Shaping everyday landscapes from cities to factories, the grid - an arrangement of individual elements along perpendicular lines - has been a basic structure of modern life. The matrix, in contrast, pushes the grid into the digital frontier, freeing it from its confinement to two dimensions. Featuring bold new essays by Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Koepnick, curators of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum exhibition that shares its name, "[Grid<>Matrix]" traces the complex relationship of these different yet intertwined methods of organizing the visual world and how we represent it in art. The inaugural volume of the Museum's Screen Arts and New Media Aesthetics series of special exhibitions and publications, "[Grid<>Matrix]" explores the continuities and ruptures between the analog and the digital, and between the organizational principles of older and newer media. It examines the ubiquity of screens in contemporary life and illuminates the impact of the digital on artistic practice and aesthetic experience alike.

Sabine Eckmann is director and chief curator at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis. Lutz Koepnick is curator of new media at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum and professor of German and film and media studies at Washington University in St. Louis.