IMPLICATIONS
Apart from a few crystals and rock formations, rectangles do not tend to occur naturally.
They only really came into being when people started making them. And people only started making them once they began living in large settlements such as cities – what we now refer to as ‘civilisation’.
Rectangles are convenient for city living because they are easy to construct using simple technology, they are easy to standardise and reproduce, and they fit together efficiently.
So, when we started living settled lives in towns and cities, we also started generating rectangles because they are easy to make and use, convenient to live in, efficient to store, and useful for keeping written records.
This last point is important, because at around the same time we started living in cities we also started to write things down - on clay tablets, then scrolls and sheets of paper, and in books.
Which means that civilisation is defined by fractangles: rectangles within rectangles within rectangles.
Fractangles are
- buildings, walls, bricks, timber, tiles, steps, windows, doors, rooms, corridors, cupboards, lifts, escalators
- streets, cobblestones, paving, parking spaces
- looms, fabrics, carpets, tapestries, tartans, flags
- paper, scrolls, charts, graphs, maps, books, shelving
- envelopes, stamps, bookcases, filing cabinets,
- paintings, photographs, posters, postcards, playing cards, bank cards
- cinema screens, TV screens, computer screens, camera screens, phone screens
- bar codes, bitmaps, pixels
- crosswords, chess, go, snakes and ladders, Jenga, Lego, Scrabble, Tetris
and so on.
We see the world framed by fractangles – doorways, windows, picture frames, screens.
We compose and are composed in fractangular photographs, videos, drawings, paintings, postcards, posters, TV programmes, movies.
The world we have created, the one we have lived in for the last 5,000 years or so, is a huge and growing complex of fractangles.
And
- by writing, and then printing, and then computing
- by measuring, recording, ordering and storing
- by developing the technology to transcend face-to-face interaction
- by reaching out across space and time
we eventually disappear from view, and turn ourselves into marks on surfaces, eventually ending up as points of light on screens like this one.
We are all fractangles now.
