“There’s a world out there. Open a window, and it’s there.” -Robin Williams
Are you tired of the same old view from your window? When you visit the WindowSwap site you can look out of someone else’s window for a while. The site is free and has a variety of 10-minute videos of window views – with sound, and with the name and location of the “owner” of each view.
WindowSwap was created as a quarantine project by the husband-and-wife team Vaishnav Balasubramaniam and Sonali Ranjit. In their own words, their goal was “to create an ultra-simple site that helped us travel virtually and brought a sense of calm into our lives. No likes, no comments, no way to be judged by anyone for any reason. We wanted to make the lives of people stuck indoors somewhere around the world a little bit better. Not worse.”
Starting with just 16 different views of friends’ windows, in a matter of months, the site had thousands of new submissions from all around the world! There are a huge variety of views: village streets, pastoral fields, majestic mountains, bustling avenues, twinkling skylines, and panoramic ocean views, to name a few. By contributors sharing a slice of their life, we are drawn closer as a global community.
Windows
From this height
the sunset spans the whole world
before me: houses and trees are shadows
neon flares between them like sudden fire
the freeways run, always
strangely vacant with riderless cars
empty air
the windows up here
refract the blue slate and rose light
making the hills on the horizon collide
with ideas of Sussex, piedmont
or the cold clear wind of the Abruzzi
but that is never what is out there.
At home, the lamp curls its aurora
into the corners of the room
and out the windows
squares, rectangles of light
stake out a territory on the ragged lawn.
In the center of things
between the pressing of the window and air
— a small space —
there is a meeting that defines
nothing, everything.
-Rachel Sherwood