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Anthokosmos. Abstract points. Athens, 2024
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Brushstrokes on the Ceiling
Yesterday, some rhythmic brushstrokes on the ceiling caught my attention. Erie was applying putty with a spatula, smoothing over screw holes and other imperfections to make ceiling surface look smooth.
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Anthokosmos. Points on grid. Kallithea Athens, 2024
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Spots on the Grid
Looking out from the balcony, my eyes were drawn to a series of spots on the mid-wall of a nearby building. These spots, arranged in a grid-like pattern, seemed to follow a rhythm, with equal distances between them, that subdivided the whole surface. They looked like patches covering holes, perhaps left by scaffolding hooks used during construction years ago. Now, these spots trace the invisible grid of that long-gone scaffolding.
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Anthokosmos. Points on grid. Athens, 2024
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Random Points on the Grid
Back inside, I noticed two more spots: one bright, the other reflective. They seemed randomly placed on the grid of a surface. Like what we would call in a three-dimensional design program “random points on a surface”.
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Anthokosmos. Trolleybus lines. Athens, 2024
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Points at the Intersection
My search for grid nodes—whether visible, invisible, structural, or conceptual—became a spontaneous exercise of urban observations.
At the intersection of lines. Points in the hovering of traffic lines and networks.
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Anthokosmos. Wood. Athens, 2024
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Rhythmic Holes
The points of a grid, rhythmic slots, holes for support.
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Anthokosmos. Μarble revetment. Athens, 2024
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Hooks
Support points organized to anchor two elements together. To suspend one surface from another. Supports against gravity.
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Anthokosmos. Rings on Grid, 2024
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Rings of flexibility
Points, “rings” to link divided parts. To reach flexibility for folding and movement.
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Anthokosmos. Points on Grid, 2024
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The Grid’s Confusion
The grid and its points are confusing as they often lie between the real and the spiritual. Nodes, connectors, alcoves, hooks, boundaries, and intersections all form part of a larger, organized whole—both material or immaterial, abstract or geometric.
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Anthokosmos. Bridge, a crossroad, 2024
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The bridge
“Organizing a location into places-topos“[1] is how Heidegger describes the bridge. The bridge, the thing, and the quaternary (intersection, point of intersection) that collects and defines them. The bridge, dwelling encounters.
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Agnes Martin. Untitled. 1965 (left), Piet Mondrian. Composition in Brown and Gray, 1913 (right)
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Rosalind Krauss, Grids
Rosalind Krauss in her article “the grid” analyzed the advent of the grid in art, from the 19th century to the modern movement, and its power to sustain and define it, “development is precisely what the grid resists. But no one seems to have been deterred by that example, and modernist practice continues to generate ever more instances of grids”[2].
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The influence of the grid is, for Krauss, spatio-temporal.
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The grid is spatial, geometric, neat, idealized, organizational, autonomous, autotelic, and anti-natural.
The grid is temporal as a model or paradigm antidevelopmental, antinarrative, antihistorical, i.e., a combination defining non-relationships or non-developmental relationships.
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In this sense, the stories around points on grids gathered here make up the grid of a narrative, mininarratives in grid, and histories at relatively unequal distances among them.
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Albrecht Dürer, Draughtsman Making a Perspective Drawing of a Reclining Woman. ca. 1600
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Grid, a model
The grid is a way of organizing relationships, and tendencies for creating patterns, managing drawings, and measuring and controlling subdivisions. An organization that extends to infinity. Grid can be a calculation sheet, and often an analytical system of control and intellectualization. And, not to forget, the grid of the window of representation makes us wonder. Do we still see behind this window model?
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Xenakis. Polytope de Montréal, 1967
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Points on grid
Points on Euclidean plane. Flatness is derived from coordinates, a grid that subdivides a surface based on its properties. Curved shapes and surfaced, intersection points that pass from 2 to 3 dimensions, become unruly, make polytopes, and determine the inflection curvature of the surfaces.
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Anthokosmos. Points on Grid, 2024
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Points of Inflection in Deleuze’s Grid
For Deleuze the grid serves as a framework to explore how surfaces and spaces can be divided, measured, and understood in relation to folding and unfolding processes.
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Deleuze interested in continuous change and transformaion, contrasts the grid’s geometric regularity with the organic, fluid nature of folds to show how different systems of thought and representation can coexist and interact.
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“Although they are not contiguous, singularities, or unique points. belong fully to continuousness. Points of inflection make up a first kind of singularity in space. and constitute envelopes in accord with indivisible relations of distance”. [3]
Anthokosmos. Points on Grid, 2024
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Traces of the Grid
This text explores the traces left by grid points on a surface beyond dichotomies. It is part of a series that delves into the relationship between traces, surfaces, and their properties, based on observation. These explorations link geometric and topological concerns with everyday practices, bridging the gap between digital 3D design and daily life.
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Anthokosmos. Points on Grid, 2024
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Anthokosmos. Points on Grid, 2024
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Anthokosmos. Points on Grid, 2024
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Related Texts
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[1] Heidegger, Martin. Building Dwelling Thinking. Harper Colophon Books, New York, 1971.
[2] Krauss, Rosalind. “Grids.” October 9 (1979): 51-64.
[3] Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. London, The Athlone Press, 1993. p.20
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Download Rosalind Krauss article
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