The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft

About this book

From the Renaissance idea of the painting as an open window to the nested windows and multiple images on todays cinema television and computer screens: a cultural history of the metaphoric literal and virtual window. 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. In De pictura (1435) Leon Battista Alberti famously instructed painters to consider the frame of the painting as an open window. Taking Albertis metaphor as her starting point Friedberg tracks shifts in the perspectival paradigm as she gives us histories of the architectural window developments in glass and transparency and the emerging apparatuses of photography cinema television and digital imaging. Single-point perspectiveAlbertis metaphorical windowhas long been challenged by modern painting modern architecture and moving-image technologies. And yet notes Friedberg for most of the twentieth century the dominant form of the moving image was a single image in a single frame. The fractured modernism exemplified by cubist painting for example remained largely confined to experimental avant-garde work. On the computer screen however where multiple windows coexist and overlap perspective may have met its end. In this wide-ranging book Friedberg considers such topics as the framed view of the camera obscura Le Corbusiers mandates for the architectural window Eisensteins opinions on the shape of the movie screen and the multiple images and nested windows commonly displayed on screens today. The Virtual Window proposes a new logic of visuality framed and virtual: an architecture not only of space but of time.