My mother, a painter, once sketched me an eight-pane window looking out on a garden. Just above her signature, she inscribed a dedication along with a tag-line: "We get to do the windows."

The sketch, which hung on my bedroom wall beside my actual window throughout my adolescence, was a feminist inside joke and an emblem of our relationship, expressing perennial mother-daughter border confusions, looking-glass struggles that were hilarious and ambivalent — usually at once.

How ironic, then, to realize that by making a professional home in hypermedia, I've spent a good bit of my adult life worried about — guess what? — windows. Not Microsoft Windows, or the window near my desk through which I'm frequently tempted (and occasionally encouraged) to take a flying leap, but windows on a screen, like the one you're reading in now.

These unobtrusive windows are central to the felt experience of using a computer. They focus attention and structure work, usually so quietly no one notices them until they start moving or closing unexpectedly — the stuff of Web art, hacks, and browser bugs. When windows are working as they should, however, they organize work, providing visual cues that differentiate this week's to-do list from yesterday's chat transcript and this afternoon's email. An interface without windows is uncomfortable; we are reduced to command-lines and hierarchies of lists. Remember DOS?

A screen window works a bit like a picture frame, which mediates between what it contains and the surrounding environment. But while an art historian might argue that a picture frame works best when least noticed, playing with windows is part and parcel of making art for the computer screen. In digital art, a window is a locus of fascination, a place where old questions about form and content, container and contained, erupt with renewed urgency.

This comes as no surprise, since Western culture has long understood the power of framing, both real and metaphorical. Narcissus tumbled famously into his own reflection, a superficial portrait impossible to imagine without a frame to define it (pools without edges are mud pits that don't reflect anything.) Visual artists have long understood how a well-defined edge can bring into play the potent opposition of figure and ground, not to mention the lasting shock of Albertian perspective — a keyhole opening onto a world organized along gridlines vanishing to a point. Even Einstein's theory of special relativity used thought experiments involving multiple "frames of reference" to articulate some troubling observations about presumably absolute Newtonian space-time. Glasses, those framed windows through which some of us, myself included, see the world, refract light to improve focus. For good or ill, framing allows us to dwell on certain aspects of a situation while others recede from view: we frame problems in order to solve them; when someone is unjustly made responsible for a crime, we say he or she was "framed."