributes to the project using its typical background expertise throughout the project. This paper discusses the workflow to guide a multidisciplinary team in the learning process development of virtual reality experiences. By defining a challenge in a new and unknown domain for students such as immersive storytelling in virtual reality, learners need to tackle the horseless carriage syndrome, introduced by philosopher Marshall McLuhan. That is, every new technology was first looked at with eyes that were used to technology we already knew. We often look at the present through a rear-view mirror while marching backwards into the future. Currently, the breakthrough of immersive storytelling in Virtual Reality poses challenges on the production side and on the user side (Roth and Koenitz 2016; Slater and Sanchez-Vives 2016). To reach immersion, students need to investigate how to embed innovative technical challenges in new and old narrative (Cho et al. 2016; Koenitz 2010; Roth and Koenitz 2016). By collaborating in a multidisciplinary team and connecting learners to authentic studies, they accelerate innovation. The connection between people of different disciplines and an authentic project, we refer to as the grid. During the development phase, teams need to make choices to immerse the viewer in such a manner that the virtual world becomes reality for a moment. The challenge is to convert a well-known medium as film, where a director controls what you get to see in a 360-degree view, into a situation where the viewer has full control. By defining an authentic, challenging and technical innovative case, the learning trigger is increased. Quotes from student reports (AP University of Applied Sciences) describe these experiences in multidisciplinary collaboration settings: We were very excited to start this project and had a lot of crazy ideas. Everyone could give their own opinions about everything and was very open to the opinions of the others. It was interesting to see how diverse perspectives from the different students were. As an art student my main role in this multidisciplinary collaboration was primarily to bring and refine ideas. In the beginning, I was particularly worried about how I could be useful since I am not exactly someone who has got technological skills. It turned out that the creation, elaboration and refinement of the concept, as well as the management of all the ideas that were brought to the table, became of equal value in the final result. It is true that the development of the experience and the technicality that the process requires is of crucial importance to give shape and life to concept, but both technical and conceptual aspects must be in harmony during the whole process so it can blossom as intended.

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What is the Grid? What we call the grid can be compared to a brain-like structure, which interconnects people with different backgrounds and know-how and is used as an instrument to enhance the ability of interdisciplinary contributors to learn out-of-the-box thinking from each other and the environment (see Fig. 13.1) (D’Haese 2020, online source). Different backgrounds and behaviours join forces in a so-called ‘brain’ to make an immersive 360-degree story. Supervised by a multidisciplinary team of specialists and lecturers, referred to as the environment, the brain is given tools and rewards to create immersive experiences. At regular intervals the team of specialists evaluate and reward the team by evaluating the workflow process aiming at a better collaboration, improved knowledge and a more intelligent brain for immersive storytelling. This way of giving feedback guides students to the right actions to achieve the aimed output.

Figure 13.1: A multidisciplinary grid.

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What is Virtual Reality? The computer science professor Fred Brooks defined virtual reality “as an experience in which the user is effectively immersive in a responsive virtual world” (Brooks 1999, online source). This implies user dynamic control of a viewport. In order to describe an experience, we use terminology as immersion and interactivity. Immersion refers to the feeling that occurs in a situation where spectators (such as viewers or gamers) are paying so much attention to this particular medium, and the latter causes so much involvement that the audience is no longer aware of the things that are happening around them (Heirman 2018). From a 3D vision technology perspective, user control of the viewport and a surrounding experience make virtual reality more immersive than other types of media. In a virtual reality device, like an HTC Vive or Oculus Quest, you have two displays, one in front of each eye, and the image is a little different from the other, which generates a clear 3D view. With a virtual reality device, it is possible to move around in a predefined space and interact with the virtual environment. By using the virtual reality device, we are able to control our viewpoint. This means that the experience is completely one’s own private experience, so the virtual reality device is updating the 3D space according to the direction the user is looking at. This is possible by built-in sensors tracking the user’s head position and rotation in order to update the 3D environment. Because of the minimal latency of updating the 3D world, virtual reality is the immersive medium.

What is Immersion? Immersion is achieved when a person forgets his position in space and time and believes that s/he is in a different environment. Through new media, such as virtual reality, this feeling can more easily be triggered, but it is commonly known to also happen in traditional media with books being a prime example of getting absorbed into another world. This can be expressed in different ways, such as: (a) The loss of time: what time it is and how long you have been watching; (b) Not being aware of other events taking place in the same physical space (for instance, a person entering the room or someone asking a question); and (c) Not responding to the environment.

The Operational Workflow To create a virtual reality experience, it is important student teams go through all workflow stages and are connected by the grid to make progress in the project. The workflow consists of five stages, each to be expanded in the following. These are:

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(a) creative storming; (b) conceptualisation; (c) specification of technical aspects; (d) prototyping; and (e) user testing. Working in a multidisciplinary team shows things from different angles and directions. Everyone is unique and can provide a different perspective to look at the problem. Open communication is vital for team problem solving. Especially in telling stories in virtual reality a lot of technical questions arise, related to audio, interaction, and immersion. To solve this a team needs to develop different prototypes, which is a quick and rough solution of an idea, and bring it to the grid to validate. This process is also known as our efficient tool in the complex development of virtual reality experiences. During each workflow stage, the team observes, takes actions and receives positive or negative feedback. Observations are the input with a scientific or philosophic base of each discipline on a certain idea. The teams are also coached by a multidisciplinary group of lecturers.

(a) Creative Storming The first phase of the workflow entails creative storming. It is a collaborative technique for a multidisciplinary team. It is used to analyse the domain of immersive storytelling to eventually develop an immersive experience. The analysis of the experience includes the modelling of the narrative structure, user flow, spatial design and level of interactivity. In practice, brainstorming comes in different stages and starts with an initial and vague idea on what a virtual reality experience is created for. The first stage of the creative storm starts with a free association round, where everyone writes down the words that come to mind when thinking of the idea. Next, these words are grouped together according to how they are related to each other, ending up with the five most important words. To keep the creative storm structured, a whiteboard with sticky notes or online collaboration tools can be used. The next step is to find related events. An event is something that happens and triggers something else to happen next. The team assigns each event to the right word. Next, a timeline to order the events is created. Organising the events or scenes is the first step in finding the story’s flow. By assigning the keywords to the events, the mood or ambiance of each individual scene is defined. Per event or scene, teams create a visual mood board as a first delivery. The third step of stage one is thinking about which stakeholders and characters are involved per associated word and assigned events. Then, all the results are used for the second stage of the workflow.

(b) Conceptualisation Conceptualisation is an abstract view of the former experience events, containing the objects that are of interest for a particular purpose and the relationship between

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them. To model the concept, the team creates storyboards for every scene. Because of the 360- degree spectator view, it is hard to accurately draw the spherical scene onto a flat piece of paper. Therefore, we use top-down views, dividing a scene into quadrants and labelling each scene event with the corresponding quadrant. With the topdown quadrant usage, students have a tool to think how immersion can be reached in a 360-degree story. The quadrants are drafted by a group of people who review all scenes from different perspectives like technical, philosophical or discipline related, e.g., healthcare use the grid to merge all ideas resulting in a first concept.

(c) Specification of Technical Aspects The third phase in the workflow is the specification of all technical aspects. Student teams try to figure out the role of the viewer and think of the environment in a virtual world. They need to give answers to questions specific to the parameters of a 360degree immersive story. These parameters relate to the position of the viewer, the virtual space environment, the atmosphere they want to create and a subtle guidance of the viewer. In addition, they also need to know how a viewer can reach a certain immersion level. Users can be involved in varying degrees going from disengagement to engrossment or deep interest to total immersion. A user is rarely fully disconnected and lost in the notion of space and time. Each team selects one type in their development. We define the following three most common types of spectator immersion: – Strategic immersion: this occurs in a situation where an individual is fully engaged in focusing on achieving strategic goals. – Spatial immersion: this usually occurs when the differences between the daily observed reality and a virtual environment are so small, that the brain makes the user believe – or at least feel – as if s/he is really in that virtual environment (Bjørner et al. 2016). With spatial immersion, the individual succeeds in locating himself in a wider environment than the one visible on the screen. In order to achieve spatial immersion among users, technical aspects are particularly important. For example, research shows that high resolution and the camera angle can play a decisive role in the fact whether this type of immersion is achieved. – Narrative immersion: this is experienced when the user becomes so fascinated by a story that s/he experiences an irresistible urge to discover the plot of the story and can no longer stop watching or playing (Mandal 2013). Of all types of immersion, narrative immersion is the type that occurs with the most diverse media going from a compelling game to an exciting book. An important element in reaching immersion is the camera location, or in other words the position of the spectator in the experience. Therefore, you need to consider which role the person, who is wearing the virtual reality headset, will take in the story. Is s/he participating or only observing? In the former person’s perspective the

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viewer plays the main part in the video; the surroundings focus and move around the person. When the viewer is placed in the latter person’s perspective, s/he is part of the surroundings and is not the main character. This leaves more room and freedom to explore the story evolving around, but might be experienced as less immersive since the viewer does not play an active role in the story. In this phase, the team needs to focus on crucial details to optimise the immersive experience. Crucial details are for instance the interaction with and between other characters, how to move through the environment, or how the absence or presence of sounds can play an important role. Storyboarding techniques are used to visualise this phase, such as the top-down views, which put more details in. The grid is the intersection where the substantial requirements meet the technical limitations.

(d) Prototyping During prototyping, all technical parameters, aiming at obtaining a certain level of immersion, are tested. These include, inter alia, camera position, audio, colour, and character position. In this workflow phase the interaction grid is used at regular intervals so the team receives input from all disciplines and gets new insights in order to improve the experience. In this phase, students do not make highly complex scenes because they have to test idea feasibility. Technical students create scenes with Unity, a game development platform for building 3D and 2D games to deploy to mobile, desktop, VR/AR consoles or the web. These are intended to create the environment and eventually incorporate graphical assets and artwork from the designers.

(e) User Testing The final workflow phase is user testing. Teams need to get feedback from the user experience. They need to gain information about what works well or not, they need to know whether the target group understands the story in order to create a higher user satisfaction. User centred design thinking is an iterative process and the results of user testing cause the building of new prototypes with new insights. In one of our former cyber bullying projects “The Empathy Machine” (Media3 2020, online source), students experimented with emotions. User tests forced them to make several prototypes from computer generated images to 360-degree videos to reach the highest level of immersion.

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Innovative Results One of the most innovative course results was the invention of the soft cut technique. The standard cut in film editing is a hard cut which is utilised where one cut from the end of one clip is pasted to the beginning of another. In 360-degree experiences, this hard cut brings the spectator back to reality. As an opposite, we invented a soft cut technique in which at any time by measuring the headset’s rotation, we know what and where the spectator is looking at. By recording or making every scene multiple times, but with little changes in one half of the 360-degree view, the scene is changed accordingly, i.e. depending on where the spectator is looking at. Because of the minimal latency of updating the 3D world in a virtual reality device, scenes can switch without the viewer’s notification. A multidisciplinary team of artists, designers and IT engineers used this technique in the Mondriaan project (AP-VRLAB-MONDRIAAN PROJECT 2020, online source). They were connected to the grid during the bachelor class “Dive into my world: An immersive encounter.” Students needed to immerse the spectator in the artist world of Mondriaan. This Dutch artist, who is most famous for his contribution to abstract art through works in which he used only the straight line, the three primary colours and the neutrals of black, white and grey. Traditional video editing and composition tools were combined with programming techniques in Unity to make the painting come to life. In this work, actors were instructed by the multidisciplinary team in a 360-degree green room. IT engineers were able to translate the actors’ movements into the virtual painting and let them interact with the painting’s primary colours using software development. The actors in the experience only started to move when the spectator looked in their direction. The above-mentioned soft cut technique was used so spectators who have full experience control don’t miss out on the main storyline. In another project, a multidisciplinary team was asked to transform artist Maud Vanhauwaert’s poem (2019, online source) “The Tower of Babel” into a virtual reality experience. The poem, echoing a biblical story from the Book of Genesis, is about men building a tower to reach out to God. God punished men’s pride and installed the confusion of speech. Everyone started to speak a different language, so no one could understand one other, and as a result the tower was never finished. This tower forms the foundation for the poem. The poem made a journey through eight languages, each time returning to Dutch according to the principle of Chinese whispers or the whispers poetry. For example, the Dutch poem was translated into English (see below), and translated back into Dutch. That Dutch version formed the basis for the Yiddish translation and so on: We exist in just one city, although a bit more we live in plenty languages that cross each and each others sounds with mother tongues from other towns we become strangers ourselves.

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The virtual reality experience as created by the “The Tower of Babel” team (2020, online source), combines 360-degree video with 3D assets to generate an unforgettable ride through the artist’s work. This virtual reality presentation is made to be viewed in a giant container, a VR installation especially designed for this creation. The audience is immersed by combining visuals and audio in a surrealistic tower where virtuality and reality come together. The end result was presented during the 2019 Antwerp arts festival “Wintervuur” (Wintervuur 2019, online source).

Team Teaching Our grid uses Sandholtz’s multidisciplinary team principle, where lecturers jointly plan the course schedule, goals, ideas, instructions and evaluation (Sandholtz 2000). During the course, all lecturers have equal voices. By multidisciplinary team teaching we give all lecturers the opportunity to use their own strengths, but also to learn from each other. Through joint agreements, the dates and programmes are set. Every lecturer guides students through the workflow from his own point of view, and organises extra moments for a specific group of students. For example, computer science students get specialised classes in virtual reality development, while journalism students get extra classes in story structures. Besides the specialised lectures, supportive classes on virtual reality are scheduled for all disciplines. Until now, the team of lecturers has experienced a professional growth in terms of skills, knowledge, insights and self-efficacy. They all discovered new instruction strategies and various ways of dealing with students. The team realises that an atmosphere of openness, respect and trust is of great importance. The team communicates openly, shares responsibilities and reflects together in weekly meetings. The team of lecturers acts as coaches do and facilitates learning through active listening and ensures student teams plan, monitor and evaluate their learning for themselves, and grow in applying learning outcomes and problem-solving.

Conclusion This multidisciplinary idea started off with the “Show & Tell!” research project. This research team consisted of a group of people with various backgrounds, such as academic researchers, artists, engineers, journalists and designers specialised in immersive technologies. Together they developed an integrated methodology and workflow for the creation of immersive 360-degree stories. During the research project, several interdisciplinary master classes for students in arts, engineering and journalism were organised to develop experiences in which narrative parameters were tested, the main goal being to obtain different levels of immersion, starting from the lowest level

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of reality till “total immersion.” All the results have led to new narrative strategies concerning the viewer in the virtual reality experience e.g. a descriptive set of how time and space can affect the storyline, as how a camera position can influence the viewer’s level of information and the level of involvement (Van Aken 2016). All these parameters determine the strategy concerning the viewer: to stimulate suspense, surprise and/or curiosity. Interdisciplinary collaboration needs an iterative project management approach, in which an optimum communication in all project stages is a key factor for success. A multidisciplinary approach stimulates out-of-the-box thinking. It encourages to take bigger steps to uncover the potential of new technology. It allows us to think less about the technology itself but more about the content, that is, what we can do with technology. If we leave it to computer scientists, there is a risk that only technical issues are addressed; if we leave it to non-technicals such as artists or journalists, the technical feasibility might not get enough attention. Separately, we do not get anywhere, but together we are taking bigger steps to understand the technology and its capacity. The grid is the very tool to accelerate innovation.

References AP-VRLAB-MONDRIAAN PROJECT 2020, online source. Accessed November 29, 2020. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=XYfGUZgDoTw&t=1s. Bjørner, Thomas, Andreas Magnusson, and Robin Pascal Nielsen. “How to Describe and Measure Obstacles of Narrative Immersion in a Film?” Nordicom Review 37, 1 (2016):1–17. Brooks, Frederick. “What’s Real about Virtual Reality”, 1999, online source. Accessed January 30, 2021. https://www.cs.unc.edu/~brooks/WhatsReal.pdf Cho, Jaehee, Tsung-Hang Lee, Joel Ogden, Amy Stewart, Tsung-Yu Tsai, Junwen Chen, and Ralph Vituccio. “Imago: Presence and Emotion in Virtual Reality.” ACM SIGGRAPH 2016 VR Village 6 (2016): 1–2. Accessed January 30, 2021. http://www.siggraph.org/sites/default/files/siggraph2016-vr-village-open-access.html D’Haese, David. Media 1, “Multidisciplinary Grid”, VR Experience (ML-agents) 2020, online source. Accessed January 30, 2021. https://ddhaese.github.io/Course_ML-Agents/ Heirman, Wannes Whitepaper. White paper 1: An Overview of Possible User Effects in VR and 360° video (Een overzicht van mogelijke gebruikerseffecten in VR- en 360°-video), 2018. Antwerpen: AP Hogeschool, online source. Accessed January 30, 2021. https://anet.be/docman/ irart/1c584a/b286358c.pdf Koenitz, Hartmut, Teun Dubbelman, Noam Knoller, and Christian Roth, “An Integrated and Iterative Research Direction for Interactive Digital Narrative.” Interactive Storytelling 2 (2016): 51‒60. Mandal, Sharmistha. “Brief Introduction of Virtual Reality and Its Challenges.” International Journal of Scientific and Engineering Research 4,4 (2013): 304‒309. Media3, “The Empathy Machine”, 2020, online source. Accessed January 30, 2021. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=Xb0GXsdGYaU Roth, Christian, and Hartmut Koenitz. “Evaluating the User Experience of Interactive Digital Narrative.” Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Multimedia Alternate Realities, 31–36. ACM, 2016.

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Sandholtz, Judith. “Interdisciplinary Team Teaching as a Form of Professional Development.” Teacher Education Quarterly 27, 3 (2000): 39‒54. Slater, Mel, and Maria V. Sanchez-Vives. “Enhancing Our Lives with Immersive Virtual Reality.” Frontiers in Robotics and AI 3, 12 (2016), online source. Accessed January 30, 2021. http:// journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frobt.2016.00074/full The Tower of Babel, 2020, online source. Accessed November 29, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=lcX0TfDRV9s. Van Aken, Silvia. “The Labyrinth of the Mind. Een narratieve en stilistische analyse van Jaco Van Dormael’s mindfilms: Toto le héros (1991), Le huitième jour (1996), Mr. Nobody (2009).” PhD diss., KU Leuven, 2016. Vanhauwaert, Maud. “City Poem”, 2019, online source. Accessed November 29, 2020. https:// radiobabel.be/toren/stadsgedicht/. Wintervuur, 2019, online source. Accessed November 29, 2020. https://wintervuur.be/index. php?p=evenementen/wij-zijn-mogelijk&fbclid=IwAR1HFlzkmf_MpoVMp25VCXcRG2Bx2nyG09x7V0yAG_pc6rWTpODZ1Msy20o.

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14 The Multidisciplinary Learning Grid: A Conceptual Space to Develop Neuropedagogy-based, Arts-integrated Chemistry Activities Abstract: Memory and learning are strongly affected by the context and circumstances in which they arise and which define the learning experience. In class, this experience is dictated by the tasks that students are asked to perform. Thus, the process of developing learning activities directly affects how learning will take place. The learning grid can be seen as a conceptual space that supports the development of learning tasks, mainly by teachers and educational content developers. The learning grid is the space that ultimately gives rise to the context and circumstances of future learning experiences. Traditional one-dimensional grids offer learning experiences that appeal to single modes of learning, generally cognitive-rational only, leaving the learner to process information solely through cognitive-rational processing pathways. By creating multidimensional learning grids, educators can offer the learner a richer learning experience, one that includes cognitive-rational, multisensory, and affective channels through which to process content. In order to expand the learning grid concept to the fullest, we can design multidimensional grids that are also multidisciplinary and integrate information processing pathways by merging different disciplines. In this chapter we introduce a three-dimensional learning grid that stems from the intersection between Chemistry, Neuropedagogy, and Art. This grid forms the core of a creative approach to teaching high-school chemistry; it was developed to facilitate the understanding and integration of content, given the abstract nature of the subject, which requires that students master visualization skills and multi-level thinking. This chapter begins with an introduction to the relevant frameworks on which the grid was designed. Then, the emergent neuropedagogy-based, arts-integrating methodologies for teaching chemistry are described and analyzed, including examples of activities developed by this approach and students’ relevant learning outcomes. These activities illustrate how this conceptual grid can be translated from theory to practice, and how it is being implemented in some high-school chemistry classrooms (in Israel). We think that educators from other subject areas would also benefit from adopting the idea of the multidisciplinary learning grid as a scaffold for designing meaningful learning experiences. Keywords: Chemistry teaching; neuropedagogy; arts-integration; multidimensional learning grid

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Imagining the Learning Grid In this chapter we introduce the idea of the multidimensional learning grid as a conceptual space that allows educators and content developers to weave learning experiences that aim at fostering two mechanisms, both of which are essential for learning to occur: sense-making and personal meaning-making. The space of the learning grid can be imagined as a creative space delineated by disciplinary scaffolds, namely, each discipline introduces a dimension to the grid. For the learning grid presented here, this conceptual space is three-dimensional and emerges from the intersection between three disciplines: Chemistry, Educational Neuroscience, and Art (Fig. 14.1). As will be explained later, each of these disciplines constitutes a dimension in this grid for a reason; the combination of these three disciplines is expected to support both sense-making and meaning-making in chemistry. Once the three-dimensional, multidisciplinary learning grid is defined, its dimensions become guides composed of important aspects to which special attention must be given while developing learning activities, since they strongly affect the learning experience. In the following sections we will discuss each of the three disciplinary dimensions of the grid and analyze their relevant components.

Figure 14.1: Schematic diagram of the three-dimensional conceptual space of the neuropedagogy-based, arts-integrating, chemistry learning grid.

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Some Challenges in Learning Chemistry Specifically, this learning grid arose, first and foremost, as a consequence of addressing the inherent difficulties that students face while learning chemistry; these difficulties occur because of the highly abstract nature of the subject. Chemistry, as a discipline, constitutes the first dimension of this multidisciplinary leaning grid, not only in terms of the subjects to be learned but also in terms of the difficulties that students face while learning those subjects. The main goal of chemistry teachers is to facilitate the construction of chemical knowledge and aid students master related thinking skills. To learn most chemical concepts, students must internalize content by creating abstract mental constructs of accepted scientific models (Harrison and Treagust 1996; Jong et al. 2013; Körhasan and Wang 2016). Students are expected to comprehend the advantages and limitations of these mental models as well as use them to understand chemistry at several levels. Ultimately, they must be able to explain how observable chemical phenomena at the macroscopic level results from interactions between particles at the submicroscopic level and express these processes at the symbolic level. This multi-level mode of understanding in chemistry is termed “the chemistry triplet” (Johnstone 1991; Taber 2013); it presupposes visuo-spatial and multi-level thinking (Oliver-Hoyo and Sloan 2014; Uchinokura 2020; Wu and Shah 2004). The macroscopic level of understanding chemistry does not impose a serious challenge for students. This level belongs to the perceptible world and it comprises all that can be sensed, observed, and measured. It can therefore be easily connected to the concrete world that students experience daily and they can use everyday language to describe it. For example, making observations about a phenomenon during a lab experiment or measuring certain properties of a material belong to this level of understanding chemistry. The submicroscopic level refers to the particle level of a chemical system and includes imagining all the particles that compose the system, all the possible interactions between particles, the pattern that might result from these interactions, as well as the degree and modes of movement of these particles. Whereas the macroscopic level involves perceptual representational competences, the submicroscopic level involves purely conceptual ones. The symbolic level of understanding chemistry manifests itself through the interpretation and generation of representations of chemical systems through combinations of symbols such as schematic drawings, graphs, diagrams, equations, and formulas (Fig. 14.2). This convention of symbols is organized in a system of verbal and non-verbal expressions that together constitute what chemists call “the chemical language.” Normally, students build this language gradually by integrating what the teacher said in class, what she wrote on the board, and the pictorial representations that she might present (Rau 2017). To efficiently handle abstract chemical concepts and their relationships, students must undergo a switch in their thinking. They need to make a transition from thinking through general, concrete language and symbols, which they use to describe

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their experience of the macroscopic world, to thinking through chemistry-specific, highly abstract language and symbols, in which they are required to describe chemical systems in a multi-level manner. Success in learning chemistry depends on the extent to which students can construct scientifically correct mental models of content from which they can retrieve information afterwards, when asked to answer a question about chemistry or solve a complex problem while integrating new input with stored memory. This process is called visualization; it plays a central role in learning chemistry. Visualization in science can be defined as the mental process of constructing internal imagery, or symbolic visual representations of “entities” such as concepts, ideas, systems, objects, or processes (Gilbert 2010). This operation strongly relies on our ability to employ analogies and metaphors at both the verbal and non-verbal levels. According to Dual Coding Theory (Clark and Paivio 1991), this kind of operation requires cognitive integration between verbal and non-verbal information that is encoded in the image to be visualized. Thus, since verbal and non-verbal inputs are processed in distinct cognitive systems; integration of related input from these separate systems must be verbally mediated. Although dual coding theory is not explicit about the specific mechanisms underlying verbal/non-verbal input integration, visualization is considered a conceptual representational competence and as such, it is

Figure 14.2: Schematic diagram of the chemistry triplet illustrating the macroscopic, submicroscopic, and symbolic levels of understanding in chemistry in relation to the combustion reaction of methane.

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based on sense-making by use of a combination of visuo-spatial thinking and language through reasoning (Rau 2017; Vekiri 2002). The second dimension in the multidisciplinary learning grid presented here is neuroscience; its intersection with chemical education results from the will to comprehend the mental processes that take place during learning, and how this understanding can help educators develop learning activities that stimulate visuo-spatial, multi-level thinking. Our aim is to encourage educators to consider and apply what is known about how the brain learns when designing future chemistry learning experiences. Next, we will discuss the neuropedagogical principles that are expected to enhance learning in general, based on an accepted model of information processing. Then we will connect them to the process of learning chemistry.

Educational Neuroscience in a Nutshell Teaching and learning can occur more efficiently by incorporating into teaching what is known from neuroscience research and the literature about how the brain processes information and consolidates it in learning (Hardiman 2012; Sousa 2011). This approach gave rise to the field of educational neuroscience or neuropedagogy. The learning grid presented here proposes neuropedagogy as a second dimension to be taken into account while developing chemistry learning activities and formulating lesson plans. In this section, a simplified model of information processing is presented and briefly discussed. This model is then connected to the learning process through mental mechanisms that might enhance long-term retention and transfer of content and skills. The information processing model presented here (Fig. 14.3) is a simplified interpretation of the model presented by David Sousa in his book How the Brain Learns (2011, 43). Sousa based his model on existing ones and developed it by incorporating new research findings in neuroscience in a way that it could be readily accessible to educators. According to this model, any information to which we are exposed from our environment and that reaches our senses must pass through a series of sequential systems until it can be successfully stored as long-term memory and undergo consolidation for future retrieval when required. These sequential systems allow the brain to sort input according to its significance, and finally connect new input to existing memories. The first of these systems consists of our senses, which are the only gateway of the outside world into our consciousness. Our senses are directly related to the sensory register system, which has a typical lifetime of only a second or two and deals with sensory information. The world around us consists of endless amounts of information; therefore, the main function of the sensory register is to pass only the “important” information for further processing. This means that only strong enough stimuli, or stimuli that strongly draw our attention, pass on to the next system, if it is

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Figure 14.3: Schematic diagram of a simplified model of information processing based on the model of David A. Sousa.

not blocked at this stage. The next processing system is short-term memory; its processing of sensory information generally lasts up to 30 seconds. In the model that we adopt here, short-term memory consists of immediate and working memories. Information in immediate memory is held as long as it is useful, or it moves on to working memory processing. The latter plays an essential role in information processing, problem solving and memory storing. Working memory is generally referred to as “the manager of your desktop”; it is characterized not only by information storage, but also by the performance of the concurrent cognitive tasks (Atkinson and Shiffrin 1968; Baddeley 2010; Baddeley and Hitch 1974). Working memory manipulates necessary information received from the sensory input as well as information retrieved from long-term existing memory needed to perform all the complex cognitive tasks required in everyday life and during learning. According to Baddeley’s latest model of working memory (Baddeley 2010), this structure is composed of a control system called “the central executive” and its three sub-systems: the visual sketchpad, the phonological loop, and the episodic buffer. The first two subsystems deal with imagery and sound input, respectively. The episodic buffer can combine information from all perceived sensory inputs together with information recalled from long-term memory. Working memory can successfully handle from four to seven concurrent items, depending on a person’s age and training. Although various studies have reported different reaction times and capacities for working memory, all agree that it has its limitations. For example, working memory capacity is strongly affected by attention span and prioritization (D’Esposito and Postle 2015), and the ability to interpret new input in terms of previous knowledge (Baddeley 2003). Thus, working memory can reach an overload if the input comprises many items and/or these items are completely unknown, in which case the

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learner must accommodate all new items that seemed relevant when they were first processed along with relevant information retrieved from the long-term memory. This can lead to misconceptions in learning by distorted sense-making. Long-term retention of content is possible after neural processing of working memory through consolidation. Memory consolidation is at the core of learning and it is understood as a time-dependent process where new memories are reenforced and transformed into long-lasting memories (McGaugh 2000). Consolidation occurs at the molecular and cellular levels in the brain; it is mediated by different brain areas and involves interactions between different neural systems. After consolidation, content is thought to be integrated and assimilated into our cognitive belief system; it can be retrieved in the future and be connected to new learnings and knowledge. Consequently, it is currently accepted that learning involves a long-lasting neurological change and that this change results from input that was important enough to be stored and consolidated as long-term memory. In parallel to sense-making mechanisms, both the affective aspects of the learning experience and the process of assigning personal meaning to input greatly affect the tagging of input as important (Li et al. 2020; Richter-Levin and Akirav 2003; Kensinger and Schacter 2008). Several studies have confirmed the key role that emotions play in enhancing memory and consolidation; therefore, any long-term memory must consist of both cognitive and emotional components (Sousa 2011, 53). For developing learning activities, with the aim of inducing meaningful learning experiences, this implies that sense-making alone might not be enough to support the long-term retention of content and that personal meaning-making should also be considered.

Implications of Neuroscience on Learning and Teaching Chemistry Generally, most chemistry teachers plan their lessons didactically so that content makes sense; thus, they base the development of performance tasks on pedagogical principles that are traditionally known to be efficient in learning, such as introducing content gradually, supporting verbal utterances simultaneously with pictorial representations of content, rehearsing content through worksheets and hypothetical problem-solving tasks, and introducing demonstrations. When students work in pairs or groups, the speech function is also incorporated, and additional content processing can occur through negotiation and argumentation through social learning. In some cases, students are asked to elaborate on chemical content and then give oral presentations in which argumentation also takes place. These tasks are based on cognitive-rational modes of learning and involve mainly visual, auditory, and speech functions in logical thinking and reasoning. Sometimes chemistry activities include working with molecular model kits or performing inquiry-based experiments. In

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these cases, tactile functions are involved, in addition to visual, auditory, and speech; procedural skills are gained through hands-on endeavors and active learning. Despite teachers’ efforts to teach chemical content so that it is easy to understand, chemistry remains a difficult subject for many students and they struggle to transition between the macro, submicron, and symbolic levels of understanding involved in multi-level thinking (Thomas 2017). In addition, even when content seems to have been internalized, retention is not guaranteed, and students tend to forget content over time. Thus, after having defined some of the challenges of learning chemistry, and having reviewed the basic aspects of information processing, we proceed to examine how specific implications of educational neuroscience can affect chemistry teaching practices and consequently lead to more efficient learning: a. Consider working memory limitations: As previously mentioned, chemistry students must learn chemical language composed of highly abstract concepts. Since working memory is restricted in its capacity for coexisting items, teaching many such abstract concepts in one lesson can lead to working memory overload, where information is “dropped” and, without further consolidation, forgotten. Working memory limitations can be addressed by decreasing the number of new concepts that are taught in one lesson, thus enabling effective information processing and consolidation into long-term memory. b. Create multiple occasions for memory consolidation: Memory reactivation through rehearsal is the key to consolidation. When reactivation occurs, the connections between the disparate, active neural networks that store the specific retrieved memory are gradually strengthened (Hebb 1949; Lechner et al. 1999). In rehearsal, the newly acquired information is gradually integrated with pre-existing memories (Cohen et al. 1997; Moscovitch et al. 2005). Teachers must plan learning progressions so that retrieval occasions of specific content are distributed over the years (namely, 10th, 11th, and 12th grades), and are not only localized over a couple of weeks after the first instruction took place. c. Address visual literacy explicitly: It is important that chemistry students be trained directly regarding how to read and interpret graphic displays of all kinds according to their specific function. Reading images properly, like reading text, is strongly connected to previous imagery and to the ability to manipulate and assign meaning to new images in relation to the remembered ones. Images, as letters and digits, can also be recognized and “chunked” according to themes or schemes. It was found (Vekiri 2002) that the difference between novices and experts in understanding the pictorial and symbolic representation of scientific content lies in the ease with which they correctly interpret images. d. Offer varied processing pathways: Several studies have shown that allowing for more processing channels can lead to more efficient learning and retrieval. One example of broadening processing channels is to include sensorimotor functions (such as crafting or embodying representations of content) while learning. This might reduce working memory load by strengthening the visual sketchpad.

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Another example is engaging in egocentric speech (Vygotsky et al. 1978, 25‒27) during problem solving to support the organization of sequential thought processes. This might imitate dialogue; therefore, speech areas in the brain are also involved to some extent. e. Expose content in unusual ways: Our minds are wired to constantly seek and pay increased attention to unusual stimuli. Thus, being exposed to content in an unexpected manner can lead to deeper processing and enhanced memory in certain situations (McDaniel and Bugg 2008). Another possible mechanism is elevated situational interest by emotional tagging, which was shown to strengthen retention. This is believed to increase situational motivation and attention spans. f. Encourage creative elaboration of content: When a task is posed as a challenge, when information must be generated though uncommon routes, or when personal interpretations of content must be created and presented, there is an increased investment of mental resources, which implies deepened processing; this is expected to improve both retention and recall (Rinne et al. 2011). In addition to deeper processing, creative elaboration infers personal meaning-making and thus, emotional arousal, which in turn increase the chance for consolidation into long-term memory. g. Opt for social learning: Engaging in pair and group work naturally involves collaboration, shared knowledge generation, argumentation, and negotiation, to name only a few of the competences related to social leaning (Vigotsky 1978). In all cases, speech function (oral production) and emotional arousal are involved. As a result of searching for a way to incorporate the above-mentioned implications of neuropedagogy into chemistry teaching practices, we considered arts-integration to be a suitable pedagogical tool. In the following sections, we briefly review this framework. Then we elaborate on how neuropedagogy-based, arts-integration in chemistry evolved from theory to practice and was introduced to the chemistry classroom.

Arts-integration as a Pedagogical Tool The third dimension of the multidisciplinary learning grid is arts-integration; it emerged after we asked ourselves several didaktik1 guiding questions (Sjöström et al. 2020), such as: What kind of activities can induce chemistry learning experiences that allow for personal meaning-making as well as sense-making of content? How can

1 The term didaktik, with “k” instead of “c”, is used in the education literature to refer to reflective processes regarding the teaching practice. For example, didaktik questions are generally “What”, “How”, “Why”, “When” questions that educators ask in relation to lesson planning, instruction, and assessment of learning (see: Seel 1999; Sjöström et al. 2020).

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teachers combine art and visual literacy to advance the learning of chemistry through visuo-spatial, multi-level thinking? In searching the literature, we found that, contrary to what was previously thought, cognitive psychology and neuroscience research have shown that engagement in the arts is not solely an emotional endeavor; creative and artistic undertakings involve varied cognitive functions and the investment of mental effort (Efland 2002; Hardiman et al. 2014; Hardiman et al. 2019). At the neurological level, it was suggested that a connection might exist between learning in the arts and the transfer of knowledge and skills to other disciplines (Catterall 2002). The cognitive, affective, and social benefits of learning in and through the arts have become increasingly accepted. David E. Gullat (2008) reviewed the evolution of arts-integration in educational set-ups and summarized the central points to be considered by educators and education policy makers for improving academic achievement, social interconnectedness, and other goals by merging art with other curricular disciplines. In his work, he also presented a list of the repercussions of the research findings in arts-integration on the teaching profession. Some, but not all, of these repercussions include increasing understanding through learning by doing, enhancing higher order thinking skills, introducing additional entry points of content, promoting imagination and visualization, encouraging multi-sensory learning, encouraging communication and collaboration, and improving spatial thinking and reasoning in math. Acknowledgment of the benefits of art-integration reinforces the transition from STEM education (i.e., learning Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math in a multidisciplinary manner) to STEAM education (i.e., learning though Arts and humanities integrated STEM) (Land 2013; Madden et al. 2013), as well as the growing implementation of arts-integrating programs at all age levels, from K-12 to higher education (Burnaford et al. 2001; McIntosh and Warren 2013). In chemical education, we can find some activities and learning modules that were designed to fully integrate the arts; they aim at both practical and conceptual integration (Hayes 2017; Hoover et al. 2020; Kumbar 2007; Leysath and Bronowski 2016; Masters et al. 2014). However, usually art content is introduced as the subject or story behind a traditional learning task in order to revise chemical content, or it takes the form of extended inquiry lab activities that deal with color-related phenomena or restoration tasks (Danipog and Ferido 2011; Gaquere-Parker et al. 2016; Greenberg and Patterson 1998; Lech and Dounin 2011; Vyhnal et al. 2020).

Neuropedagogy-based, Arts-integration in Chemistry: From Theory to Practice In the introduction of his book The Arts and the Creation of Mind, Elliot Eisner writes: “many of the most complex and subtle forms of thinking take place when students

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have an opportunity either to work meaningfully on the creation of images ‒ whether visual, choreographic, musical, literary, or poetic ‒ or to scrutinize them appreciatively” (2002, 39 Kindle location). This quote perfectly illustrates the practical essence of the creative approach to teaching and learning chemistry that we present here and that we have developed within the conceptual space of the multidimensional learning grid. For some of the developed activities, observation techniques like those used in art appreciation, were modified and used with students as a mechanism to gain in-depth observational skills to support both the interpretation and production of depictions of chemical content. In other activities, students are asked to create personal representations of chemistry-related content through expressive elaborative tasks, followed by argumentation, with the aim of acquiring conceptual representational competences that will be applied in multi-level thinking. We called the former methodology “From Art to Chemistry” and the latter “From Chemistry to Craft.” In the following sections we will explain in more detail each of these two methodologies, including examples of implementation in class and the students’ related learning outcomes.

From Art to Chemistry “From Art to Chemistry” is a visual arts-integrating methodology that relies on verbally mediated art appreciation techniques such as Visual Thinking Strategies (Hailey

Figure 14.4: Diagram illustrating the three-activity sequence of image appreciation and application of content and skills by one of the modalities of the “From Art to Chemistry” methodology.

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et al. 2015; Housen 2002), Observe, Describe, Interpret, Prove (Jacques and Andrew 2012) and See, Think, Wonder (Richards et al. 2003). Carrigan J. Hayes (2017) reported using a combination of these techniques to facilitate conceptualization in relation to chemical content and experimental design in undergraduate chemistry. Similarly to Hayes’ work, our work was also based on using these in-depth observational techniques to generate our own version of image appreciation that would, according to our understanding, be based on neuropedagogical principles, and would foster sense-making and meaning-making. This methodology rendered two different modalities, each designed to attain a different goal. The first modality guides students to go from perception to conceptualization and it targets the construction of correct mental models by engaging students in verbally mediated, visuo-spatial thinking. This modality follows a fixed sequence of three tasks: appreciation and verbalization of abstract artwork, appreciation and verbalization of chemistry-related images, and visualization-oriented problem solving (Fig. 14.4). During the first two tasks of the sequence, regardless of the artistic or scientific nature of the image, students engage in guided observation. They are explicitly asked to follow certain steps during their observation: stop and contemplate the image freely, pay attention to the details of the elements that form the image, discover possible connections and interactions between them, find possible patterns formed as a result of those interactions, and suggest the function or implicit meaning of the image. In this way, we train students to gain visual literacy in both art and chemistry by generating knowledge, understanding, and meaning using a bottom-up approach (Fig. 14.5). Afterwards, in the third task of the sequence, students put these newly

Figure 14.5: Conceptual plot depicting the version of image appreciation technique developed by the “From Art to Chemistry” methodology.

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Figure 14.6: Schematic diagram of the “5 3 1” modality developed by the “From Art to Chemistry” methodology.

gained skills to use while participating in problem solving that was designed to straightforwardly tackle chemistry-related, visuo-spatial thinking (Fig. 14.4). In such an exercise, students are asked to answer questions by extracting and interpreting specific information from a model of a chemical system, comparing between models, and/or drawing a model of the system and providing explanations as required by the task. This can be done not only with structural models. Depending on the subject, this final task can teach students to work with any kind of graphic display involving chemical content at the symbolic level: chemical equations, relevant mathematical equations, graphs, schematic diagrams, formulations, and more. The second modality of the “From Art to Chemistry” methodology involves gaining inquiry skills outside the context of the laboratory, in an unconventional and personalized way. This modality targets the rehearsal of posing questions and designing related experiments, which are essential thinking skills needed to apply the scientific method. In addition, the task can be extended to include revising chemical content that was learned in the past and that can be connected to what is shown in the artwork, thus strengthening its consolidation in long-term memory. A task of this kind (Fig. 14.6) begins by asking each student to observe deeply a piece of naturalistic art and pose at least five general questions inspired by the artwork. It is important that students work alone at this stage and undergo a personal experience whereby they can raise their own questions, without the need to categorize them as right or wrong. During a discussion session, all students are encouraged to share their questions and think about possible answers together. Afterwards, each student is asked to observe the piece individually for a second time and raise at least three chemistry-re-

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lated questions. After a second discussion round, they are asked to formulate one research question and properly design an experiment to test the proposed research question, again, individually. In this modality, the criteria behind the teacher’s choice to bring a specific piece of art, around which the activity revolves, is highly important. The teacher must understand the possible connections between the piece of art and chemical content, as well as the possible research questions to which observation of the artwork might give rise.

From Chemistry to Craft The two main neuropedagogical principles advanced in the “From Chemistry to Craft” methodology are: (1) the creative elaboration of content; and (2) argumentation through oral presentation. Their combination is expected to facilitate both sense-making and meaning-making processes because they span cognitive, affective, and sensori-motor functions. Activities belonging to this methodology are intended to guide students into multi-level thinking by challenging them to examine the relationships between the properties of a chemical system (macroscopic, observable, and measurable phenomena) and its components and structure (submicron phenomena). To achieve this goal, in practice, students embark on creating material symbolic representations of content in relation to a specific theme in chemistry. Then, they present their outcomes to the class and defend them in terms of the chemical con-

Figure 14.7: Students’ learning outcomes from the activity “The Material Museum of the Chemists” developed by the “From Chemistry to Craft” methodology.

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cepts conveyed by their representation. In this kind of activity the crafted outcomes are accompanied by written essays in which students provide detailed explanations of the connection between the created models and the supporting chemistry theory. An example of this kind of activity is called “The Material Museum of the Chemists” (Fig. 14.7); here students are free to craft according to the properties of a material of their choice. In the written essay that they submit, they must talk about crafting and how this process was affected by the material’s properties. In addition, they must identify the kind of chemical material they chose (molecular, metallic, covalent network or ionic), and thoroughly explain how the material’s properties result from the structure of the particles that compose it and their interactions (submicron level). Finally, the students present their work to their peers during an exposition in a museum-like set-up in the chemistry lab, which is open to all school students during active breaks the day of the exposition. This methodology can also be used to aid students in visualizing the submicroscopic qualities and organization of the elemental components of chemical systems. In some activities, students create three-dimensional plastic representations of a specific chemical system, e.g., molecular structures and geometries, ionic lattices, metallic lattices, or covalent network lattices, depending on the subject being learned or rehearsed. They must produce representations that are in line with scientifically accepted models. Students work in pairs or groups of three; therefore, they must discuss the task, decide on how they will represent the assigned structure, pay attention to the chemical principles that dictate the criteria for modeling their representation (e.g., the relative particles’ sizes, all attractive and repulsive forces involved, the kinds of resulting bonds, and the angles between bonds). They must agree on how to present their work and include a discussion about the advantages and limitations of the model they built. In addition to the cognitive effort required and the affective aspects that this kind of collaborative, creative activity involves, working with crafting materials integrates sensorimotor functions, providing additional processing pathways. Although this appears to be a traditional practice of working with models, modeling learning sequences that were developed by using the multidisciplinary learning grid, explicitly acknowledge and include neuropedagogical aspects as well as a clear connection to the design elements and considerations that are parallel to the process of modeling in chemistry (Marchak et al. 2021a). In a less traditional activity that uses this methodology, students are asked to produce sound representations in relation to chemical concepts or systems, followed by explaining the criteria behind their decision to create a specific kind of sound to depict a specific concept or system. In this way, students can think creatively about chemistry. One such task would be to ask students to differentiate between the states of matter in terms of sound. For example, which sound would they use to depict a solid, a liquid, or a gas? When this activity was carried out with 12th grade chemistry students, a varied set of outcomes was observed. Some students differentiated between states of matter at the submicroscopic level by the internal energy of the

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material in each state, whereas others by the degree of movement that the particles in the material would have in each state. Other students chose to distinguish one state of matter from another by the sound that a material can make in each state when it interacts with other materials or when moving. In this last kind of representation of content (macroscopic level), students generated various versions of a “knock” to depict a solid, a “pouring” sound to depict a liquid, and a “whisper” to depict a gas. To conclude this kind of lesson, the teacher asks students to play the sounds that they have produced. A discussion session is necessary in order to let students process content by talking about their interpretation of it. It is important that the teacher makes the explicit connection between the sound models and the traditional models of the states of matter (visual or textual) by searching for parallels and disparities between the models. Also, special attention must be paid to the mentioning of the advantages and limitations of these models based on the underlying chemistry theory or concept that they represent.

Implementing the Grid in Chemistry Classrooms: Some Remarks In this chapter we presented the multidisciplinary learning grid concept, specifying its three dimensions and their components (Fig. 14.8). This grid rendered a creative approach for teaching and learning chemistry that incorporates more than 25 arts-integrated activities that span the chemistry curriculum at the level required by the high-school matriculation exam here in Israel. These activities are the result of three years of combined literature research, development, and validation in chemistry classrooms. All these activities were developed by combining between specific components from each of the three dimensions that compose the presented learning grid. Because implementing the approach requires a teacher who is aware of its underlying considerations regarding neuropedagogy and arts-integration, proper training is essential. Thus, in parallel to this approach, we also developed a teachers’ training course in which 50 in-service chemistry teachers from all over the country participated during the summer of 2020 (Marchak et al. 2021b). These teachers have been implementing this approach with their chemistry students, and 32 of them are also part of ongoing research about how the course and the implementation of the approach might influence their attitudes towards teaching, their creativity-related self-efficacy, and their teaching practice. It is important to understand that this approach does not intend to replace traditional teaching practices or inquiry lab activities; rather, it complements them in a modular way. Traditional, didactic modes of instruction, rehearsal, problem solving, and experimentation have a very respected place in teaching. However, we suggest that the neuropedagogy-based, arts-integrating approach presented here be com-

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bined as another pedagogical means to increase the repertoire of teaching practices and to recognize and include certain aspects of memory, understanding and learning that might be otherwise left unattended while teaching chemistry.

Conclusion: Expanding the Idea of the Learning Grid to Other Disciplines In this chapter we introduced a multidisciplinary learning grid that stems from the intersection between Chemistry, Educational Neuroscience, and Art. As mentioned above, this grid forms the core of a creative approach to teaching high-school chemistry that was developed to address both sense-making and personal meaning-making mechanisms while learning chemistry; aiming at helping students master chemical content. However, all teachers, regardless of their discipline of expertise, share the common goal of helping students internalize content in a meaningful way. They all undertake the process of planning their lessons by asking themselves basic questions about what, why, when, and how they should teach specific content. During lesson planning, each teacher may consider each of these questions to a different extent. Teachers not only think about these issues ‒ they also participate in continuing edu-

Figure 14.8: Schematic diagram of the three-dimensional conceptual space of the neuropedagogy-based, arts-integrating, chemistry learning grid including examples of the components of each dimension.

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cation through professional development courses, with the goal of improving their practice by gaining content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and/or pedagogical content knowledge. When these considerations about lesson planning are guided by an existing model, it is termed a “didaktik” model. A didaktik model is a sort of conceptual scaffold that guides the teacher in the decision-making process regarding her instructional practice (Seel 1999; Sjöström et al. 2020). In that sense, the multidimensional learning grid presented here is a didaktik model for neuropedagogy-based integration of arts (Fig. 14.8). The neuropedagogy dimension reminds teachers and content developers to pay attention to neurological issues that affect learning, such as amount of cognitive load, varied processing pathways, creative elaboration, sense and meaning, oral production, and learning by doing. The arts-integration dimension considers certain techniques as pedagogical tools that might support personal meaning-making, and visuo-spatial and multilevel thinking, such as art appreciation procedures, crafting plastic representations of content, producing sound representations of content, embodying content, reenacting processes, and processing content through storytelling. In the specific learning grid presented here, chemistry is one of its three dimensions (including the inherent challenges of learning it). However, neuropedagogy and arts-integration can be combined to form other learning grids, for disciplines other than STEM. Naturally, the advantages of engaging in learning experiences that were designed while considering neuropedagogy and arts-integration are not exclusive to the field of chemistry. Thus, educators and developers in other disciplines could benefit from exploring the conceptual space of the neuropedagogy-based, arts-integrating multidisciplinary learning grid.

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Andreas Zehetner and Liora Bigon

15 Concluding Remarks: Grids of Light, Darkness, and Intermediate Shades Abstract: This short chapter ties together some conceptual and empirical issues raised by the various contributions to this volume, in a creative rather than in a systematic way. This is in the light of this volume’s three thematic threads of “interdisciplinarity”, the “grid”, and the “arts.” By highlighting associations between the contributions while linking their varied “grids” to aspects of light, darkness and intermediate shades ‒ this contribution has a merit of its own in pointing towards the leverage and new avenues for future exploration. These avenues are based on both crossdisciplinarity and on an essential off-the-grid viewpoint. Keywords: interdisciplinarity; the “grid”; the arts; synopsis; an “off-the-grid” perspective

Introductory Words This short synopsis presents some concluding remarks on the concept and idea of the “grid”, in relation to its varied contexts. In what follows, we will therefore provide a critical reflection, ranging from the “bright side” of the grid to its “dark side”, via some in-between shades with relation to the various disciplines. In their introductory words, the editors of this volume framed the concept of the “grid” and its relevance in the many disciplines, from the humanities and social sciences to exact sciences, with a flexible affinity to the arts. From the perspective of the life sciences as well, the “grid” is dynamic and evolutive, polymorphic and morphogenetic, and it can help us to better understand the complexity of nature and to respond to it in a structured way. We have borrowed grids from nature: regular patterns arranged along (imaginary) vertical and horizontal grid lines can be found on plants (e.g. a pineapple), animals (e.g. a snakeskin or honeycombs), and geological structures (e.g. crystals). An almost random glimpse into biomimicry allows us to perceive nature’s fabulous richness in a multiplicity of grids and similar structures. Indeed, grids define our world, from the very large to the very small: our geographic coordinate system (GCS), for instance, covers the world with longitude and latitude gridlines and allows us to locate exactly the position of any object on the planet. And in microscale, Scanning Electron Microscopes (SEM) use grids to produce images of elements that are even smaller than one nanometer. This book is entitled The Arts of the Grid. We leave it to the reader whether to agree or disagree that grids are an art by themselves; to imagine their relationships with the many aspects of the matter and materiality of creativity and the process of artistic

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Figure 15.1: Lior Ben-Gai, Hexagliders 2.0, WebGL, 2020 (courtesy of the artist).

creation; to basically interpret “the arts of”, in English, as “the skill of”; or to reflect on this updated collection that uses the most recent ideas, concepts and empirical methods as “the state-of-the-art” by itself. However, rather than (or in addition to) reflecting on the “grid” as a piece of art, it is possible to interpret it more as an auxiliary means to produce (scientific or artistic) results. The legendary New York book designer Massimo Vignelli (1931–2014) has been quoted in a very illustrative though somewhat earthy way: “A grid is like underwear, you wear it but it’s not to be exposed” (in: Howarth 2013, online source). The digital artwork shown in Fig. 15.1 is illustrative here, by featuring a sound reactive grid- based computational model (CA, or Cellular Automaton) that contains an algorithm created specifically for the piece, using custom software developed by the artist as part of his ongoing research into exploration of synthetic abstract structures. In this way, the “grid” constitutes auxiliary means through which artistic and performative uses of CA include a light-sensitive custom computer for the installation and a hybrid CA-microscope audio-visual instrument for the live performance. This piece is also designed to work autonomously in a gallery space, so that the live visuals react in real-time to audible sounds in the space by altering the parameters of the program while it is running, thus constantly evolving and adapting to both the ambient soundscape and to visitors’ interactions with each other and the piece. Fig. 15.1 also illustrates the renewed critical interest in the “grid” with affinity to the “arts”, in the broadest sense, that is being evoked anew almost every generation in the past hundred years, since Piet Mondrian via Rosalind

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Krauss’s analysis, and up to this volume (for instance). This is because every generation recreates the grid and its interpretations against the backdrop of its own techno-cultural, ever- changing, baggage.

The Bright Sides of the Grid PowerPoint users know this: they can opt for “snap to grid”, and any object is “magnetically attracted” by the grid line next to it. This helps to align elements quickly and in an orderly manner, and as such speeds up operations. However, this option can be deselected, which allows the user to unfold his/her creative potential without being bound to horizontal and/or vertical gridlines. In simple terms, such as Fig. 15.2 shows, grids give us something to hold on to. Grids provide support and increase precision in structuring information input and analysis, visualizing and using output, as mentioned in several of this volume’s chapters (see Chapter 9, “Searching for the Grid at the Turn of the Twentieth Century”; or Chapter 7, “Sounds in Grid”). Grids may also save time: after some practice, it becomes easier and faster to see where information of any kind should be put. In terms of cooperation and teamwork, as exemplified in other chapters, grids make collaborations run smoother as they can become part of a guideline that each member of a team must follow, making it easier to collaborate on a project and disseminate knowledge (see Chapter 13, “Storytelling in Virtual Reality”; or Chapter 14, “The Multidisciplinary Learning Grid” as to arts-integrated Chemistry activities). Such qualities hold especially true for multidisciplinary work. They keep information, data, materials and other “flows” consistent, and they help in integrating and synchronizing data. Lastly, data which has been organized through whatever type of grid helps unifying and making the information provided more predictable for analysts and users, and easy to navigate.

Figure 15.2: MS PowerPoint’s “Grid and Guides” menu (Microsoft PowerPoint, in public domain).

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Functions of the “Grid”: Descriptive, Prescriptive or Normative? For a better understanding of the “good” and the “bad” sides of grids, it might be useful to distinguish between three categories of functions that a grid may fulfil, as are represented in the chapters of this book. Descriptive, prescriptive and normative analyses have been described by Keller (1989): first, the descriptive function of the grid is most important, as it allows us to use grids to better describe the complexity of the underlying nature. The underlying grid of a city’s street layout helps a great deal to describe distinct spots and also how to reach them. For a music composer, grids for instance in the shape of the three-four time of the Waltz, or the beat and rhythm of a pop song ‒ describe the way the song is composed. Second, a predictive function of the “grid” might help us to understand how something will unfold and develop in the future. This is important in urban design, as exemplified by Chapter 5, on the repetitive configuration of towns throughout the history of Senegal, used to serve different functions by the changing regimes; or by Chapter 4 that mentions Beijing’s Forbidden City with one court after the other, all following the same harmonic grid. This also gives trust to the visitor, who feels good and assured because nothing unexpected happens, though in the urban context the “grid” has its dark side as well due to its possible connotation with authoritative regimes (Grant 2018); or due to its possible Foucauldian connotation through its aspect of governmentality (see Chapter 11, “How to Do Things with Grids: Anarchitectures of Navigability”). The third function of a grid, the normative function, encapsulates future outcomes and gives advice and directions for upcoming action. It tells us what would be best to do next. And, this last function of the grid is where we found some sensitive, if not critical aspects, to be proposed for discussion in the next section.

Where There is Light, There is Also Shade Not by definition, but for a vast majority, grids are perceived as linear. As such, grids suggest performing and applying “linear” thinking. In business related research and its interface with emotive values, linear thinking might provoke heading for the “the more the better” paradigm. In Management, grid or “matrix” models are very popular. In principle, those grid models display the relationship of two variables. Many of those grid-based decision models, like the Managerial Grid Model (Blake and Mouton 1964) or the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) matrix (developed by Bruce Henderson for the Boston Consulting Group in 1970, reviewed for example in Morrison and Wensley 1991) implicitly assume a linear relationship of these variables in the logical order of “the-more-the-better.” The “best” quadrant is thus the one where both variables have high values. For instance, in the BCG matrix, “stars” are those that rank high

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in both dimensions, while “poor dogs” rank low in both. While this has some logic on its side, the paradigm of linear positive relationships should not be considered as a panacea in social sciences. Non-linear relationships, such as the phenomenon of diminishing returns or even inverted U-shaped relationships, increasingly question the “more-the-better” paradigm. There can be “too much” of intelligence for a certain job, “too much” of market share, and “too much” of performance, that leads to detrimental effects such as burn-out, illness or increased pressure from other parties. All these move away from the optimum level. Secondly, grids might produce undifferentiated, unspectacular results. This aspect is discussed in Chapter 3 that concerns Brazilian new towns as a “calculated indifference.” The resulting problem is therefore: do grids lead to “expected” mainstream pieces of artwork, which appear familiar to the spectators of artworks or listeners of music ‒ artworks that are suspected to be short-lived and quickly replaced by similar ones that follow the same pattern? Thirdly, another grid-related matter is connected to symmetry and harmony. As classically suggested by Leonardo da Vinci, physical attraction depends on ratio, and in particular symmetry (this is sometimes referred to as the “mathematics of beauty”, or “aesthetic grid”, as phrased in Chapter 6 that expands on the philosophical challenges posed by AI artists). Symmetry refers to the extent to which one-half of an object (image, organism, etc.) is the same as the other half. This aspect is referred to, inter alia, in Chapter 4 presenting harmonic and symmetrical Chinese palace buildings by emphasizing that the beauty of these arrangements lies in the visitor’s “looking for order.” However, there have been many studies into a human’s physical beauty using composite images and face-half mirroring, with mixed results. Not always the perfectly symmetric face was perceived as the most beautiful one (Perrett et al. 1999). Fourthly, with respect to technical disciplines such as Engineering, we might ask ourselves whether grids help or hinder ground-breaking and disruptive innovations. In their contribution on “innovation traps”, Välikangas and Gibbert (2005) clearly refer to ambiguity of (mental) grids and patterns by stating that innovators need to have the possibility to leave patterns, and at the same time, emphasize the necessity of boundaries for innovators. And, finally, the question of whether grids are static or dynamic could be discussed. This seemingly contradictory aspect has been raised early in this volume, in Chapter 2 entitled “The Networked Artwork: The Grid as Dynamic Relational Form?”; Here, it is stressed that networks and relationships change very quickly in today’s world. Is a “network” a similar construct to a “grid”? Does the former replace or complement the latter? Do “grids” change with societal and technological changes? Do they adopt to a changing environment? Or does the power of a “grid” lie mostly in the fact that it does NOT change and adapt. These are interesting questions for future discussion and further exploration, with many chapters in this volume exhibiting a movement and formulation of the “grid” in many directions: whether vertically exca-

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vating beneath the surface from “An Improvisational Actor’s Perspective” (Chapter 10); or vertically layering networks of communication in a genealogical way, in light of linguistic structures, such as in “The Linguistics Relation in the Virtual Grid” (Chapter 12). Whether perpendicular as in “On Grids of Contemporary Art Production” (Chapter 8) or in “Storytelling in Virtual Reality” (Chapter 13); rhumb-lined such as in “Anarchitectures of Navigability” (Chapter 11); or splintered and fragmentary, such as in “When Art and Science Shared their Fragments” (Chapter 9).

Escaping from the Grid Grids, whether they are manifest or intellectual, visible or invisible, aesthetic or technological, do have their merits in many disciplines from the humanities to the social sciences, from the life sciences to the exact sciences, from the arts to engineering. The present multidisciplinary volume provides a spectacular bouquet of contributions that scrutinize the concept of the grid. Light has been shed on the grid as an underlying accessory to combine knowledge from various disciplines in a diverse and thoughtful manner. Here, we have tried to discuss the idea of the grid from various perspectives, from light to dark, and would like to conclude with an illustration of a well-known logic puzzle (e.g., Maier 1930) (Fig. 15.3). In this puzzle, candidates should connect nine bullet points with only four connected lines. Most of them fail, because they do not consider – or do not dare – to “escape” from the grid, even with their pen. In this case, however, the solution can only be found by (temporarily) “leaving the grid.” In conclusion, being neither proponents nor opponents of the “grid” – involving human, material and theoretical “flows” in every direction ‒ we suggest considering it whenever useful, being careful about possible caveats. At the same time, being entangled in the grid might generate an Archimedean perspective for having the courage to escape from it if it serves the greater good, and for the sake of a further exploration.

Figure 15.3: The nine-dot-problem (image in public domain, Wikimedia).

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References Blake, Robert R., and Jane Mouton. The Managerial Grid. Houston: Gulf Publishing, 1964. Grant, Jill. “The Dark Side of the Grid Revisited: Power and Urban Design.” In: Gridded Worlds: An Urban Anthology, edited by Reuben Rose-Redwood and Liora Bigon, 75‒100. Cham: Springer, 2018. Howarth, Dan. “Massimo Vignelli Makes Books.” May 9, 2013. In Dezeen’s website. Accessed December 15, 2021. https://www.dezeen.com/2013/05/09/massimo-vignelli-makes-books/. Keller, Robin. “The Role of Generalized Utility Theories in Descriptive, Prescriptive, and Normative Decision Analysis.” Information and Decision Technologies 15, 4 (1989): 259–271. Maier, Norman. “Reasoning in Humans. I. On Direction.” Journal of Comparative Psychology 10, 2 (1930): 115–143. Morrison, Alan, and Robin Wensley. “Boxing up or Boxed in?: A Short History of the Boston Consulting Group Share/Growth Matrix.” Journal of Marketing Management 7, 2 (1991): 105‒129. Perrett, David, Michael Burt, Ian Penton-Voak, Kieran Lee, Duncan Rowland, and Rachel Edwards. “Symmetry and Human Facial Attractiveness.” Evolution and Human Behavior 20, 5 (1999): 295‒307. Välikangas, Liisa, and Michal Gibbert. “Boundary-setting Strategies for Escaping Innovation Traps.” MIT Sloan Management Review 46, 3 (2005): 58–65.

About the Contributors SAGIT ALKOBI FISHMAN has been a digital artist and a new media scholar for over a decade. In her artistic work she focuses on digital and mixed-media painting, through which she  explores the influence a medium may have on the creation process as well as on the aesthetic experience. Some of her paintings have been presented in Weizmann Institute of Science. Her artworks embody various themes including phenomenological themes drawn from Feminist existentialism, and accentuate critical perspectives concerning the notions of individualism and traditionalism in the digital age, and the tension between them. Alkobi Fishman has an academic background in computer science (BA, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology) and in philosophy of digital culture and art (MA, Tel-Aviv University). Her Master’s thesis, written under the guidance of Israel Prize winner Prof Ben Ami Scharfstein, centered on the question of the relation between imitation and art and inquired into cross-cultural perspectives. Her recent interests lie in the intersection between technology and aesthetics and the questions aroused by technological entities in the realm of the arts. FRANK BAUER. Born in Germany in 1987, Bauer studied social sciences/history at JGU Mainz (MA 2012) and architecture at UIC/IIT Chicago and UdK Berlin (MA 2017). The same year he co-founded Büro Vogel Bauer, an agency specialized in the planning and realization of contemporary sculpture. After being visiting researcher at Fondation Vasarely and KWY Lisboa, he is currently working as an Elsa Neumann PhD Fellow at UdK Berlin on the computational ontologies of contemporary art fabrication. LIORA BIGON teaches at Holon Institute of Technology (HIT) (MA in African Studies, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; PhD in Architecture, the University of Manchester, UK). Interested in urban spatialities in the global South, (post-)colonial history, architecture and planning cultures in sub-Saharan Africa, and toponymy studies, she has published widely in these fields, including articles, encyclopaedic entries, and books, e.g., Garden Cities and Colonial Planning in Africa and Palestine (co-ed., Manchester University Press, 2014); French Colonial Dakar (Manchester University Press, 2016); Place Names in Africa (ed., Springer, 2016); Gridded Worlds: An Urban Anthology (co-ed., Springer, 2018); and Grid Planning in the Urban Design Practices of Senegal (with Eric Ross, Springer, 2020). LEONIE BRADBURY is a respected authority on the creative and scholarly aspects of contemporary art, with more than twenty years of experience creating compelling and innovative exhibitions, developing new artistic works, and promoting artists as thought leaders. She currently holds the Henry and Lois Foster Chair in Contemporary Art Theory and Practice and serves as Distinguished Curator-in-Residence at Emerson College, Boston. She directs Emerson’s platform for visual art, “Emerson Contemporary”, focused on presenting and commissioning new media art, performance art, and art engaged with emergent technologies. Bradbury holds a BA in the History of

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Art from the University of Minnesota; a MA in the History of Art: 20th Century Art, Theory, and Criticism from Boston University; and a PhD in Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Art Theory from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in Maine. JEROEN CLUCKERS is a video artist and film-maker. He creates audio-visual dreamscapes that explore, question and transform the boundaries between fiction and reality, digital and analog, cinema and painting, image and imagination. Soon after obtaining his Master in Fine Art (Media Art at KASK Gent), his work was picked up internationally. Today, it has been exhibited in more than 40 countries worldwide, at festivals, museums and galleries and it has received several awards. Since 2017 he has been connected to Graphical and Digital Media as a Lecturer-Researcher, and has conducted research in immersive storytelling in the research project “Show & Tell!” JOSEF (SEPPO) GRÜNDLER lives in Graz, Austria. Sound and media artist, ‘maker’ of software and electronics, visiting professor of sound design at Donau-University Krems and assisting professor at the FH-JOANNEUM University of Applied Science. Main instruments are guitar, electronics and software. Holds a PhD in medicine. Board of directors’ member of the Institute for Media Archeology and of the Society for Dissemination and Distribution of New Music. Teaches sound and interaction design. Workshops on topics like improvisation, software and electronics for designers and artists. Since 1982 working in the field of new media such as music for computer games, theater, film, media and sound installations. Works have been presented at Ars Electronica, Wiener Festwochen, Steirischer Herbst, the Knitting Factory New York, Sonambiente Berlin, Transmediale Berlin, City of Women Festival Ljubljana, Fine senca fine – Venice, Trentino, Budapest, Graz, etc. Creator of various CDs. Current live acts include the Klammer & Gruendler Duo, Singing Adorno, the Urban Sound Band, solo concerts, 6To6decibel, “the nomadic producers” and co-organizing the Styrian Improvisers Orchestra. STEPHEN HARGREAVES is an educational researcher and lecturer in English didactics,  language and culture  at the  Artesis  Plantijn  University College of Antwerp. Central in his approach is the social-constructivist vision in which students and lecturers learn together from and with each other. Using and implementing a technologically powerful learning environment with the support of Teacher Design Teams (TDT)  and  emphasis  on didactics  is one of his research foci. As an educational researcher, he conducts research on the effectiveness of educational models and the well-being of students with regard to their learning environment perception. The education and research nexus is the guiding principle in his professional labor. Stephen co-wrote the “Stairway to English” coursebooks for De Boeck publishers and has published articles related to education and innovation. He was awarded the Flemish ICTprize for sharing his work and inspiring fellow teachers and trainers.   DEBORA MARCHAK obtained her PhD in Physical Chemistry from Tel Aviv University on the research of quantum conductance though semiconducting nanoparticles

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at high temperatures. Later, she joined the Department of Materials and Interfaces at the Weizmann Institute of Science during her postdoctoral studies. Nowadays Debora is head of the “We Have Chemistry!” National Projects Competition, head of the National Center for Chemistry Teachers, and conducts research on art-integrated chemistry teaching practices, inspired by neuro-pedagogical approaches, at the Chemistry Group of the Science Teaching Department at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Since 2013 Debora also teaches Chemistry, Science, STEAM and PlaceMaking to High School students in the city of Arad and is involved in several projects for the advancement of practical science education in Israel. LARA D. NIELSEN (PhD New York University) is a writer whose research works among and between a diversity of visual and kinetic arts medias, focusing on resistance strategies to control practices and technologies. Recent projects consider contemporary art that studies surveillance and evidentiary regimes in digital and documentary medias, including film, installation, architecture, and performance. Rooted in transnational and colonial port cities of the Atlantic and Pacific theaters, This Kinetic World (2017) addresses a panoply of grid media histories that animate today’s increasingly pressing questions about how to do things with systems. Working at the nexus of Law and Performance, Freedom with Silence (2018) studies the equivocal uses of silence and legibility that pervade the violence of forced disappearance (crimes against humanity committed by the state) in the nomoscapes of today’s twenty-first century Americas. On how small structures contribute to the stability of something larger (2018) reflects on chance operations and the control society in the anthropocene. These and other publications question and assess documentary, oral history, and ethnographic techniques for maneuvering transnational circuits of exchange between people, goods, and things. Another line of research focuses on creative strategy in the nonprofit and globalizing arts and cultural industries, offering qualitative research approaches to economic questions of exchange and social justice in the arts and culture sectors (Neoliberalism and Global Theatres: Performance Permutations, 2012 & 2015; Contemporary Theatre Review, 2006; Studies in Law, Politics & Society 2003.). Following university careers in New York City, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and Amherst, MA, she is most recently teaching in Madrid, Spain. FRANCESCA ORESTANO, Professor of English Literature at the University of Milan, is the author of a book on John Neal and the American Renaissance (Dal Neoclassico al Classico); on Revd. William Gilpin and landscape aesthetics; on the picturesque and nineteenth-century literature. She has edited with Michael Hollington Dickens and Italy; with Norbert Lennartz New Bearings in Dickens Criticism; she is the author of essays on Dickens and American landscape, on Dickens and Virginia Woolf, and the reception of Dickens in Italy. She works on the connection between Victorian literature, taste and science; on John Ruskin; on literary Impressionism. With Michael Vickers she has edited Not Just Porridge: English Literati at Table (2017) ‒ a gastro-

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nomic history of English literature. Her essay on Dickens’s Little Dorrit is forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens. TOM PEETERS is a lecturer and researcher at the AP University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Antwerp, and teaches various courses in software and web development. He obtained a Master of Electronics and ICT Engineering and has worked as a software engineer and project manager at Agfa-Gevaert NV for several years. He has given international guest lectures in Finland (Oulu), and is currently also the international coordinator for Electronics-ICT program in the Science and Technology department. He is also a member of the research group “Show & Tell!” ADIR PRIDOR is the Chairman of the Executive Committee, HIT – Holon Institute of Technology, and the founder and Chairman of The Institute for Industrial Mathematics. With a  PhD in Mathematics and a  MSc in Physics (both from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Prof. Pridor is an expert in operations research and complex systems analysis, applied mathematics and algorithm design, optimization, industrial modeling, manufacturing theory, telecommunications, logistic systems, hydrodynamics, network analysis, transport equations, data mining, defense and security. Pridor was a founder and Head of the Center for Military Analyses (CEMA) at Rafael, and one of the founders of the Operations Research Branch in the Israeli Air Force. Being involved in academic activity since 1975, he authored numerous scientific papers and technical reports. He also served as a visiting professor and professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) NY and the University of Delaware, Newark.   RENATO LEÃO REGO, PhD, is a Brazilian architect, historian and professor at the State University of Maringá (UEM), Brazil. His teaching focuses on modern architecture and town planning history, and his current research project is related to the construction of new towns in developing countries. He has been Associate Research Fellow at the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies, Birkbeck College, and Visiting Professor at the Center for Latin American Studies, University of Florida. He is the author of Planted Towns: The British and the Construction of the Northern Paraná Landscape; and Ideas for New Towns: Architecture and Urbanism in Twentieth-Century Brazilian Hinterlands (both in Portuguese), and has published widely on the diffusion of planning ideas in Brazil. ERIC ROSS is a cultural and urban geographer, associate professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Al Akhawayn University, Ifrane. He is a specialist in Islam in Africa and urban affairs, cultural heritage and tourism, particularly in West Africa and the Maghrib; and conducted research on Sufi institutions and urban processes in Senegal, especially on the city of Touba. Published widely in these fields, among his books are: Assessing Tourism in Essaouira (et al., Al Akhawayn University Press, 2002); Sufi City: Urban Design and Archetypes in Touba (University of Rochester Press, 2006); and Cultures and Customs of Senegal (Greenwood/Heineman, 2008).

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NAVA SHAKED is the head of Multidisciplinary Studies in HIT ‒ Holon Institute of Technology, and an adjunct professor at the PhD program at CUNY GC, Computational Linguistics Department (where she holds a PhD from). The Multidisciplinary Studies Department leverages the cooperation between HIT’s different faculties and departments in a unique way to promote synergism between Engineering, Sciences and Design. Shaked is an expert in Natural Language processing, Artificial Intelligence, and Human-Machine interaction; with twenty years’ experience both in speech technology research and in leading major projects in Israel, Europe and the US. Shaked specializes in AI & Voice Technologies. Her book Design of Multimodal Mobile Interfaces (co-edited with Ute Winter), was published in 2016 by De Gruyter. INNA SHVARTZ-SEREBRO acquired her BSc in Chemical Engineering from the Technion ‒ Israel Institute of Technology. Later, she obtained her PhD in the field of Neurobiology from the Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University, on the research of the role of micro-RNAs regulation in the development and progression of Alzheimer’s disease pathology. Nowadays, Inna is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Chemistry Group in the  Science Teaching  Department  at the Weizmann Institute of Science; where she incorporates her knowledge in chemistry and neurobiology to advance the field of neuropedagogy in chemical education. With the aim to make chemistry a more accessible and understandable subject to a broader range of students, and as part of her postdoctoral research, Inna developed a professional development course to impart neuropedagogical practical tools to chemistry teachers. Moreover, she works with chemistry teachers, guiding them in the integration of relevant neuropedagogical principles to their teaching practice. YOËL TAWIL is an anthropologist, researcher and a lecturer in the field of Creativity Studies and Medical Anthropology at the Department of Multi-Disciplinary Studies of HIT ‒Holon Institute of Technology. In his doctoral dissertation (Ben-Gurion University), Tawil provided a cultural analysis and critique of the concept of creativity in the Jewish-Israeli national context. He has taught extensively Anthropology and Creativity Enhancement, advocating in favor of bridging the gap between theory and practice and of all forms of cross-pollinating dialogues. As such, he promotes applied anthropology and theoretical collaborations that create new content. Tawil is also a professional improvisational actor and works regularly with the Medical Simulation Center at Sheba Hospital in Israel.   KRISTOP TIMMERMAN obtained a master degree in Product Development and Theater Science (University of Antwerp). As an artist he has many years of experience with performances and installations in which Virtual Reality and other immersive techniques are being used. He is chairman of MAXlab, the research platform of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp on the interaction between art and digital technology. He is the coordinator of the research project “Show & Tell!” and of its summer school.

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ANDREAS ZEHETNER is a Professor of Marketing at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria (FH OÖ). He holds a master’s degree from the Johannes-Kepler University of Linz and a doctoral degree from the Karl-Franzens University of Graz. Since 2013, he occupies the position of the Vice President of International Affairs, and is a member of his University’s Management Board. Zehetner has been teaching at various universities, among them the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE) in Beijing; the Concordia University Wisconsin (CUW); the St. Petersburg State Polytechnical; the University of Economics (VSE) in Prague; and the Plekhanov University of Economics, Russia. In his research, he is interested in organizational buying behavior, negotiation, and emotional and social competences in sales and sales management, as well as in higher education internationalization and university-industry relationships. SHAOQIAN ZHANG is an associate professor of art history at Oklahoma State University, USA. She received her BA in Chinese architecture from Beijing University, and MA and PhD in art history from Northwestern University. Professor Zhang’s research touches upon a wide variety of visual materials ranging from traditional East Asian architecture to contemporary art in China. She has published a number of articles that reflect her interests in print culture, military history, medium specificity and spectatorship in China’s modern period, appearing in journals such as Modern Art Asia, Transcultural Studies, Twentieth Century China, Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy and Art in Print. Professor Zhang received the 2017 Oklahoma State University Junior Faculty Award for Scholarly Excellence.

About the Participant Artists LIOR BEN-GAI is a computational designer and lecturer. He specializes in graphics programming, human-computer interaction and procedural content generation. Currently studying for his PhD at the Department of Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, he also lectures at the Department of Visual Communication at Shenkar College of Engineering and Design. Lior’s research involves interactive explorations of novel forms and processes that emerge in large systems of interacting components. LIMOR COHEN, MIRIT MALIHI, and SHAY MALKIN are Master students in Integrated Design and Applied Mathematics. They produced their artwork at the Lab for Designing Mathematics as the final project in the course “Symmetry and Fractals” instructed by Dr. Shai Gul, HIT – Holon Institute of Technology. EMMA MARGARITA ERENST is an interdisciplinary designer working at the cross-section of physical and virtual design spaces. Her personal research focuses on the friction between software, hardware, body, and motion and the ways such friction can be shaped or resolved through emerging technologies. Her commercial work is multidisciplinary and includes design of wearable art for award winning dance performances, development of interactive products and creative research strategies for the printing and textile industry, branding and information design for magazines and startups, and visual storytelling. ARIEL LIFSCHITS is an architect and product designer, a partner in the Toledo-Lifschitz Architects Office. He graduated with honors in Architecture Studies from the New York Institute of Technology, and holds a master’s degree in Product Design from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. Lifschitz’s projects are societal and range from technology-oriented studio to high-end and sustainable architecture. SHARON MURRO is a young graphic designer, graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, and holds a master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Design from Shenkar. Currently, she manages a collection in the Materials Library at the Design Museum, Holon. IGOR REVELIS (KLONE) was born in Kharkov, Ukraine, and currently lives and works in Tel Aviv. A renowned graffiti artist who created and presented his works in public spheres and galleries and museums throughout Europe, the Middle East and the United States ‒ Klone’s work is influenced by his childhood emigration memories from the Soviet Union to Israel. It includes themes of diaspora, an alienated environment, a broader political treatise and back to “home” again. ALEX SCHNAIDER is a textile and paper artist whose studio is located in Tel Aviv. Studied art education at the Ramat Hasharon Art College and participated in numerous group exhibitions, Schnaider’s work is also currently presented at the Triennale “Textile Art Today” which travels between European museums and galleries. His

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artwork and interviews have also been published in art magazines and internet sites globally. BRIT SHAKED is a fashion and textile designer, specializing in fabric and material printing combined with technology and machinery. She is a graduate of Fashion Institute of Technology’s MFA Fashion program (New York). Her work is vibrant and streaming with colors, movement, and dimensions; and includes a great emphasis on traditional textile techniques combined with deep thinking about production and industry solutions. DEGANIT STERN SCHOCKEN is an international jewelry designer and Senior Lecturer at the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design. She established Shenkar’s Department of Jewelry Design, and chaired it for nine years, during which time she established her leading position in this field. Has presented her work in galleries and museums globally, she also chaired the Masters program in Design in her institution till 2016. SHAUL TZEMACH lives and works in Tel Aviv. He began his career in the plastic arts, later moved on to the New Media, and real-time kinetic, interactive and generative art including video mapping and 3D projection. In his artworks, Tzemach uses interdisciplinary methodologies in order to explore aspects such as the creation and transformation of forms. Spread across varying artistic fields, his works are characterized by multiple layers, chaos, and complexity, and are engaged in the phenomenon of infinity.