Friedberg 2006

Friedberg, Anne. The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006.

Introduction

Leon Battista Alberti, 1435 treaties on painting and perspective, De pictura -- instructs painter to regard rectangular frame of painting as an open window, giving rise to single-point perspective

"Although it may seem that cinematic, televisual, and computer-based representrations continue to rely on perspectival positioning, a key component of my argument is to suggest otherwise. The complex relation between perspective and the moving image necessitates a more refined account of the viewer's position in space in relation to a fixed frame with either static, moving, multiply layered, obliquely angled, abstract, sequential, or multiple-frame images." (2)

"Perspective may have met its end on the computer desktop." (2) -- GUI where windows stack, closer to cubism than Renaissance perspective

"In this way, computer-generated virtual spaces coexist with the vernacular daily virtual spaces that we inhabit (or at least sit in front of) as viewers and users, in the same way that perspectival painting coexisted with its challengers." (3)

Aside from historical anomalies, "only in the last 2 decades -- markedly with the advent of digital imaging technologeis and new technologies of display -- diud the media 'windoww' began to include multiple perspectives within a single frame. And as a coincident development, the interface of computer display made this 'new' multiple-'window'/multiple-screen format a daily lens, a vernacular system of visuality. This remade visual vernacular requires new descriptors for its fractured, multiple, simultaneous, time-shiftable sense of space and time. Philosophies and critical theories that address the subject as a nodal point in a communicational matrix have failed to consider this importan paradigm shift in visual address." (3)