San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
OPENING A WINDOW ON THE WORLD
A glimpse of someone else’s very everyday life offers a reassuring view
While I normally love my apartment in San Francisco, with its views of hummingbirds and cherryheaded conures flitting through backyard foliage, I’ve been stuck inside so long that I can’t be bothered to look up anymore when I hear their screeches and glitchy chirps overhead. Exotic birds? Whatever. Give me the sight of a bus trundling past my coffee shop table, or the sounds of kids releasing bigchested laughs as they walk home from school. Give me anything else!
And right on time, I found WindowSwap. In June, married Singapore creatives Sonali Ranjit and Vaishnav Balasubramaniam unleashed their quarantine project into the world. “(Vaishnav) and I were tired of the view from our window, so we made a little place on the internet where you can open a new window somewhere in the world,” wrote Ranjit.
The site collects 10minute loops of usersubmitted window views and blows the videos up in your browser window with just the barest context of the user’s name and location. Just click a button to change your view to someone else’s window. So far, there are slices of reality sourced from upwards of 170 countries: from a rainy hill overlooking a marina in Bergen, Norway, to a view of a freeway in Oakland set to downtempo club music.
Fans of weather live feeds and EarthCams will find this gimmick familiar, though the setting is much more lowkey and domestic than the shots of Bourbon Street and Times Square that they offer. (At the same time, WindowSwap’s view from an apartment in Giza, with the Great Pyramids hulking in the background, seems like an ultimate humblebrag.) Rather than highlighting landmarks, these views, of backyard gardens full of decorative orbs and nondescript, Sovietera apartment blocks, are more like miniature profiles of nonfamous people, set in the quiet interludes between the big action of their lives. You rarely see a person in the frame, unless they happen to be walking down the street outside.
In a 2002 interview with the late film critic Roger Ebert, animated filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki talks about why he would pepper his films with brief scenes where nothing would happen, save for something as banal as a gust of wind ruffling grass. He ties that aesthetic choice to the concept of “ma,” or emptiness, and demonstrates this by clapping his hands four times. “The time in between my clapping is ma,” he tells Ebert. “If you just have nonstop action with no breathing space at all, it’s just busyness. But if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension at 80 degrees all the time, you just get numb.”
I remember the early days of the pandemic, right after everyone in The Chronicle’s newsroom was sent home, when the adrenaline of keeping up with the constant breaking news, the live feeds, the civic press releases and looming sense of doom propelled us from one day to the next. There wasn’t any time in between the claps back then. And once the adrenaline wore off, I became depressed — numb.
I felt the way I feel today, when the sky outside of my window has been tinted a deep, unsettling orange by the multiple wildfires blazing in the Bay Area. In real life, there’s nowhere to cast my gaze and relax: It’s doom, doom, doom in every direction. Pulling up WindowSwap lets my mind go somewhere else.
In the loop from Ixtapa Zihuatanejo, a resort area on the Pacific coast of Mexico, the sun is perpetually setting over the ocean, granting the horizon a peach and butteryellow haze. It’s cloudy and probably not terribly hot, but people are still walking along the beach in the distance. You hear waves colliding gently with the sand and the close hum of an air conditioner.
My mind craves the kind of stimulation fostered by WindowSwap, where each window is both a view into someplace else and someone else. The frames seem so deliberate in their undeliberate messiness, inviting the viewer to concoct their own narratives and seek out patterns from the visual information provided. What does a doll hand sticking out of a cactus pot tell me about Aubree of Williamsburg, Brooklyn? Why do two different apartments have the same orange Adirondack chair on their balconies in Lausanne, Switzerland?
These days, I feel much more sympathetic to James Stewart’s busybody newsman in “Rear Window” who, stuck at home while recuperating from an accident, spends his time staring out his window and getting caught up in the drama of his neighbors. On WindowSwap, I find myself getting overly invested in whether one gawkish dog in the United Kingdom can find the tennis ball his owner has thrown in the yard; I wonder how much Casey in Boston is paying for an apartment where the main view is of a neighbors’ windows and a brickwalled alley. That sense of “ma” seems to work like the overturning of a snow globe, unsettling all my mental debris to allow me to think again.
A view of a stranger’s window in San Francisco is flanked by gauzy curtains, and all you can really make out are a whitepainted fire escape, a bird feeder, the twinkling leaves of a red tip photinia shrub and a line of colorful town houses on the opposite side of the street. There’s a pair of sneakers on the fire escape and the window is cracked open, intimating that the dweller hops out on occasion to take advantage of the ad hoc balcony space. The birds sound different over there, too, with throatier, harsher chirps — maybe
It’s nice to glance over and remember that there are other people out there: people who like to play fetch with their dogs, collect metal roosters and listen to the papery ruffling of palm leaves in the breeze.
they’re smokers.
There’s joy to be found in the new, even when it’s centered in what someone else might consider to be their everyday life. When you have a penchant for doomscrolling, as I often do, and when it seems like we’re all living in a moment of intense entropic acceleration and chaos, it’s easy for one’s attention to flit from disaster to disaster without pause. WindowSwap’s appeal lies in its intentional nothingness. It’s nice to glance over and remember that there are other people out there: people who like to play fetch with their dogs, collect metal roosters and listen to the papery ruffling of palm leaves in the breeze. I’m sure my usual view, parrots and all, might just as easily give someone else the sense of peace they’re looking for.