Anne Friedberg, The Virtual WIndow: From Alberti to Microsoft
Product Description (Amazon.com)
Honorable Mention, 2008 Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award presented
by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. and 2007 Winner of the
Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award at University of Southern
California. 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.
CHUCK KLEINHANS
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