visual aesthetics

"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.[...]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." http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/virtual-window

This conference paper discusses the visual tropes of the window and the screen in the work of Derek Mahon and Alan Gillis. More specifically, the focus is on how the architectural window and the digital screen operate as framing devices in their works, and how they enable the poets to interrogate the interrelationship between poetry as verbal discourse, and visual representation. The shift from the architectural window to a digital window on the screen also marks a shift in understanding questions of viewpoint and perspective in contemporary culture.