Back when art moved along the paths of a narrative (back when art seemed to be progressing toward a goal), the project was, visually, that of perfecting an illusory space within a frame. This was analogous to a window on a space that either did exist or could exist. This was considered high achievement during the Renaissance; painters sought, through perspective and light, foreshortening and mimicry of distance, to recreate a seemless space within the bounds of the edges of the painting.
This project persisted into the twentieth century, all the while being subject to the whims and explorations of various artists. Duchamp played at the surface of this project both conceptually and literally, by creating works that incorporated real nails, painted shadows; the impressionists and cubists heightened the effect of the frame, by dissolving that space within it into light and eventually into pure geometry. Abstract expressionsts banged against the frame, sometimes almost transcending its limitation; later, Stella, Noland and the color field painters furthered the flattening of that middle distance in the window by creating works that expressly worked within the limits of the frame.
Cinema toyed also, from its inception, with the frame; divided the screen (as that space was very quickly coming to be called), dissolved it literally before your eyes, superimposed screen after screen of movement into montage. The space that did or could exist very soon became a space that couldn't exist at all, at least not in the physics of our world; that space was only possible in the reverberations of light and sound in the human skull, and in the media that leaked this resonance out into community.
In the middle to late twentieth century, the screen became, quite literally, the monitor you are using to read this. And that space that started off as a space that could exist took on a strange manifestation; that of virtual existence. The space was no longer static, could not only be admired, but entered; the mouse, another substitute for the human hand, could reach deep into the work of art, and pull out variations of the piece. And art became not simply something for the gaze; it became something that wrapped itself around the user, fitted the beholder with variations of itself; ideally, the work of art in the twenty-first
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