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Windows are nearly always two-way screens. At home, I step out of the building to look in and I see furniture and books and even more screens – TV, computer, the door of the microwave - [] – all existing beyond my reach as I gaze in.
Looking back on the book now, I see that I have written a great deal about windows and screens, but nothing about blinds and shutters. However, these mechanisms do indeed have a very singular resonance of their own. At the Hotel Del Capri I took this photo of the shutters in my bedroom. It
was on the ground floor of the hotel, just a few metres away from an intersection on Wilshire Boulevard, and I could never forget how close I was sleeping to one of LA's main arteries.
This weekend I received an email about a work of art being made right now in Los Angeles by Zehao Chang. Titled "11:11pm" it is a simple yet very beautiful piece, and although it uses Venetian blinds rather than shutters, it reminds me of the nights I spent in LA listening to the traffic and connecting it to the shimmer of lights behind the slats.
(Image by kind permission of the artist) Watch the movie
Chang writes: As people speed down a quiet street in their cars at night, passing by motels and homes, their moving headlights casts a beautiful display of lights and shadows through partially open venetian blinds. The brief intrusions of the passing strangers into another's living space highlights the inherent ephemerality of bonds and of connections, and in their wake all that remains is memory and afterimages.
