The Tyranny of Rectangles and how they will never go away

How did humans ever come to agree that one of the primary ways they would represent their experience of the world is through the rectangular shape?

The rectangle is rare in the natural world but it is the shape of the canvas almost invariably used by the artist to paint on. Rectangles are about limits and boundaries. Straight lines. Perfect 90 degree angles at the corners framing the “reality”on the page. It is this shape that a great proportion of humanity stares at much of the time. TV screens are rectangular – some studies suggest 6 hours of TV a day are not uncommon for many consumers. What about the shape of computer screens that mesmerise geeks, stockbrokers, shop assistants, hackers, bank tellers, teenagers and businessman alike? Most of our experience of the world comes through looking at and through windscreens and windows. Into mirrors. At photos. In newspapers, magazines, traffic fines and comics. The words you read here are constrained within a rectangle. The rectangle of the screen, canvas or page are normally straight lines, creating authoritative boundaries, order imposed over entropy.

Media is mostly rectangular. Maps, engineering drawings, powerpoint presentations, screens, promisory notes, birth certificates, credit card statements (and the cards themselves), cellphones, academic journals, holy texts, electricity bills, passports, banknotes and all other representations of our world are invariably framed in the rectangular.

I remember looking at an anarchist ‘blow up the system’ poster in grimy Lancashire some 30 years ago and even that was, predictably, a rectangle. The Rosetta stone once had the familiar shape. We live our lives through four 90 degree angles. What is it about this shape that which replicates itself across all different media? Marshall McLuhan suggested that the media was the message. And what shape does the media come in? What messages are we sending ourselves? Which rectangles are you paying attention to?

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