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 icons--how 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 Alberti's 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 perspective--Alberti's metaphorical window--has 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 Corbusier's
mandates for the architectural window, Eisenstein's 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.
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