room and window

Our Visual Studies text for next week?  Anne Friedberg's The Virtual Window.  From Alberti to Microsoft.  On its first page: "We know the world by what we wee: through a window, in a frame, on a screen.  As we spend more of our time staring into the frames of movies, television, computers, hand-held displays - "windows" full of moving images, text, icons, and 3-D graphics - how the world is framed may be as important as what is contained within that frame."

So naturally, when I found this facing me ... I was in a windowless cubicle; this looks like a windowless cubicle - and yet I had the illusion of looking through this frame into another space.  Probably it was the same at the other end, when this rather sinister set-up - it looks just like an interrogation chamber - developed some inhabitants, because you can see that little spying eye looking back at me.  The trouble with long distance video calls, of course, rather than Skype, is that one can't arrange oneself as in a mirror; one's got no idea about the bad angle that the camera may be finding of one's chin ...