There is something elementary about Grosz’s insights about framing. Not that they’re simplistic, rather that they seem to reach down to some very fundamental aspect of the artistic instinct. I think that her understanding of, and elaboration around, the uses of frames as devices is very powerful, but I’m curious about her connection of framing to architecture. I understand that she’s following Deleuze and Guattari’s footsteps, but framing seems like a pre-architectural instinct to me. The magic circle, the family, the in-group and the out-group, all of these take place before architecture. The frame is what divides the outside from the inside, but that occurs at the cellular level. A lipid bilayer, an epidermis, these are frames, the way that Grosz describes them. We have an intuitive understanding that there is an exterior, where there is chaos, and aninterior, where there is mystery: It is called the body.
Interestingly, as digital artists, one of the most powerful and ubiquitous types of frames also seems to be one of the least investigated or utilized. We have used “windows” as a user interface paradigm for over twenty years, but I’m not sure that even now the idea has been fully developed, either as user interface or as an artistic metaphor. Once we understand windows as being the permeation of the wall between the rarefied space of human activity and chaos, how do we apply that to our understanding of how information is displayed in a computer? (For example, which side is which?) If a frame is necessary because “…unless it is in some way demarcated, nature itself is incapable of sexualizing life, of making life alluring, lifting life above mere survival,” then what does it mean that we frame a huge portion of the information we get via the screen of these devices?
—Alexei