When we look back from these two poles where intense visuality meets narrative – cinema of attraction (phantom rides) and digital screens (navigation)– it is possible to argue that even still images such as photographs and paintings have a temporal, and therefore a potentially narrative dimension. They are narrative to the extent that they require a certain amount of time to be processed. Less dicta-torial in time management than film, a photograph requires that someone stops, looks, thinks and responds, moves on–a requirement that assumes the occur-rence of a series of small events liable to become a micro-narrative. Similarly, urban spaces of architecture – houses, public buildings, department stores – once they are visible and visually displayed and processed, entice the engagement of the people entering them, moving in them, and exiting, into the small stories of everyday life. These spaces attract because of –not in spite of– the fact that they can be entered and navigated in a narrative.
I have noticed that movement is thematically in the forefront when it comes to flaunting the visuality of screen media. This thematic centrality can be taken as a pointer to a self-reflexivity that has methodological and philosophical conse-quences. As we have seen, in early cinema the phantom ride and its relatives that exploited mobility make virtual mobility visually imaginable; hence, possible.
Digital mobility, in turn, multiplies modes of mobility even further. Multiple tropes of mobility are at work in both media in transition: the cinematic form itself, but also a mobilization of the (inter)active navigator in cyberspace. Mobility is a topic and trope in media, so that self-reflexivity becomes prominent. Self-reflexively, new media spaces come to stand for new mobilities that subvert or at least qualify the old notions of narrative.
This bond between visions of mobility and narrative harbors the self-reflexivity I keep insisting on. This is most prominently demonstrable in relation to carto-graphy. Tom Conley points out the close analogy between cinema and cartogra-phy, both of which he sees as forms of“locational imaginings”. (2007: 2) Conley borrows this term from David Buisseret (2003). This author argues that carto-graphic media locate subjects within the places they represent. In this analogy that Conley makes between maps and movies, we can recognize two points that are useful for our comparison between early cinema’s phantom rides and interac-tive screens of navigation. These are the cartographic texture of images of mobi-lity and the inherent self-reflexivity this entails.
When discussing the role of maps in movies, he writes that the image of the map“brings forward these elements of the image in which it is found” –a self-reflexivity by means ofmise-en-abyme. He uses two sets of terms. In the first place he uses Bazin’s terminology offactandeventto point out how both movies and maps“produce space through the action of perception, especially perception that both perceives and perceives its ways of perceiving.”This–his locational imaging
–is an event of space-making. This event occurs in the process of perception and, according to Conley, has a haptic quality. (20) A second, less conspicuous but for me equally important terminological choice is the term deixis, which he evokes in a footnote (216). He borrows this use from the French semiotician Christian Jacob, whose seminal bookThe Sovereign Map (2006; or, L’empire des cartes, 1992) Conley translated. Jacob, in turn, bases his theory of the deictic nature of maps on Emile Benveniste’s linguistic theory, of which I have spoken above. The lin-guist proposed this term to account for the implication of the speaker in what is being said. Examples are‘I’and‘you’ –as distinct from‘he’or‘she’ –and‘here’ or‘there’. The combination of these two examples lead to the key phrase‘I am here’that defines the cartographic act.16
The phantom ride discussed above offers the focalization that this phrase entails. It gives the illusion that the viewer is on the train and sees the world through that vantage point. The map requires that the subject decode the (ima-ginary) phrase. The map is only usable once the subject knows where‘I am here’
exactly is. Interactive maps, as I will further elaborate in the next chapter, visua-lize this situation in two ways. The interactive map embodies the user’s position as focalizer of the map. It also reflects what the user does with the map, what itinerary the user creates and simultaneously travels.
Indeed, in the current inquiry of moments of media transition foregrounded in self-reflection, concepts such as attractions, ludology, navigation, and narrative architecture or spatial narrativity have infused our theoretical vocabulary. These terms have in common that they are deployed to conceptualize the changing rela-tionship between the user, spectator or engager, and screen media as essentially different from classical notions of reading strategies, textuality, and distinctions and hierarchies between spectator, performer and character that inform classical modes of identification in narrative even in the broadest sense.
Screens of navigation show us that in our present visual culture viewing and making collapse. Moreover, the spatial boundaries between screen and physical space become blurred. In Chapter 5, I will further explore the notion of the carto-graphic, both as property of moving-image media, and as characteristic of our creative engagement with these images: cartography as practice. In screenspace, we are simultaneously narrator, focalizer, spectator, player and, perhaps most fundamentally, navigator. But first, in the following chapter, I will further develop the methodological issues put forward here through self-reflection. I will examine the consequences of our approach to screens of navigation as interfaces for mobi-lity and spatial navigation for our understanding of the mobile screen as theoreti-calobject.
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3. Theoretical Consoles
Theoretical objects are things that compel us to propose, interrogate and theo-rize. They counter the influence of approaches that try to define, position and fix.
The handheld, mobile screen offers us a specific kind of theoretical object. Smart-phones and tablet computers are a rapidly developing type of screen object.
Hybrid screen devices that encompass multiple interfaces, they raise questions about the specificity of the screen gadget as object, and about the entanglement of technologies, applications and practices. Moreover, the very speed of the devel-opment of this type of technological object demands an assessment of their his-toricity: how can we understand their specificity if they are changing so very fast?
Taking the current moment–in which smartphones and tablets are at the fore-front of innovation and commercial marketing – as a provisional halting place and point of departure, I will go back just a few years. Through an analysis of the Nintendo DS game console, launched in 2004 and updated in 2008 to include a camera (the DSi) and re-released in 2010 with a larger screen (the DSi XL), and in 2011 adding a 3D screen (the 3DS), I argue that handheld gadgets like mobile gaming devices, smartphones, and tablets like the iPad are best understood as theoretical consoles: objects that raise theoretical and historical questions, precisely, about their inherently temporary and hybrid status. In order to demonstrate that this function is theoretical rather than object-specific, after the case study in this chapter, I will take this perspective in Chapter 5 to look at the hybrid interface of the iPhone as a theoretical console.