The Virtual Window

The Virtual Window PDF Author: Anne Friedberg
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262512505
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the Renaissance idea of the painting as an open window to the nested windows and multiple images on today's cinema, television, and computer screens: a cultural history of the metaphoric, literal, and virtual window. 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.

The Virtual Window

The Virtual Window PDF Author: Anne Friedberg
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262512505
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the Renaissance idea of the painting as an open window to the nested windows and multiple images on today's cinema, television, and computer screens: a cultural history of the metaphoric, literal, and virtual window. 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.

The Virtual Window

The Virtual Window PDF Author: Anne Friedberg
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262512505
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the Renaissance idea of the painting as an open window to the nested windows and multiple images on today's cinema, television, and computer screens: a cultural history of the metaphoric, literal, and virtual window. 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.

Window Shopping

Window Shopping PDF Author: Anne Friedberg
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520915518
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book Here

Book Description
Departing from those who define postmodernism in film merely as a visual style or set of narrative conventions, Anne Friedberg develops the first sustained account of the cinema's role in postmodern culture. She explores the ways in which nineteenth-century visual experiences—photography, urban strolling, panorama and diorama entertainments—anticipate contemporary pleasures provided by cinema, video, shopping malls, and emerging "virtual reality" technologies. Comparing the visual practices of shopping, tourism, and film-viewing, Friedberg identifies the experience of "virtual" mobility through time and space as a key determinant of postmodern cultural identity. Evaluating the theories of Jameson, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and others, she adds critical insights about the role of gender and gender mobility in the configurations of consumer culture. A strikingly original work, Window Shopping challenges many of the existing assumptions about what exactly postmodern is. This book marks the emergence of a compelling new voice in the study of contemporary culture.

The Virtual

The Virtual PDF Author: Rob Shields
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134460848
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book looks at the origins and the many contemporary meanings of the virtual. Rob Shields shows how the construction of virtual worlds has a long history. He examines the many forms of faith and hysteria that have surrounded computer technologies in recent years. Moving beyond the technologies themselves he shows how the virtual plays a role in our daily lives at every level. The virtual is also an essential concept needed to manage innovation and risk. It is real but not actual, ideal but not abstract. The virtual, he argues, has become one of the key organizing principles of contemporary society in the public realms of politics, business and consumption as well as in our private lives.

The Window Seat

The Window Seat PDF Author: Aminatta Forna
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802158595
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Get Book Here

Book Description
“Gutsy, funny, risky and wise, full of dazzling late-night insight, in-the-middle-of-everything epiphanies, moments of sheer honesty blooming into gut truths.” —Marlon James, Booker Prize–winning author Aminatta Forna is one of our most important literary voices, and her novels have won the Windham Campbell Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. In this elegantly rendered and wide-ranging collection of new and previously published essays, Forna writes intimately about displacement, trauma and memory, love, and how we coexist and encroach on the non-human world. Movement is a constant here. In the title piece, “The Window Seat,” she reveals the unexpected enchantments of commercial air travel. In “Obama and the Renaissance Generation,” she documents how, despite the narrative of Obama’s exceptionalism, his father, like her own, was one of a generation of gifted young Africans who came to the United Kingdom and the United States for education and were expected to build their home countries anew after colonialism. In “The Last Vet,” time spent shadowing Dr. Jalloh, the only veterinarian in Sierra Leone, as he works with the street dogs of Freetown, becomes a meditation on what a society’s treatment of animals tells us about its principles. In “Crossroads,” she examines race in America from an African perspective, and in “Power Walking” she describes what it means to walk in the world in a Black woman’s body and in “The Watch” she explores the raptures of sleep and sleeplessness the world over. Deeply meditative and written with a wry humor, The Window Seat confirms that Forna is “a compelling essayist . . . her voice direct, lucid, and fearless” (Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine).

Rethinking Media Change

Rethinking Media Change PDF Author: David Thorburn
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262264945
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 422

Get Book Here

Book Description
The essays in Rethinking Media Change center on a variety of media forms at moments of disruption and cultural transformation. The editors' introduction sketches an aesthetics of media transition—patterns of development and social dispersion that operate across eras, media forms, and cultures. The book includes case studies of such earlier media as the book, the phonograph, early cinema, and television. It also examines contemporary digital forms, exploring their promise and strangeness. A final section probes aspects of visual culture in such environments as the evolving museum, movie spectaculars, and "the virtual window." The contributors reject apocalyptic scenarios of media revolution, demonstrating instead that media transition is always a mix of tradition and innovation, an accretive process in which emerging and established systems interact, shift, and collude with one another.

Concurrent Programming on Windows

Concurrent Programming on Windows PDF Author: Joe Duffy
Publisher: Pearson Education
ISBN: 0321604415
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 1424

Get Book Here

Book Description
“When you begin using multi-threading throughout an application, the importance of clean architecture and design is critical. . . . This places an emphasis on understanding not only the platform’s capabilities but also emerging best practices. Joe does a great job interspersing best practices alongside theory throughout his book.” – From the Foreword by Craig Mundie, Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Microsoft Corporation Author Joe Duffy has risen to the challenge of explaining how to write software that takes full advantage of concurrency and hardware parallelism. In Concurrent Programming on Windows, he explains how to design, implement, and maintain large-scale concurrent programs, primarily using C# and C++ for Windows. Duffy aims to give application, system, and library developers the tools and techniques needed to write efficient, safe code for multicore processors. This is important not only for the kinds of problems where concurrency is inherent and easily exploitable—such as server applications, compute-intensive image manipulation, financial analysis, simulations, and AI algorithms—but also for problems that can be speeded up using parallelism but require more effort—such as math libraries, sort routines, report generation, XML manipulation, and stream processing algorithms. Concurrent Programming on Windows has four major sections: The first introduces concurrency at a high level, followed by a section that focuses on the fundamental platform features, inner workings, and API details. Next, there is a section that describes common patterns, best practices, algorithms, and data structures that emerge while writing concurrent software. The final section covers many of the common system-wide architectural and process concerns of concurrent programming. This is the only book you’ll need in order to learn the best practices and common patterns for programming with concurrency on Windows and .NET.

Windows at Tiffany & Co.

Windows at Tiffany & Co. PDF Author:
Publisher: Assouline Publishing
ISBN: 1614286930
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 6

Get Book Here

Book Description
They are astonishing, wonderful, and always, invariably modern: the windows at Tiffany’s Fifth Avenue flagship are the stuff dreams are made of. Their appeal is universal, inviting passersby, old and young, to vanish through the looking glass and into a spellbinding world of robin’s egg blue where even the most elusive of fantasies may come true. This hand-bound oversize Ultimate Collection edition presents a well-curated tour of the intricately crafted displays that continue to serve as references of the zeitgeist, from the legendary designer Gene Moore’s Christmas and Valentine’s displays to the neon creations of the current Tiffany & Co. creative team. Along with never-before-seen concept sketches, historical manuscripts, behind the scenes imagery and insights by cultural influencers and devotees of the world’s global arbiter of design and style, Windows at Tiffany’s revisits the whimsy and spirit of one of the world’s most recognized brands, and elicits nostalgia for each reader’s first blue box moment.

Virtual Economies

Virtual Economies PDF Author: Vili Lehdonvirta
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262027259
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Get Book Here

Book Description
How the basic concepts of economics—including markets, institutions, and money—can be used to create and analyze economies based on virtual goods. In the twenty-first-century digital world, virtual goods are sold for real money. Digital game players happily pay for avatars, power-ups, and other game items. But behind every virtual sale, there is a virtual economy, simple or complex. In this book, Vili Lehdonvirta and Edward Castronova introduce the basic concepts of economics into the game developer's and game designer's toolkits. Lehdonvirta and Castronova explain how the fundamentals of economics—markets, institutions, and money—can be used to create or analyze economies based on artificially scarce virtual goods. They focus on virtual economies in digital games, but also touch on serious digital currencies such as Bitcoin as well as virtual economies that emerge in social media around points, likes, and followers. The theoretical emphasis is on elementary microeconomic theory, with some discussion of behavioral economics, macroeconomics, sociology of consumption, and other social science theories relevant to economic behavior. Topics include the rational choice model of economic decision making; information goods versus virtual goods; supply, demand, and market equilibrium; monopoly power; setting prices; and externalities. The book will enable developers and designers to create and maintain successful virtual economies, introduce social scientists and policy makers to the power of virtual economies, and provide a useful guide to economic fundamentals for students in other disciplines.

The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections

The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections PDF Author: DR. ENG Jenna Ng
Publisher: MediaMatters
ISBN: 9789463723541
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book Here

Book Description
Screens are ubiquitous today. They display information; present image worlds; are portable; connect to mobile networks; mesmerize. However, contemporary screen media also seek to eliminate the presence of the screen and the visibilities of its boundaries. As what is image becomes increasingly indistinguishable against the viewer's actual surroundings, this unsettling prompts re-examination about not only what is the screen, but also how the screen demarcates and what it stands for in relation to our understanding of our realities in, outside and against images. Through case studies drawn from three media technologies - Virtual Reality; holograms; and light projections - this book develops new theories of the surfaces on and spaces in which images are displayed today, interrogating critical lines between art and life; virtuality and actuality; truth and lies. What we have today is not just the contestation of the real against illusion or the unreal, but the disappearance itself of difference and a gluttony of the unreal which both connect up to current politics of distorted truth values and corrupted terms of information. The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie is thus about not only where the image's borders and demarcations are established, but also the screen boundary as the instrumentation of today's intense virtualizations that do not tell the truth. In all this, a new imagination for images emerges, with a new space for cultures of presence and absence, definitions of object and representation, and understandings of dis- and re-placement - the post-screen.