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The Virtual Window

From Alberti to Microsoft


By Anne Friedberg

Overview
As we spend more and more of our time staring at the screens of movies,
televisions, computers, and handheld devices"windows" full of moving images,
texts, and iconshow the world is framed has become as important as what is in
the frame. In The Virtual Window, Anne Friedberg examines the window as
metaphor, as architectural component, and as an opening to the dematerialized
reality we see on the screen.

This book is part of a promising new wave of scholarship. From the


1960s onward,
writing on perspective was divided between what might roughly be
called humanist
interpretations and technical accounts. Humanist writing made use of
structuralist,
phenomenological, and psychoanalytic interpretations, and it has
produced a line of texts
from Hubert Damisch to Hanneke Grootenboer. Technical writing, such
as Martin
Kemps, has accumulated an equally impressive range of information.
Recently there have
been signs that the two strains are merging, for example in Lyle
Masseys
Picturing Space,
Displacing Bodies
. Anne Friedbergs new book is a contribution to the first, humanist,
kind
of writing, but with an important difference: she is concerned not only
with the origins of
the perspective window, but with its continuation and proliferation to
the moving image
and the computer screen. I will return, at the end, to this theme, and to
the other kind of

writing.
The Virtual Window
is a survey of the window metaphor, from Alberti through Microsofts
Windows and on to X-Boxes and other developments around 2005,
when the
manuscript was finished. (p. 244) Enroute Friedberg discusses such
things as the
camera
obscura;
the first photographs; panoramas and popular entertainments;
windows in
modernist architecture; multiple views in
Things to Come, Suspense, Sisters,
Time Code,
and
other films; and screen shots from the Apple Lisa, Windows 1.0 (1985),
and other
operating systems.
She has two principal purposes. First is to demonstrate how the single,
framed window
in Alberti has become the multiplicity of image-delivery devices we now
use, so that
cinema now forms an originary visual system for a complexly diverse
set of
postcinematic visualities. (p. 6) This new space of mediated vision,
she writes in the
introductory chapter, is post-Cartesian, postperspectival,
postcinematic, and
posttelevisual. (p. 7)
Her second purpose is to delimit that multiplicity by exploring the frame
as a continuous

theme and leading metaphor. The multiplicity of imaging technologies,


she notes, has
prompted media critics like Friedrich Kittler to argue that we are
witnessing what she
calls a convergence of all media forms; against that Friedberg
maintains that we
continue to be engaged by the master metaphor of the virtual
window. (pp. 238, 239)
She is after a new logic of the deployment and interpretation of
windows, which would
allow us to speak of the many forms of visual representation without
needing to predict
that some new technology will fuse all media into one. (p. 242) Her
theme is that the
delimited bounds of a frame continue to set the agenda for our
encounters with
images. (p. 7)
The tenor of the book is what an analytic philosopher might want to call
anti-realist.
Friedberg is not interested in the world that is represented, or even in
the means by
which it is represented, but in the representation itself, its selfreferentiality, its
artificiality, and its formal relation to what delimits it, and what exists
around it, especially
including other frames. Albertis method, in her view, was concerned
with the frame and
what goes on the flat surface, more than with the
finestra aperta
in the literal sense.
Each chapter stresses the surface of the representation and its framing
over the depth

or realism. Albertis construction was a matter of the frame (chapter 1);


the camera
obscura was a virtual image, not one marked by verisimiltude (chapter
2); modern
architectural windows serve to frame views (chapter 3); audiences at
the first motion
pictures were not fooled, butas Tom Gunning as noted
mesmerized by the hypnotic
artificiality of what they saw (chapter 4); when it comes to Windows the
images are
mediated and highly iconic, and often enough flat. (chapter 5; p.
231)
A number of fairly enormous issues are raised by the book. Here I can
only mention
four abstract points.
1. A definable set of philosophic concerns drives the books argument.
Friedbergs
grounding metaphysic, she remarks at one point, is Heideggers Age
of the World
Picture, and its concepts of
Ge-stell, Stellung,
and
Bild
(frame, position, and picture,
respectively; pp. 96, 98). I think that is correct, but she does not take
up Heidegger in any
detail. Her real interlocutors are Derrida, and especially his analysis of
the
parergon
(pp.
12-14); and Deleuze, with emphasis on the
hors-champ

(whatever is decisively outside the


frame; pp. 144-45, 241-42). Derrida and Deleuze provide much of the
actual logic of
the book, and its persuasiveness will depend on how a reader
understands them to be
deployed.

From the mid 15th century writings of Leon Battista Alberti to the late 20th century computer software
trademarked by Microsoft as "Windows", the window has a deep cultural history as an architectural and
figurative trope for the framing and mediating of the pictorial image. While the window functioned as a
metaphor for a fixed viewpoint through a single frame for Alberti, the "Windows" trope in computer software
has become emblematic of the collapse of the single viewpoint, relying on the model of a window that we can't
see through; multiple windows that overlap, obscure.
This paper will 1) debate with accounts of the ruptures (the argument of Jonathan Crary) and/or continuities
(the argument of "apparatus" film theorists Jean Louis Baudry and Stephen Heath) between Renaissance
perspective and the photographic and cinematic camera and 2) argue that while moving image technologies
may have provided a challenge to Quattrocento perspective and its concomitant symbolic system by offering
multiple perspectives sequentially, it has only been with the advent of digital imaging technologies and new
technologies of display in the 1990s that the media "window" began to include multiple perspectives within a
single frame.

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