In combination with the mobility and tactility of the screen, the DS raises the stakes of screen technology by a doubling of the screen. It does so not only lit-erally, by offering two related screens that split up screen space, but also concep-tually, thus thickening its potential as theoretical console. As a material site for interfacing, the screen can be multiplied by combining different interfaces. The clamshell case not only makes closing the screens possible, but also divides them, splitting up single screenspace into two separate screens.
Obviously, screens within screens, or perhaps more appropriately, frames within frames have a longer history than Nintendo’s invention. Split screens, inserts, mise-en-abyme: we have seen it all in cinema –and before that in paint-ing.14Yet the primary difference here is the aspect of navigation. In her section on multiple frames and screens, Friedberg explains how the digital, multiple screen allows for multitasking. This implies simultaneity of different activities in parallel spaces. (Friedberg, 2006: 233) Following the historical metamorphoses of the screen, a temporal and spatial doubling of multiple screens is perhaps the most significant newness of the digital screen. Therefore, I focus here on the fractured, yet connected, spatial arrangement of screen-based activity; the exploration of or navigation within one screen space, for example, which results in a representation of that process in another space.15
Through its multiple screens the DS makes connections between multiple (vir-tual) spaces, but also to multiple interfaces possible; and it makes that possibility visible. The games developed for the DS explore these possibilities for double vision. One of the clearest cases is that of racing games. Since the early days of racing games, we have been familiar the screen insert with a little map of the racetrack in the upper or lower corner of the frame. These maps show little arrows, or avatars that resemble the cars that are driven in the game. On the larger screen we see a first-person perspective from a car on the racetrack.
These representations exemplify what Michel de Certeau calls map and tour paradigms. Through this theoretical view the gadget becomes a true interlocutor;
the technological console is, at the same time, a theoretical one.
Fig. 3.4: Simultaneous screens of the racing gameMario Kartand adventure gameThe Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hour Glass. Courtesy of Nintendo Benelux
As I mentioned above, in their article“Nintendo® and New World Travel Writing:
A Dialogue”, Henry Jenkins and Mary Fuller compare exploration games to old travel narratives with the help of de Certeau’s writing onspatial storiesinThe Practice of Everyday Life. De Certeau claims that “every story is a travel story – a spatial practice.” (1988: 115) Reversing this idea, I propose that every space contains potential travel narratives–and so do the tactile, mobile, and dual screens of the Nintendo DS.
In his logic, de Certeau makes a distinction betweenplaceandspace:“space is a practiced place.”(116) Hence, every place can be turned into space by the practice of narrative. This practice is infused with ambitions. Fuller and Jenkins see in these ambitions a certain colonizing violence:
Places exist only in the abstract, as potential sites for narrative action, as loca-tions that have not yet been colonized. […] Places constitute a “stability” which must be disrupted in order for stories to unfold. Places are there but do not yet matter, much as the New World existed, was geographically present, and culturally functioning well before it became the center of European ambi-tions or the site of New World narratives.
3. theoretical consoles 93
The comparison between narrative and the conquest of the New World demon-strate the sociohistorical, indeed political relevance of this view. Both are ways of turning place into space, or insignificant into significant space. As the authors continue:
Places become meaningful only as they come into contact with narrative agents […]. Spaces, on the other hand, are places that have been acted upon, explored, colonized. Spaces become the location of narrative events. (1995: np;
emphasis added)
If the latter is the model of the former, then narrative is a form of conquest.
For de Certeau, maps are formalized, abstracted accounts of spatial relations, whereas tours are spatial movements, described from the point of view of the traveler-narrator. Fuller and Jenkins compare the rhetoric of the tour and the way this rhetoric produces attention to the effects of the tour, including its ethics expressed in terms of obligation–the other side of gaining control over narrative spaces. They signal the narrative aspect of touring which involves “a constant transformation of unfamiliar places into familiar spaces.”Spatial control needs to be reaffirmed as the tour-narrative continues. As a consequence, moving through space is a narrative appropriation of place, which involves an inherent struggle for control. In double screens this can be represented simultaneously as narrative and as spatial abstraction.
If tours are visual narratives, in the case of screen-based spatial representation, maps are visual abstractions of space. These two forms of space-making announce the simultaneity that double screens make possible. De Certeau was talking about traditional, analogue cartography when he used these terms as metaphors for spatial relations–the old to which the new relates. With interactive digital maps, shifting perspectives and navigation on screen become possible.
This is where the doubling of the screen becomes relevant–both practically, for the gadget, and theoretically, for its deployment as theoretical console. The virtual movements of the avatar on digital maps allow an experience of navigation that results from the transfer of physical movement of tactility to another spatial realm that can be visually entered with haptic engagement, as I will explain in more detail in Chapter 5. When the navigator moves, the avatar on the screen moves along with it. The continuity between spaces makes navigation between the con-verged mapping paradigms possible. This the DS demonstrates, proposing for our reflection the implications of mapping according to de Certeau, the way these implications respond to the old cartographies, and to what extent the newness, with all its rhetoric of sharing, truly innovates the ecology of screen technology.
Gadgetivity
Gadgets, then, are defined by activity and they afford this activity – let’s call it gadgetivity. As I have argued above, the Nintendo DS prompts a reflection on the gadget as a hub where many different preoccupations of contemporary visual cul-ture and its study intersect–the historical approach to media, in two directions;
the theoretical understanding of how gadgets work, how they are practiced; and, superimposed on both, the ethical implications that de Certeau added to this crossing. As a theoretical console, the DS offers insight in the mobile screen, both as a technological gadget and in relation to the cultural practices it allows– an intersection, precisely, of history and theory. With its historical status it sug-gests the interrogation of the gadget as “speaking its time” (Baudrillard 1996) through its combination of recognizable, old and exciting new features. Theoreti-cally, it encourages the exploration of its possibilities as console, a polymorphous screen platform for a variety of applications and practices. When we separate the thing–the DS in its material form–from theobject–the thing that asks us what it is–we create what is denoted in science by the term theoretical object: a tempo-rary construction. The object–here a particular screen device–is imagined, con-structed, in order to interrogate the meaning of the object that is being theorized.
I have proposed that the DS can thus be considered, first as a theoretical object, and more specifically as a theoretical console. The difference between what is called a theoretical object and what I term a theoretical console is that between a thing that is used and considered as object–that is, reflected upon–and a variety of practices performed through that thing–its‘consoleness’. As an object the DS Nintendo already raises questions and suggests ideas about the status, limits and possibilities of the screen. This turns the object into a theoretical object. As a console, it works as a dispositif that compels particular practices, and thus it complicates these questions.
The resulting complications comprise historical and theoretical issues that can-not be disentangled, so that the methodology of visual studies is affected by it.
Thus, it becomes a theoretical console. In this guise, we must consider the screen as the surface on which more fundamental issues about media and mediality are sketched. Many of these issues have barely been hinted at here. For example, how can we reflect on medium specificity, even when looking at one aspect, such as the screen, when the notion of a (specific) medium no longer even seems to apply in any simple sense?
For this reason, I contend that the consoleness of the theoretical object can be extended more generally to the notion of theoretical object. This becomes clear, for example, when art historian Rosalind E. Krauss points to this tension between theoretical object and medium specificity. She, too, declares a practice rather than a single thing–in her case, photography–to be a theoretical object. In her article
3. theoretical consoles 95
“Reinventing the Medium”she has this to say about photography in its theoreti-cal function:
In becoming a theoretical object, photography loses its specificity as a me-dium. Thus in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”
Benjamin charts a historical path from the shock effects courted by futurism and dada collage, to the shocks delivered by the unconscious optics revealed by photography, to the shock specific to the montage procedures of film edit-ing, a path that is now indifferent to the givens of a particular medium. As a theoretical object, photography assumes the revelatory power to set forth the reasons for a wholesale transformation of art that will include itself in that same transformation. (Krauss 1999: 292)
Within the context of the DS, Krauss’ remarks on photography as a theoretical object can be rephrased as follows: when we replace the word “object” by the word“console”and we see the transformation, including its own, as a transfor-mation less of art but of thepracticeof photography, including art. This transfor-mation is simultaneously a decisive extension of the cultural domain affected by it. This extension is, thus, a double one–in Krauss’case, of photography and of art, the one re-envisioning the other, so that the two are differently articulated together. Visual culture is seen not as homogeneous but as aplatform – a term that is central to the Nintendo DS. As such it returns debate, contestation, and differences of opinion to, in Krauss’s case, both art and photography. Something like this, by analogy, happens to history and theory through the Nintendo DS.
In addition to the many faces of the console, the specific characteristic of the portable system as a piece of technology, as hardware, the materiality, its thing-ness raises questions about the gadget status of the apparatus. As such it is also a gateway forgadget-ivity, the property of a tool for the user-player to do (other) things with it. This is a performativity of using the object in practice. In Chapter 5 I will examine the performativity implied in gadgetivity. Here, the perspective is on the status of the gadget itself, its materiality and object-status, within this culture of gadget-based practice. In this respect, the console is best understood as a thing, instrument and interface at the same time. It is in this multiplicity that it is perhaps less a medium than a carrier of mediality. Moreover, unlike other (mobile) media players, a console is, in part, an empty interface. The software application determines part of the interface, in dialogue with the hardware ele-ments. The complex of characteristics relevant to the portable console as a versa-tile object, a thing/medium, demands a theoretical grasp on the phenomenon.
The theory of what the theoretical console compels us todo, as Damisch would have it, goes as follows. We wonder what the status of its thing-ness, object-ness, or medium-ness really is. The answer to this question theorizes what a console is.
As a console it hovers between three things. It is a material object: the device we
hold in our hands. It is also a screen we look atas well as through, and it is a screen we touch. And thirdly, it is an interface utility, at once an invisible and visible platform – a machine for output of the applications one can play on it.
The DS as versatile object thus puts forward the theoretically complexconsoleness of screen gadgets as material interfaces. It is up to the analyst to approach the console-object with theoretical flexibility.
3. theoretical consoles 97
4. Urban Screens
I ended the first chapter of this book with an injunction to consider the aesthetic qualities of the moving image as guidelines for the design of spatial arrange-ments as the scripting of perceptual experience. That general point was meant to connect the everyday mobility of people moving through space to a problematic of mobility as an aesthetic practice of performative visuality. Diachronically, this study builds on both continuities and contrasts between historical moments. In this chapter I look at mobility and vision in this combination of everyday efficacy and aesthetic experience, from the other end of that two-way street: the contem-porary transformations of space as it is subject to new technologies and media. In terms of the integration of everyday technology and aesthetic experience, it is, moreover, noticeable that mobility receives a different status when it is no longer the subject’s doing. When driving on highways, for example, or navigating the screen of a handheld gadget, the subject is to an extent in charge of his own mobility. But this becomes a different experience when the movement comes from the environment to the multi-paced pedestrian, who is distracted or focused, rushed or relaxed. I examine the presence of screens in public spaces, particularly in cities, to understand how these screens function and what they do;
how they make hitherto stable architecture mobile, rendering the city-user a par-ticipant rather than an initiator of mobility; and how they compel an aesthetic experience infused into the everyday.