Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
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.
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
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.