world wide web of windows
note: scroll in the middle of the screen to move windows, scroll on the right or left side of the screen to move buildings. windows are also draggable!
windows are unstable. they’re forced into boxes. they move with the world, show what they want to. windows are the first thing i look at when i wake up. my own, and then my neighbor’s across the street. i don’t know how many times i’ve looked, but now, today, for some reason, i finally notice that there isn’t just a window missing where there should be one, but rather a filled in hole, where one used to be. something about window memory. i’m not looking through the windows, i’m looking at them. they appear as already images. they appear as already flat. an image of an image i’ll make then. Harry Dodge says images have a back wall. a window kind of already does too. it implies an end, but its also the front of a beginning. the face of a space. a temptation. a way in, but really it’s controlled from the inside. i’ve become ‘obsessed’ with them, which isn’t really that accurate. it’s more a pattern of looking. Raegan says its like being on a walk with me. but i’m tuned in now, i’ll think of it as zoomed-in looking. if you move too fast the image bounces wildly off screen before it renders again. its difficult to make these kind of images while walking with a dog, for example. the window will be a product of its surroundings but will also bring a lot of itself to the table. i look for ones with essence of painting. i like their already produced quality, or already rendered. flattening the world. the window flattens the world too. i like how they bend in trees and wires. they merge in glass space and reveal our vast and terribly rudimentary networks. we wouldn’t last long without either. the windows themselves are a network, these images could be made anywhere. it is a concentration, it is paying attention. Juliana Castro points out that in English attention is something you pay. i guess windows are frames, framing, framed. you and the window frame an image, a moving one, in collaboration. mostly the result won’t be very interesting, but the process is. mostly the windows reflect back other buildings, self-conscious. they give face to facade though. they allow you to read the building. the thing about if eyes are the windows to our souls, what are windows the eyes to? i think about where i am, where most of these windows are (so far). “new england” with storm windows, churches, shutters (for show), witch windows, and the receding winter sun that makes everything appear like a Wyeth painting. at least this way of looking helps one get through…i’m looking for color palettes, compositions. often its funny, the repetition revealing mistakes, or poor planning, failures. designed from the inside out the final facade appears random. what if buildings were inside out. if you cut the windows out, what do you remove, what do you learn? i like the way they appear already flat. no, they seem fake. you can layer them and they seem wrong, like they were always wrong. part of that is the multi-planarity. an escape from the singular, linear perspective, from Hito Steryl’s Free Fall. we’re moving past that now, she says. an attempt to keep up with the machine, but let’s bring some feeling to it. or as Catherine says a suturing of thinking and feeling. the cheap windows are fun like the old-old windows, the ones that are so old the glass drips, warps, bends. the liquid metal. it feels like the phone screen, now so smart they can’t hold still. the world vibrates (undulates), and its unsettling, nauseating. its the live flux. its the video version of the flat panorama glitch. the flattened 3D image. but the glass, you can see the filter. that’s nice. you at least know what you’re dealing with. you know why the world is suddenly chaos. windows or holes, frames or screens, frames in frames in frames…