Virtual images radically transformed the twentieth century understanding of reality (4)
A "windowed" multiplicity of perspectives implies new laws of "presence" -not only here and there, but also then and now-a multiple view-sometimes enhanced, sometimes diminished-out the window.
As computers “users”, we spend hours immobile in front of the flat, multicapable, framed virtual space of the computer screen. The frame becomes the threshold -the liminal site- of tensions between the immobility of a spectator/viewer/user and the mobility of images seen through the mediated “windows” of film, television, and computer screens.
The virtual is a substitute-“acting without agency of matter”-an immaterial proxy for the material (8)
“Virtual” refers to the register of representation of itself-but representation that can be either simulacral(image has no referent of the real) or directly mimetic.
The window is like a painting (it frames an opening onto the world) and the painting is like a window (as a technique to construct perspective, the painter should frame the view) (12)
formula for perspectival painting that entails (1)variable rectangular frame (2) the window as a metaphor for the frame of the painting (3) the “subject” that is seen through this frame (4) the human figure as a standard of measure and as determinant of the “centric point” and (5)the immobility of the viewer (27)
“flat plane of representation” (30)
The human was in a central position as a spectator in front of a pictorial world but was also the measure of that world. The painter’s position was also to be the position of the viewer, framing and delimiting the image (35)
The window was a membrane between inside and outside, and light was the material that modulated this relation (111)
glass is the only material in the building industry which expresses surface and space at the same time (119)
“Transparency means simultaneous perception of different spatial locations”
Duchamp’s Fresh Widow
Going to the cinema results in an immobilisation of the body. Not much gets in the way of one’s perception. All one can do is look and listen. One forgets where one is sitting. The luminous screen spreads a murky light throughout the darkness. Making a film in one thing, viewing a film another. Impassive, mute, still, the viewer sits. -Robert Smithson “A Cinematic Utopia” (149)
Light could carry images, light could draw in space (152)
In architectural terms, the window brought light into a darkened interior. But the window left its images outside, framed for the view. As glass began to replace opaque construction materials in the nineteenth century, a new transparency was added to public buildings.
Screen film- neither absolutely two-dimensional nor absolutely three dimensional, but something between. (154)
The screen may contain shifting camera angles, a montage of spaces and times, but the spectator does not move. Arnheim measured the film's dimensionality as a liminal mode of virtual space, "something between".