The Grid — Krauss, the Loom and the Screen

Since 2019 most of van den Dorpel's work has been built on a grid. That February he started an are.na channel, Modular Aesthetic Systems, described as "characters, alphabets, grids, modularity, zoom", and its first works of his own are the Colour Configuration pairs of March 2019 (sources/ingested/arena-modular-aesthetic-systems.md). A channel from 2018, To Exhaust a Possibility Space, already set variants of one form side by side, from Bernd and Hilla Becher's water towers to Markov's Window (sources/ingested/arena-to-exhaust-a-possibility-space.md). The grid works on screen are Colour Configurations, Field, Anni, Pression des pairs, Stained Unravel and Interruptions. On paper they include Rasterbild, Rag, Swath, Thresh, Diagonal Fault, Vesper, Tract and Leaky Abstraction.

This page reads them against Rosalind Krauss's essay "Grids" (October 9, 1979), the standard account of what the grid meant to modernism (sources/ingested/krauss-grids-1979.md). The wiki has met the essay once before: Anna Kipke uses it to read the graph paper of Emma Kunz as a surface that "opens a back door to belief" (→ sources/ingested/kipke-politiken-der-innerlichkeit-2021.md).

From nesting to the grid

The artist describes the turn to the grid as a change of structure (November 2026): "A major transition in my practice was the move from nesting, embeddedness and compositing, as in Mutant Garden (Seeder) and Nested Exchange, to grids, as in many of my more recent works. I think the move happened because nesting implies a hierarchical document, with a schema, types and modules. I gradually got interested in the grid through textiles, art history, weavers, pixels, relationships and GPU shaders."

Nesting is the structure of the earlier generative work. In Nested Exchange (2017–2019) the specimens "are configured in nested recursive 'tree' structures similar to those used in the first iterations of Chomskyan linguistics" (series text, harm.work). Mutant Garden (2020–) builds its compositions from layers of rectangles and rounded squares, each placed inside another. Markov's Window (2004) and Venster (2024) subdivide a square into smaller squares, recursively (→ Recursion). In each of these a part is defined by its parent: it sits inside something and takes its place from it, the way an element sits in a document whose schema says what may contain what.

The site lists the mutations of one mutant as tiles in a grid. Inside each tile the composition is nested: rectangles inside rectangles inside a rounded square. The interface is a grid, and the work in each tile is a tree.

A grid has no parents. Each cell is set by its neighbours, the same rule applies everywhere, and no cell contains another. Krauss calls the grid's order "that of pure relationship", and relationships is one of the artist's own reasons for turning to it. It is also how a graphics card computes. A shader runs one function for every pixel at once, over a grid of cells that do not contain one another; Entfaltung runs entirely on the GPU in this way, and the Senescenence press release traces a line from "the binary logic of the weaving loom, to early two-dimensional pixel graphics, to the contemporary GPU" (→ Senescenence). Mutant Garden already had a grid inside it, out of sight. Cartesian genetic programming "represents a computer program as a two-dimensional grid: nodes and layers" (series text, harm.work), so its programs were grids that drew nested pictures. In Colour Configurations the grid reached the image as well.

With Entfaltung (2026) the artist sees the two structures combined: "With the new Emma Kunz series, the embeddedness of nesting and the repetition of the grid seem to have found an amalgamation, made possible by the mathematical skills that programming with language models opened up to me." The drawings show both at once. Tabula I sets thirty figures in a grid, and inside each figure a fan splits into a ring of kites. Variance puts nine flower-like figures from one generator in three rows of three and transforms them together. Wending nests a square inside a square, the masons' ad quadratum, and mirrors the whole on both axes. In the tokens a nested construction, slivers inside faces inside a figure, is repeated by symmetry across three axes (→ Entfaltung; Entfaltung on Paper).

The algorithms and their works

The works run on a small number of grid algorithms. Each was written once and then used across screen works and drawings.

The table separates the program from its outputs because the practice does. One algorithm produces animations, tokens and plotter drawings, and a drawing often comes with the token or source file it was plotted from.

Krauss's grid

Krauss gives the grid two functions. In space it declares the work autonomous: "antinatural, antimimetic, antireal. It is what art looks like when it turns its back on nature." It maps the surface of the picture onto itself, "a transfer in which nothing changes place". In time it declares modernity. The grid is "ubiquitous in the art of our century, while appearing nowhere, nowhere at all, in the art of the last one", and with it cubism, De Stijl, Mondrian and Malevich "landed in the present, and everything else was declared to be the past."

Its long life comes from working as a myth. "The grid's mythic power is that it makes us able to think we are dealing with materialism (or sometimes science, or logic) while at the same time it provides us with a release into belief (or illusion, or fiction)." Krauss traces it to two nineteenth-century sources, the grids that illustrated treatises on the physiology of seeing and the symbolist window, at once transparent and a mirror. She distinguishes centrifugal grids, which present the work as a fragment of an endless field, from centripetal ones, which turn the frame inward. And she ends on its stillness: "development is precisely what the grid resists"; it is "a paradigm or model for the antidevelopmental, the antinarrative, the antihistorical."

The works keep the grid and change four of these terms.

From the window to the loom

Krauss looks for the grid's ancestry in painting, perspective, optics and the window. The loom does not appear. Neither does the Jacquard machine (1804), which ran the pattern of a woven grid from punched cards, a grid made in the nineteenth century to carry instructions. Her one Albers is Josef, the painter of the Homage to the Square. The practice's Albers is Anni, the weaver.

The same Anni grid runs on four screens at four resolutions, 1, 2, 4 and 6. At a set interval all four rebuild from top to bottom under the same rules and palette. The Anni animations began from Anni Albers's Study for Camino Real (1967). Their grid "scans from top left to bottom right, referring to the process of weaving, or writing text", the same words the artist uses for Pression des pairs.

In the practice the grid comes from making, where for Krauss it comes from seeing. A woven grid is a procedure before it is a picture: it exists only as the sum of decisions taken cell by cell, which is why it can be written as code (→ Senescenence, The grid family; Algorithmic Archaeology, Antiquity). The are.na channel collects this other ancestry: Anni Albers, the Bauhaus weaver Benita Koch-Otte, Sumerian cuneiform pressed into clay, Tauba Auerbach's Shadow Weave. Several of these are women, and weaving was mostly women's work, which is the blind spot the exhibition Angles Morts (2024) named (→ Angles Morts). Emma Kunz grew up among hand-weavers before she drew on graph paper.

Short stepped strokes in a few pen colours repeat cell by cell along the diagonal, so that the sheet reads as a woven repeat. The title is the word for a scrap of cloth.

The grid that develops

Krauss's grid does not develop, and she counts that as no loss: there is "no necessary connection between good art and change". In the practice the grid is the state of a running process, and change is the work.

A grid of soft colour cells in columns of uneven width. Colour Configurations is the first grid work in the are.na channel, and its grid exists twice. The image is a grid of colour fields. The program that made it is a grid too: Cartesian genetic programming represents a program as "a two-dimensional grid of nodes", which mutation rewires and selection keeps or discards (→ Evolutionary Logic). The same algorithm breeds the specimens of Mutant Garden. Here the grid is the genome, and its whole purpose is to change.

Stained Unravel (2026) is a cellular automaton. Each cell takes one of 23 shapes, and the first rule that matches its neighbours' exact positions sets its next shape (→ 3000, 3001). Cells grow, merge and die, and "death is not failure but the system's natural feature" (→ Stained Unravel). Anni (unravel) (2025) runs a weave backwards: it "begins in a pristine crystalline state" and decays.

Short line segments fill the field, regular in places and gathered into streams in others, with voids where segments are missing, as in Vera Molnár's Interruptions. The five tokens, Peer Pressure, Interruptions, Monochrome, Projection and Nocturne, are deployed on Ethereum mainnet (contract), and each computes its field live from code stored on-chain. The artist names the departure from its predecessors as two things: fluid dynamics and animated randomness. Some cells average the orientations of their six neighbours, which is how a numerical solver approximates diffusion, so the field relaxes into streams and fans. Other cells spin on the spot or stick at a random angle, and the following cells turn with them (→ Interruptions). Krauss saw centrifugal grids dissolve the surface "into perceptual flicker or implied motion". Here the motion is real, and the grid behaves like a fluid.

Agent's reading: the rule repeats, the state develops

Thesis (Krauss). The grid is "a paradigm or model for the antidevelopmental, the antinarrative, the antihistorical". Once it appears it "seems quite resistant to change", as in the late careers of Mondrian and Josef Albers.

Antithesis (the works). The grid is a process with a history: a genome that evolves, cells that are born and die, a weave that unravels, a field that flows.

Synthesis. Krauss's own vocabulary contains the answer. She describes the grid as a structure that returns as "endless repetitions of the same conflict". A cellular automaton is exactly that: one local rule, applied unchanged at every cell and at every step. The rule is as antidevelopmental as any Mondrian. What develops is the state the repetition produces. The higher concept is the rule repeats, the state develops: computation moves the grid's stillness out of the image and into the rule, and the image becomes free to change. Mondrian repeated one rule across thirty years of canvases. A cellular automaton repeats one rule thousands of times a second, and the repetition, seen at that speed, reads as growth.

On paper: the grid stopped

The plotter drawings take one state out of the process and fix it. On paper the grid is still again, as Krauss describes it, but it is a still taken from something that moved.

Made with the Stained Unravel algorithm and sold with its source token. The sheet is a field of small cells, each one of the automaton's shapes, plotted in many pen colours with no area left empty.

Also a Stained Unravel output. Horizontal bands of cells fill most of the sheet, and a diagonal break runs across them where one region of the automaton meets another.

Triangles, half-cells and diagonal strokes, each cell hatched by the pen, so that the automaton's 23-shape vocabulary can be read at the scale of the sheet.

Each cell holds one line, horizontal, vertical or diagonal. The program rewrites the grid in reading order, and each cell's orientation is drawn by weighted chance from four cells already written to its left and above (→ Interruptions). The work began from Molnár's Quatre éléments distribués au hasard (1959).

Pression des pairs has a larger family on paper. The plotter drawings Vermis, Current, Atlas and Girl/Boy Song (all 2024), Sediment (2025) and Tract (2026) run its rotating-line algorithm. In Atlas "the probability of downward diagonal streams increases towards the bottom side of the drawing, creating the impression of curvature, as if hovering a planet."

The Pression des pairs algorithm drawn in permanent marker on black PVC. The line cells gather into wavy diagonal bands of colour across the square, the orientation of each set by the cells drawn before it.

The same algorithm at its densest: rotating-line cells so small and many that they read as diagonal streaks of colour across the sheet. The artist adds pencil by hand, and calls the drawing a hybrid (→ Early Plotter Drawings).

A fine-celled field in pen and marker in which regions of colour drift diagonally across the sheet and break up at their edges. Drawings like this one, Tract and Sediment are where a simple grid rule arrives at forms that look geological (→ Randomness and Pattern).

The imperfect mirror

The artist describes a related interest (November 2026): "The mirroring in Symmetrical Overdub also shows my interest in symmetry in images, where the mirrored side is not an identical mirror but a variation with changes. This happens in many of my works, in particular in Entfaltung and Beads. Working on drawings by hand always produces it. When programming, asymmetry requires intention."

A square field of short horizontal strokes, zigzags and vertical ticks in several pen colours, shown in Angles Morts (2024). The plotter drew the field, then drew it again over itself, mirrored across the vertical axis through the middle of the sheet; in sound recording an overdub is a second take recorded over the first. Every pair of marks therefore meets on both sides of the axis, but a mark that lies underneath on one side lies on top on the other, so the two halves match without being identical. The drawing belongs to a group of plotter drawings on Terschelling paper that the artist annotated in his are.na channel: Shroud is "mirrored overdrawn, creating a mild symmetry", Mold "rotated overdrawn".

A mirror is the grid's repetition carried across an axis, and the two media reach the imperfect mirror from opposite sides. A program copies exactly: the reflected half is identical unless code is written to change it. By hand no copy is identical, and the second side always differs from the first. Symmetrical Overdub takes a third route: the program mirrors exactly, and the order in which the ink is laid down makes the halves differ. In the Entfaltung drawings the plotter draws constructions that are mirrored exactly, on one or both axes, and the hand fill makes the two halves differ (→ Entfaltung on Paper). Beads plots the Anni grid and colours its cells by hand, so that repeats of the same motif come out differently (→ Meditative Labour). The tokens reach it through the viewer: their symmetry is a setting that shows exactly at the ninety-degree snap, and from any oblique angle the same figure looks irregular (→ Entfaltung). The practice's older name for what the hand adds is the "workmanship of uncertainty" of Note 609 (→ Randomness and Pattern), and it is close to the small imperfections the artist values in Vera Molnár's work, left by the labour of translating a program onto paper (→ Algorithmic Archaeology).

The edge is the screen

For Krauss the centrifugal grid "extends, in all directions, to infinity", so the work is "a tiny piece arbitrarily cropped from an infinitely larger fabric". On a screen the crop is set by the viewer's device.

Field places a spinner every 70 pixels, keeps a margin of a tenth of the window's shorter side, and builds the grid again whenever the window is resized. In a 1600 × 1000 window token 2 shows 220 spinners, 20 by 11, each with its own number of spokes and speed. Its token image on a marketplace shows nine. The grid of Stained Unravel sets one column per 4 to 7 pixels of screen width, that of Interruptions one per 7 to 12 (→ Interruptions), so a phone shows fewer cells than a projection. Anni (sync) turns the same idea into an installation: one grid at four resolutions side by side, the "zoom" of the channel's description. Krauss's centrifugal grid implied a world beyond the frame. These grids go exactly as far as the screen and are recomputed at its edge.

The artist named this extent himself, in his text on Field: "The first time I put spinners in a two-dimensional grid, it struck me that they become something like flowers. Or wind turbines. We find ourselves in a large open field: a field without boundaries" (harm.work/writing/field-2008-2023). A Field Without Boundaries was also the title of his exhibition at Shimmer, Rotterdam (2020–21), and the 2026 statement on the Entfaltung drawings uses the phrase for drawing and programming themselves (→ Entfaltung on Paper).

On paper the edge is drawn. Rasterbild sets circles in rows and columns. Each circle is filled with parallel lines at its own angle, some only halfway, and the outermost circles are left empty, drawn as outlines. The grid is shown to its limit while the fill stays inside: Krauss's centripetal grid, with the frame carried into the work. The title is German for "grid picture", the name Charlotte Posenenske gave to her own grid paintings of 1956–57, two of which are in the are.na channel. The drawing comes with an Arweave source token. Posenenske went on to make modular series that others could assemble; Krauss names Sol LeWitt's "modules and lattices" as their counterpart, and LeWitt appears twice in the artist's own notes (→ 426, 675).

A lattice of diagonal cells sits inside a field of parallel fineliner lines that runs on to the edge of the sheet. The title is a software term for an abstraction that lets its implementation show (→ Process Legibility).

The grid as interface

Krauss published "Grids" in the summer of 1979. That autumn VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program for personal computers, went on sale: a grid of cells as a working tool. The graphical interfaces of the Xerox Star (1981) and the Macintosh (1984) followed. Since then the grid has been the default of the screen: the pixel raster, the icon grid of a phone, the feed, the tiled page of a marketplace. Krauss's essay could not include this. The works are made inside it.

Field takes an interface sign and changes its use. "Spinners are shown when UX designers want to make clear that you need to wait for something", the artist writes, and the grid turns them into flowers, wind turbines, a field. The wiki's reading of the work is that "the grid strips the functional meaning and leaves only the form" (→ Field). The text also gives the reason the work matters to him: "one cannot suspend being. The separation between productive time, and time supposedly 'on hold' is entirely based on my own perception and interpretation." In Krauss's terms, the grid here does what the myth does, in the open: it takes the most functional grid there is and releases it into something else. The marketplace returns Field to the interface grid, as a three-by-three thumbnail on a tile in a grid of tiles.

The window, Krauss's second source, runs through the practice as well: Markov's Window (2004) and Venster (2024, Dutch for window), whose frames imply a composition that continues past them (→ The Lozenge). The window of the graphical interface is the symbolist window's successor, a pane that shows something and returns the viewer's own image. The squircle, the shape of the app icon in the phone's grid, has its own page (→ The Squircle).

Historical significance

Krauss's grid declared modernity by cutting off the past: with it, "everything else was declared to be the past." Van den Dorpel uses the grid the other way round. In the announcement of Entfaltung (2026) he states the aim: "I want to embed my work within this historical lineage, freeing digital art from technological novelty" (harm.work). His grids lead back to the loom, to cuneiform, to Anni Albers, Posenenske and Molnár, and to the computer programs of the 1950s that already drew on a grid of cells, such as Christopher Strachey's draughts program (1952), which the are.na channel collects.

Read against Krauss, the works make three corrections to the history she gave. The grid's ancestry includes the loom and the women who worked it. The grid can carry time, and in computation it does so through the repetition Krauss thought kept it still. And after 1979 the grid did not stay in the ghetto she described. It became the surface of every screen, and these works are made in that grid and look back through it.

See also

• sources/ingested/krauss-grids-1979.md — Rosalind Krauss, "Grids" (1979), digest with page references
• sources/ingested/arena-modular-aesthetic-systems.md — the artist's are.na channel on grids and modularity, 2019–
• Senescenence — the grid family: Anni Albers, Anni, Stained Unravel; the loom as ancestor of the GPU
• Algorithmic Archaeology — the grid as the oldest algorithm; the timeline from the loom to the language model
• Interruptions — the Pression des pairs lineage, its grids and rules, measured from code
• Stained Unravel — the cellular automaton, its 23 shapes and its rules
• Evolutionary Logic — Cartesian genetic programming, the program as a grid of nodes
• Field — the spinner grid and the time "on hold"
• The Lozenge and The Squircle — the window, the platform square, the icon
• Sacred Geometry — the loom, the mandala and stained glass as rule-based grids
• Angles Morts — weaving, women's work and the blind spots of the history of generative art