The Virtual Window

Author: Anne Friedberg
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262512505
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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.

Building the Virtual State

Author: Jane E. Fountain
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780815798903
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
The benefits of using technology to remake government seem almost infinite. The promise of such programs as user-friendly "virtual agencies" and portals where citizens can access all sections of government from a single website has excited international attention. The potential of a digital state cannot be realized, however, unless the rigid structures of the contemporary bureaucratic state change along with the times. Building the Virtual State explains how the American public sector must evolve and adapt to exploit the possibilities of digital governance fully and fairly. The book finds that many issues involved in integrating technology and government have not been adequately debated or even recognized. Drawing from a rich collection of case studies, the book argues that the real challenges lie not in achieving the technical capability of creating a government on the web, but rather in overcoming the entrenched organizational and political divisions within the state. Questions such as who pays for new government websites, which agencies will maintain the sites, and who will ensure that the privacy of citizens is respected reveal the extraordinary obstacles that confront efforts to create a virtual state. These political and structural battles will influence not only how the American state will be remade in the Information Age, but also who will be the winners and losers in a digital society.

Window Shopping

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

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

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

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.

Rethinking Media Change

Author: David Thorburn
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262264945
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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.

Virtual Ethnography

Author: Christine Hine
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1847876498
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Book Description
Cutting though the exaggerated and fanciful beliefs about the new possibilities of `net life′, Hine produces a distinctive understanding of the significance of the Internet and addresses such questions as: what challenges do the new technologies of communication pose for research methods? Does the Internet force us to rethink traditional categories of `culture′ and `society′? In this compelling and thoughtful book, Hine shows that the Internet is both a site for cultural formations and a cultural artefact which is shaped by people′s understandings and expectations. The Internet requires a new form of ethnography. The author considers the shape of this new ethnography and guides readers through its application in multiple settings.

Windows Internals

Author: Pavel Yosifovich
Publisher: Microsoft Press
ISBN: 0133986462
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 1473

Book Description
The definitive guide–fully updated for Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 Delve inside Windows architecture and internals, and see how core components work behind the scenes. Led by a team of internals experts, this classic guide has been fully updated for Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016. Whether you are a developer or an IT professional, you’ll get critical, insider perspectives on how Windows operates. And through hands-on experiments, you’ll experience its internal behavior firsthand–knowledge you can apply to improve application design, debugging, system performance, and support. This book will help you: · Understand the Window system architecture and its most important entities, such as processes and threads · Examine how processes manage resources and threads scheduled for execution inside processes · Observe how Windows manages virtual and physical memory · Dig into the Windows I/O system and see how device drivers work and integrate with the rest of the system · Go inside the Windows security model to see how it manages access, auditing, and authorization, and learn about the new mechanisms in Windows 10 and Server 2016

Virtual Art

Author: Oliver Grau
Publisher: Mit Press
ISBN: 9780262072410
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Book Description
An overview of the art historical antecedents to virtual reality and the impact of virtual reality on contemporary conceptions of art.

The Window Seat

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

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).

Inside Windows NT

Author: Helen Custer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781556154812
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 422

Book Description
Microsoft Windows NT is the foundation of the new 32-bit operating system designed to support the most powerful workstation and server systems. The initial developer support for Windows NT has been phenomenal--developers have demonstrated more than 50 Windows NT applications only months after receiving the pre-release version of the software. This authoritative text--by a member of the Windows NT development group--is a a richly detailed technical overview of the design goals and architecture of Windows NT. (Operating Systems)