James elkins review of the virtual window from alberti to microsoft by anne friedberg

[Note to readers: this is a book review, originally posted on the password-protected
College Art Association site. It has not been revised. Please send comments to me via my
website.]
Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window. MIT Press, 2006. xii + 357 pp.
Review by James Elkins

This book is part of a promising new wave of scholarship. From the 1960s onward,
writing on perspective was divided between what might roughly be called humanist
interpretations and technical accounts. Humanist writing made use of structuralist,
phenomenological, and psychoanalytic interpretations, and it has produced a line of texts
from Hubert Damisch to Hanneke Grootenboer. Technical writing, such as Martin
Kemp’s, has accumulated an equally impressive range of information. Recently there have
been signs that the two strains are merging, for example in Lyle Massey’s Picturing Space,
Displacing Bodies. Anne Friedberg’s new book is a contribution to the first, humanist, kind
of writing, but with an important difference: she is concerned not only with the origins of
the perspective window, but with its continuation and proliferation to the moving image
and the computer screen. I will return, at the end, to this theme, and to the other kind of
writing.
The Virtual Window is a survey of the window metaphor, from Alberti through Microsoft’s
Windows and on to X-Boxes and other developments around 2005, when the
manuscript was finished. (p. 244) Enroute Friedberg discusses such things as the camera
obscura; the first photographs; panoramas and popular entertainments; windows in
modernist architecture; multiple views in Things to Come, Suspense, Sisters, Time Code, and
other films; and screen shots from the Apple Lisa, Windows 1.0 (1985), and other
operating systems.
She has two principal purposes. First is to demonstrate how the single, framed window
in Alberti has become the multiplicity of image-delivery devices we now use, so that
cinema “now forms an originary visual system for a complexly diverse set of
‘postcinematic’ visualities.” (p. 6) This “new space of mediated vision,” she writes in the
introductory chapter, “is post-Cartesian, postperspectival, postcinematic, and
posttelevisual.” (p. 7)

Her second purpose is to delimit that multiplicity by exploring the frame as a continuous
theme and leading metaphor. The multiplicity of imaging technologies, she notes, has
prompted media critics like Friedrich Kittler to argue that we are witnessing what she
calls a “convergence of all media forms”; against that Friedberg maintains that we
continue to be engaged by the master metaphor of the “virtual window.” (pp. 238, 239)
She is after a “new logic” of the deployment and interpretation of windows, which would
allow us to speak of the many forms of visual representation without needing to predict
that some new technology will fuse all media into one. (p. 242) Her theme is that the


“delimited bounds of a frame” continue to set the agenda for our encounters with
images. (p. 7)
The tenor of the book is what an analytic philosopher might want to call anti-realist.
Friedberg is not interested in the world that is represented, or even in the means by
which it is represented, but in the representation itself, its self-referentiality, its
artificiality, and its formal relation to what delimits it, and what exists around it, especially
including other frames. Alberti’s method, in her view, was concerned with the frame and
what goes on the flat surface, more than with the finestra aperta in the literal sense.
Each chapter stresses the surface of the representation and its framing over the depth
or realism. Alberti’s construction was a matter of the frame (chapter 1); the camera
obscura was a virtual image, not one marked by verisimiltude (chapter 2); modern
architectural windows serve to frame views (chapter 3); audiences at the first motion
pictures were not fooled, but—as Tom Gunning as noted—mesmerized by the hypnotic
artificiality of what they saw (chapter 4); when it comes to Windows the images are
“mediated” and “highly iconic,” and often enough flat. (chapter 5; p. 231)
A number of fairly enormous issues are raised by the book. Here I can only mention
four abstract points.
1. A definable set of philosophic concerns drives the book’s argument. Friedberg’s
“grounding metaphysic,” she remarks at one point, is Heidegger’s “Age of the World
Picture,” and its concepts of Ge-stell, Stellung, and Bild (frame, position, and picture,

respectively; pp. 96, 98). I think that is correct, but she does not take up Heidegger in any
detail. Her real interlocutors are Derrida, and especially his analysis of the parergon (pp.
12-14); and Deleuze, with emphasis on the hors-champ (whatever is decisively outside the
frame; pp. 144-45, 241-42). Derrida and Deleuze provide much of the actual “logic” of
the book, and its persuasiveness will depend on how a reader understands them to be
deployed.
2. The book is closely, but not impeccably, aligned with visual studies. Friedberg notes that
“the fractured modernisms of cubist painting, photographic collage [and] architectural
transparency… remained only exceptions” in the century of film and computers (p. 2).
This is the kind of refreshing revaluation that visual studies can bring to bear on art
history’s ongoing concern with high modernism and its aftermath. And yet the power of
the avant-garde, modernism, and their values, are not easy to shake off, and in the very
next paragraph she says “Perspective may have met its end on the computer desktop.”
One might wonder about this, because the death of perspective is a trope in modernism
and in the deeper history of perspective. In the twentieth century this particular death
of perspective has mattered in proportion to how much modernism and postmodernism
matter: for example I don’t imagine Bill Gates loses much sleep over the demise of
perspective. One might also doubt Friedberg’s assertion on art historical grounds,
because the kind of death she is imagining here—the death by multiplication of
simultaneous, incompatible projections and viewpoints—is the same death that
perspective has been said to have suffered at the hands of Rauschenberg and pop art, in


arguments made by Leo Steinberg and Rosalind Krauss. I mean to suggest that the
contrast between the two statements I have quoted is a barometer of affiliations: in art
history it has to matter that the avant-garde produced such “deaths.” In visual studies,
and in the century of cinema, it doesn’t.
3. A distinction might be made between the window as operative metaphor and the
window as business metaphor. From the beginning of the book (p. 1), the window on the
computer screen is compared and contrasted with Alberti’s window. It makes good

sense to tell a history that starts from Alberti’s window and ends in Microsoft’s
Windows. The first use of the word “windows” for a GUI interface might have been
motivated by the analogy to a real window, but it was a canny business decision on
Microsoft’s part to retain the word, because it fit so well with the consumer’s desire to
imagine the computer screen as a window on another world. The genealogy of windows
that leads from Alberti to Microsoft is therefore appropriate for an economic analysis,
and as Friedberg shows it also works well as the engine of a psychoanalytic account. (She
has very useful summaries of the concept of the screen in Lacan and in film studies.) But
the genealogy from Alberti to Windows makes less sense when it is used for formal
analysis. As Friedberg and many others have noted, computer windows are only
infrequently views onto fictive, perspectival space. They are more likely to be
representations of sheets of paper. For the enormous majority of the working day in
offices around the world, the computer “desktop” represents a flat surface with flat
sheets of paper on it. To pursue an analyses of the detail that actually appears on a
screen, it would ultimately be necessary to give up the window analogy. From that point
of view, this is not one history, but two histories fortuitously joined by a common word.
Here is an example of how the two senses of “window” exist in dialectic friction.
Friedberg describes “the perspectival ‘shifts’ when images move or follow one another in
sequential display,” as in film or on computer screens. (p. 2) Why, I wonder, is “shifts” in
quotation marks here? Is it only because the rapid, unpredictable changes, sequences, and
imbrications of perspectival images are not adequately captured by the word “shift”?
Perspective usually changes when one scene follows another, or one picture on a
computer is overlapped by another. In geometric terms nothing is unusual in that:
perspective, as Friedberg notes, has always had this capacity to be multiple. What is new
in computer screens, aside from their speed and their digital origins, is phenomenological
(this passage I quoted follows a quotation from Damisch’s Origin of Perspective) and the
word “shift” serves to mark that new meaning. The two approaches I mentioned at the
outset, humanist and technical, have no easy meeting place.
4. I want to close with an observation that applies not only to this book, but to a
number of others in current scholarship on digital culture. Many of the arguments about

the importance of the surface, of artifice, and of the frame, could be expanded if the
analysis were to include the technical discourse of perspective, optics, and software
programming for computers. The “merely” technical is the modern counterpart of the
“untheorized” geometric that has so often been excluded from analyses in the
humanities.


For example, I agree with much of Friedberg’s argument about Alberti, and with Joseph
Masheck’s observation that it is a “misprision” to say Alberti conceived his window in a
literal sense, and that Alberti was more interested in the frame and the procedures of
framing. (p. 33) But the evidence for that only appears in all its splendid detail when his
construction, and the many that followed it in the next century, are actually learned and
drawn by the historian. Only the experience of constructing an eight-sided well in onepoint perspective, or a foreshortened loggia with a vaulted ceiling, can demonstrate
exactly how the window is linked to its frame.
We in the humanities really need to attend to the technical side of our subject. Just as
the actual geometry is often omitted from discussions of Renaissance perspective, so
code is omitted from texts on contemporary digital imaging. Windows, on a computer
screen, are produced by discrete routines, which are indispensable for a full
understanding of the production, interpretation, and use of the computer desktop. “We”
need to speak “their” languages: Friedberg’s account would only be strengthened—made
richer, more absorbing, more historically grounded—if she were to explore, for
example, the methods of GUI interface programming using the AWT (abstract window
toolkit) in Java, or the equivalent tools in c++ or Python. Her account of the
proliferation of window-like elements would be broadened by the inclusion of graphical
interfaces, such as those in GraphViz, Gantt charts, or business dashboards. These
technical things are not irrelevant; they are the languages—literally and metaphorically—
of the objects in question.
Even aside from these “purely” technical considerations (but what is “purely” technical?)
there is the question of metaphors. Friedberg’s book is centrally concerned with the
history of the window metaphor, and yet programmers use just as wide a range of

metaphors as scholars. A visit to the “Interface Hall of Shame” on the internet discloses
—in the “Misplaced Metaphors” section—such concepts as “the VCR metaphor,”
“stoplight metaphor,” “wizard metaphor,” “hot cursor metaphor,” and “box of chocolates
metaphor.” As scholarship on images and representation catches up with the times, it is
important not to fall into the dichotomy that once characterized the literature on
perspective: we need to know both languages—the metaphorical and the technical—to
follow the field.
Friedberg’s book is interesting and well argued, and full of open doors to further work.
These four points are not flaws in her exposition, but markers of the shape of the
conceptual field, as it exists at the moment. No one knows quite how to solve the
dissonances between Heideggerian methods and other approaches (the first point),
between visual studies and art history (the second point), between the literal and the
metaphorical (the third), or between the humanist or post-humanist and the “merely”
technical (the last). They are the form in which we encounter our subject.