WINDOWS
History of a Metaphor
Chapter Sixteen
The Window Metaphor in Modern Science
"A computer monitor connected to a network becomes a window through which we can be present in a place thousands miles away...VR, interactivity and telepresence...are made real by a much, much older technology – the screen. It is by looking at a screen – a flat, rectangular surface positioned at some distance from the eyes – that the user experiences the illusion of navigating through visual spaces...If computers have become a common presence in our culture only in the last decade, the screen, on the other hand, has been used to present visual information for centuries - from Renaissance painting to twentieth century art." (Lev Manovich)
The omnipresence of windows, screens and frames has seeped into every aspect of scientific research and theoretical thinking. And now the computer world is pouring its metaphorical potential into the scientific process wherever you chance to look.
Journeys through Space: the Cinema Screen
The origins of the cinema’s screen are well known. We can trace its emergence to the popular spectacles and entertainment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: magic lantern shows, phantasmagoria, eidophysikon, panorama, diorama, zoopraxiscope shows, and so on. The public was ready for the cinema and when it finally appeared it was a huge public event.
The window as a metaphor, of course, cannot be separated from the general aesthetics of film making at all. Jean Luc Godard, perhaps more than any other film maker, has reflected upon this fact in his later films, which, for most filmgoers, became increasingly difficult to comprehend. Nevertheless he already during the ‘60s - through jump cuts, cinema as collage, self-referential cinema etc. - reacted to the loss of the central perspective within the confines of the cinematic window or looking glass itself. -‘Words Upon The Window Pane’, a film by Mary
McGuckian, starring Geraldine Chaplin, uses reflections upon an episode in Jonathan Swift’s life to explore the spiritual connotations of the window metaphor.
And there are many films dealing directly with the metaphor. Think of ‘Rear Window’, the most densely allegorical of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpieces, moving from psychology to morality to formal concerns and finally to the theological.
Surveillance: Monitoring the Radar Screen
Space rocket launches had to cope with the problem of ‘time windows’. In the wake of US space programs political talk about ‘windows of opportunity’ proliferated.
But more important: "as with all other elements of modern human-computer interface, the computer screen was developed by the military...With radar we see for the first time the mass employment...of a fundamentally new type of screen, the screen which gradually comes to dominate modern visual culture – video monitor, computer screen, instrument display. What is new about such a screen is that its image can change in real time..." (Lev Manovich)
A fact sheet coming out of ‘U.S. Strategic Command Public Affairs’ tells about one of its most important former missions: " An essential element of America’s ability to command, control, and communicate with its nuclear forces is the Airborne Command Post, also called ‘Looking Glass’. Its highly-trained crew and staff ensure there is always an aircraft ready to direct bombers and missiles from the air should ground-based command centers become inoperable. Looking Glass guarantees that U. S. strategic forces will act only in the precise manner dictated by the President."
Manovich discusses a possible genealogy of the modern computer screen. In this genealogy, the computer screen represents an interactive sub-type of the real-time screen (the radar screens, the displays and TV monitors), which again is a sub-type of the dynamic screen of cinema - which again is a sub-type of the classical type established 5 centuries ago. Manovich’s discussion of these types relies on three ideas.
The idea of temporality permits to see the window, the screen as a frame ‘freezing’ a situation ‘in time’ - actually from Dürer’s perspectival machine to the frames of photography and cinema - and finally in a breakthrough to the real time scanning of TV monitors and the real-time interactivity of the computer screen. Secondly, Manovich stresses the fact that any screen is a window into the space of representation which itself exists in our normal space. Thirdly, though, one has to look at the screen’s history from another angle – the relation between the screen and the body of the viewer. "The scene, the picture, the shot, the cut-out rectangle, here we have the very condition that allows us to conceive theater, painting, cinema, literature, all those arts, that is, other than music and which could be called the dioptric arts." (Roland Barthes)
Virtual Reality, on the other hand, continues the tradition of simulation, which, for example, was first established by the panorama. However, writes Manovich, "it introduces one important difference. Previously, simulation depicted a fake space which was continuous with and extended from normal space...In VR, the actual physical reality is disregarded, dismissed, abandoned." This might be the end of windows.
Chapter Twenty
How ‘Windows’ Chanced To Become
A Registered Trade Mark
Reflections from Microsoft’s PR people: "An Awesome Launch for an Awesome Product: Windows 95 would launch in August 95. The PR program began 20 months before. How do you sustain a nearly two-year program without any advertising until the end? How do you follow the most successful product launches in Microsoft history and convey that Windows 95 goes beyond a ‘mere’ launch to be a milestone in the history of the PC? How do you do all this against the backdrop of the Internet, a rapidly evolving technology and market force that forced continual refinements to the features and positioning of Windows 95?" (Waggener Edstrom)
"But why should a window-driven interface be easier to use than a text-driven one?...The relationship seems simple enough: spatial information is easier to navigate than textual information, and windows are just a tool for seeing that space, like a looking glass or a microscope ... Windows are more fluid, more portable. You can drag them across your screen, resize them with a single mouse click. They’re designed to be malleable, open-ended. Most computer users are constantly tinkering with their windows, making them bigger or smaller, pushing them off to the peripheries of the desktop or bringing them into focus." (Steven Johnson)
Text-driven interfaces within windows? Windows that are no longer analogs to the real world version? Windows that go unregistered as trademarks? Everything is possible.
Intro Authors Windows in Painting German Sample Chapter Overview
All Rights Reserved (1999/2002) H. J. Krysmanski