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The Window as An Evocative Object

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Introduction

The setting sun slowly hiding behind distant mountains, groups of students walking between classes, the whistle of wind and the rumble of thunder – these are all sights and sounds accessible through my bedroom window. An object integral to architectural design, windows are embedded within the walls of almost every building, bridging the gap between interior spaces and the outer world. They allow for both the acts of looking outwards and looking inwards, offering a view of reality that is separate from one’s current situation. 

Windows have always been a significant part of my life, taking up space on the walls of my bedrooms, from the one in which I spent my childhood, to the ones in my different living situations during university life. They offer a view into the natural world that lies beyond the internal space that exists physically within my room and cognitively within my mind. Despite the ever-changing scenery, my bedroom window remains still and unmoving, acting as a constant that is always there. 

To understand more about the affordances of windows and what they can mediate, I turn to some relevant media theorists who were discussed in class. 

Objects of transition and shifting meanings

Sherry Turkle describes how the meaning of evocative objects “shifts with time, place, and differences among individuals” – a sentiment I find particularly relevant to windows (307). Sunlight streaming through a window could make it an object associated with positivity, encouraging someone to go outside. Conversely, the scene of heavy rain gives the window a gloomy evocation that is in contrast with the safety and warmth within one’s home. These are associations that I personally make with such scenes, though someone with different experiences may perceive things differently. 

Despite not quite fitting Turkle’s discussion of transitional objects as small, handheld ones that remain the same over time and distance, I find that windows can be still considered an object of transition and passage. They stay with us as we grow into adulthood, always present regardless of location. The view from my childhood bedroom differs from my current one, but the window’s function of showing the outside world remains the same. Windows can also be transitional in how they are decorated and personalized. In my first year of university, I made a crochet garland for my dorm window and continued to hang it up on my new one after relocating. This item holds memories from the past, framing the outside world through a sentimental lens despite the view being different from before.     

Old dorm room window (left) and current dorm room window (right)

Objects of discipline

Turkle’s discussion of objects associated with discipline and desire also resonates with my experience with windows. Opening the blinds in the morning and closing them at night is a simple part of my daily routine that I pay no mind to, but can be considered an act of discipline that has ingrained itself within my life. Michelle Hlubinka expresses how her watch and datebook structure her life and keep her on schedule. These objects are described by Turkle as having the ability to take over one’s life and control their perceptions of time, and thus, actions (310). Indeed, my digital devices, and all their applications, perform functions like these, but my window always reaches me first. It acts as my primary indicator of time and weather before I check my phone. Windows engage my senses and tell me information about the world before I even consciously think about it. The pattering of rain on my windowsill enters my ears, so I pack an umbrella; the rays of morning sun hit my eyes as I lie in bed on my phone at 5AM, so I finally decide to go to sleep. Hence, the window subtly acts as an object of discipline that dictates daily actions.

Mediators of the senses 

Caroline Jones’s chapter on the senses brings up Plato’s allegory of the cave. It describes prisoners trapped within the depths of a dark cave, with their only perception of the world being through the sight of shadows instead of the real figures that cast them. The prisoners are victims of a “partial form of sight”, blinded to the true content of the media that the shadows mediate and only being able to derive individual interpretations about what they see (Jones 89).

Since windows allow light to shine into a room, informing its inhabitants of the outside world in a factual and realistic way, they can be seen as something opposite to the cave. However, I realised that windows also have their limitations, and the somewhat limited world that they depict could, conversely, be thought of as the deceptive shadows in Plato’s allegory. 

Windows, most of the time, only span certain parts of walls, each providing a specific view of the exterior. For instance, my room’s only window is west-facing, which allows me to see the sunset. However, this means I see sunlight later in the day than those with rooms opposite to mine since theirs face the sunrise, leading to me having a skewed perception of time when first waking up. I have also experienced hearing music from outside without being able to see its source, leading to me only being able to make assumptions about the source’s location and the people involved. Windows are like transparent barriers to the outside, letting us witness the world while physically isolating us from it. They allow us to see, hear and smell information, but not touch or taste anything; we cannot touch the grass we see from the view of a window, nor can we feel the rain on our skin.

Jones states that only by exiting the allegorical cave can one understand the full dimensions of things, “thereby also discovering what has been mediating reality”(89). Similarly, windows provide useful but limited views of the world, and only by going outside can one immerse themselves in the scene and find the sources that information is coming from. 

Conclusion

Drawing connections between windows and media theory made me realize just how significant of a role they play as mediators of senses, memories and so much more. They ground us in reality, tell us about the world and subtly guide our perceptions and actions. I have found that my time spent looking out of the window has gradually lessened as the time I spend looking at my digital devices has increased. Although these virtual screens act as windows into different worlds that bring new perspectives to my life, they can never act as a replacement for the physical, natural reality that I live in. Finally, we must be reminded that despite their affordances, the extent to which windows mediate information is limited, and gaining a deeper understanding of everything requires going outside to experience the world in its full scope. 

References

Caroline, Jones. “Senses.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, Edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, The University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 88–100. 

Turkle, Sherry. “WHAT MAKES AN OBJECT EVOCATIVE?” Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, edited by Sherry Turkle, The MIT Press, 2007, pp. 307–27. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhg8p.39. Accessed 6 Oct. 2025.

Written by Adela Lynge

Images by Adela Lynge

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Analyzing My Perspective

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Introduction

Everyday, when I wake up, the world is a little blurred. Beside my head, on my windowsill, are the frames of plastic that fix that. 

I have had glasses since I was nine years old and since then they have been the windows through which I have quite literally watched my entire life. Without my glasses, I would not have the same memories that I do today, namely because lots of the details would be missing. Nothing is more subjective than a person’s perspective, and in that, their perception of the world. By watching the world through my glasses, my perception has been permanently altered by them. It would otherwise be lacking image and depth as I literally would not be able to see the bigger picture. Unless I decide to wear contacts, or get surgery to fix my eyesight, my entire world will always be mediated through these pieces of plastic and because of that, they are the root from which all of my memories, perceptions, and opinions grow.

By clarifying the world around men, mechanically fixing the way that my eyes focus the light in the world they watch, my glasses have mediated my experience and memory since I got them.

Affordances

The main affordance of my glasses is pretty clear: they help me see. Without them, and assuming there was no alternative to fixing my vision, my everyday life would be significantly impaired. I would not be able to see properly beyond a foot from my nose, which would make things including–but not limited to–reading signs and whiteboards, driving, and recognizing faces pretty difficult. Though they are crucial to my easy access to the world around me, the function of my glasses reaches beyond what they do to the light as it enters my eye.

Each pair of glasses that I have means something different to me. I have a purple and green glow-in-the-dark pair from when I was a kid, pairs that were too small, pairs that gave me a headache and, most importantly, pairs that I love and feel myself in. In addition to helping me see, my glasses are a mode of self-expression. Just because they are functionally necessary to my everyday life, does not mean I can not use them to a further effect and have fun with them. I also deliberately avoid wearing contacts. Frankly, I hate them. Though I do not mind sticking a piece of plastic in my eye, they are far too finicky for my taste, and when I do wear them, they always really dry out my eyes. Additionally, because I have had my glasses for so long, I have gotten used to them, and feel more myself when I wear them than when I go without.

I rarely change my everyday glasses. All of these frames are distinctly associated to different periods of my life, and by that effect, are irrevocably linked to the memories I have within those periods. By mediating my world so thoroughly, my glasses can be studied within the context of many of the critical terms we discussed in class, most notably, Body and Senses.

Body

Growing up with glasses, they have become incorporated into my own sense of identity. This is interesting to consider in the context of McLuhan’s theory of media as “extensions of man” and it should be understood as “continuous with the human nervous system”(Wegenstein 29). My glasses are an extension of my eyes by necessity, altering the way my eyes receive light, and focusing the world around me. By affecting my vision so concretely, there is very little distinction between the “inside and outside” of the media and myself, greatly conflating my perspective with the perspective of the glasses. Theoretically, the glasses still mediate when they are not on my face, they still function off my face, there just is not anyone to perceive the perspective they create. 

McLuhan defines a dual function of media, one that is both an extension and amputation of the body (Wegenstein 29). They are an extension of my eyes and mediate my world through their lenses, yet they are also physically separate from my face, focusing the light in the world whether or not they are on my face. 

Senses

Obviously, my glasses pretty heavily impact my own sense of sight, however, what is more significant is how reliant I am on my glasses.

The concept of Plato’s cave is interesting to consider in relation to my reliance on my glasses. The basis for Plato’s cave is the division between “knowing and mere existence” in that the prisoners–bound to simply watching the world–only exist, while philosophers–who experience the full dimensions of the world and understand its mediation of reality–are in the know (Jones 89). This distinction between watching and knowing is applicable to my perception of the world with and without my glasses. Without them, my ability to see and move through the physical world is inherently altered, but I am still able to see. However, the lack of depth and detail that impedes my ability to see the bigger picture could be compared to the simple existence of the prisoners in the cave who simply watch without knowing.

By correcting my vision, my glasses afford me an effective sense of sight, allowing me the context and depth of details, and affording me the knowledge associated. The construct of the cave completely dictates the prisoners’ experiences of reality, forming “a system of representation and deception with which the blindered sense of sight colludes”(Jones 89). Similarly, my glasses completely mediate my perception of the world. Though the reliance between me and my glasses is far less absolute than that of the prisoners and the cave featured in Plato’s cave analogy, and most of the things I do in my everyday life are possible without sight, there is a similar reliance on media to fully experience the world and the full extent of knowledge it offers.

Exploring these parallels further, the concept of true vision–“turning away from spectacle… closing one’s eyes to the visible world—or its mediated image—to question what one sees”–is also interesting to consider. Associated with this notion, and Plato’s analogy, are two tropes of blindness:“the ignorant blindness of the prisoners and the volitional blindness of the philosopher”(Jones 89). These ideas of different blindness parallel the function of glasses. I can consciously take off my glasses, turning away from the spectacle and engaging in a form of volitional blindness, thus un-mediating the world and returning it to the state that my own eyes and brain have decided is right for me (as inconvenient as that may be). But it also renders me ignorant to the details of my physical surroundings.

Conclusion

It is intriguing to study my glasses as they have become such a routine and unremarkable part of my life. By looking at them through the lens of the theories discussed in these chapters, I found a new appreciation for my frames. By looking at the functional and everyday objects in our lives in these ways, we can appreciate how the more menial objects mediate us and how we perceive the world. 

(Note: Obviously there are ways to navigate the world without being able to see, I wrote this post in the context of the knowledge I have as someone whose vision is correctable with prescription lenses.)

Sources

Jones, Caroline. “Senses”, Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W.J.T Mitchell and Mark, B.N. Hansen, The University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 88-100. 

Wegenstein, Bernadette. “Body”, Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W.J.T Mitchell and Mark, B.N. Hansen, The University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 19-34. 

Blog post written by Molly Kingsley

Image by Molly Kingsley

Critical Concept Explication

Do We Sense The World… Or Does it Sense Us?

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As we navigate the world, our perception is shaped through our touch, taste, sight, sound, and smell.

But how do we understand these experiences and how does mediation play into this interaction?

In the chapter Senses, Caroline Jones explores two contrasting answers to this question. Through Friedrich Kittler and Marshall McLuhan, we can begin to understand the complexities of how our senses interpret media and the surrounding world.

Starting with our first theorist, Kittler believes that our senses are radically shaped by the media around us. His idea is fairly synonymous with ideas about technological determinism. On the opposite end of the spectrum, McLuhan insists that human senses are grounded in the body and simply extend their reach through or using media. By dissecting these opposing ideas, Jones extends these ideas to explain how media and the senses interact.

Jones’s main argument is that the senses are not natural or unchanging, but are always shaped and reshaped by media. As she puts it: “The senses both constitute our ‘sense’ of unmediated knowledge and are the first medium with which consciousness must contend.” (p. 88) While Media delivers content to our existing senses, they actively reorganize how we experience the world through touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight.

Building on the work of the two earlier thinkers, Friedrich Kittler and Marshall McLuhan, Kittler argued that media fundamentally produce and change the senses. We see this currently when smartphones reshape our attention span and even eye movement patterns from the constant flicking and scanning our eyes do, while also restructuring how we process information.

To compare, McLuhan argues that media are extensions of our senses. Take for instance, the telephone extends hearing, but our senses remain grounded in our body. Jones takes this further by showing that, across history, from ancient philosophy to modern capitalism, our senses have always been shaped by outside forces. For example, we have been conditioned to associate smell to the terms “Pine Forest” and “Country Fresh” to a clean, hygienic home.

As for vision, society has often treated sight as the most important path to truth. According to Jones, vision became privileged because philosophers, starting with Plato, saw it as the most objective sense that could reach truth from a distance. Over time, philosophy and art reinforced this by treating sight as the ‘pure’ path to knowledge, while pushing touch, taste, and smell aside as “too bodily” or “animal”.

But this ranking of sight above touch, smell, and taste is not natural because it’s something created by media and culture. Her main point is that the media are not solely neutral tools that show us the world. Instead, they actively change our senses, reshaping what we know is true and also how we actually experience reality through our bodies. And to study media, we need to perceive senses as the very ways of shaping our sense of reality.

Through the course of philosophy’s historical developments, we’ve seen a lot of fluctuations as to what counts as knowledge and the ways in which one may truly “know” something. From the philosophers of Ancient Greece – Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, who regarded philosophical reasoning as the way to gain a true sight of reality. to modern-day thinkers, most infamously Hume, who rejected the concept of “universal laws”, favouring sensory experience to understand the world.

In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Plato presented prisoners shackled to the walls of a cave, where the prisoners perceive the projected shadows of objects as the objects themselves, for they can not turn around, and thus, they are unaware of the illusion being carried out. In this case, the eyes are seeing, yet the prisoner is effectively blind to the truth of reality. Their “senses” have effectively failed to distinguish between a representation of reality, its fabrication and reality itself.  Plato attributes this blindness to a lack of philosophical reasoning. Critiquing the dependency on the five senses to understand reality, and as a means to achieve true knowledge. He then proceeds to provide the remedy for this, in which the prisoner is required to be willing to be blinded once again, this time by the volitional blinding light of reality. Shown in the allegory as the eyes having to adjust to the bright sun after spending a whole life in the darkness of the cave. 

Fast-forwarding into the Enlightenment period, we have John Locke and, famously, David Hume, with his Problem of Induction, arguing that we can not know for sure that something has happened until it has happened; his idea of reality is one which can only be validated by our senses, such as the eyes or ears.

Hume argues that it is only a force of habit and custom that we assume to “know” things. For example, we do not have all the empirical data of history and the future to accurately claim that a sound is produced when we clap our hands. Human reasoning, consequently, is argued to be a cumulative process based on data from sensory experience, and this is the primary way in which we understand the world.

In concluding the chapter’s philosophical basis, Jones’ main idea that “our senses are not fixed” is strongly reinforced by a modern thinker, Karl Marx and his argument that the way our senses interact with technology and political economies form us as humans. This idea of technological determinism claims our senses are formed externally by the historical development of the world rather than internally within ourselves. Our senses are in a constant state of change and adaptation, in relation to our experience of the world.

Taking a step back to Hume, which considers media as a tool for gathering or promoting information for the senses, and is not only “the bridge in the middle” but also something that shapes and influences how people use and reconsider their senses and the world experienced through them. Media not only “outputs”, but also “inputs” through our senses. The chapter shifts our understanding of media as solely information we consume but also the force that transforms our human senses that we use to experience the world.

While the media shapes people’s perception of reality and the way we interpret our own senses, the media itself is also ever changing and replaced by new inventions and technologies. Our senses, when mediated, shift with it, and so does our conversation with the world around us. In such a context, the ability to independently think while understanding how our senses interact with media is the key of guiding us out of the cave.

Maxine Gray, Betty Liao, Nam Pham, Aubrey Ventura