As we have seen, a multitude of screens– large and small, publicly visible and privately pocketed–pervades urban spaces, the boundaries of which are perme-able. Since they are flexible and open, urban settings produce a space for creativ-ity, possibility and action. The urban screenspace, as a mobile dispositif, invites many different, sometimes mundane, sometimes innovative performative prac-tices. The mobile screens of navigation offer something else in addition: they fundamentally revise the spatial coordinates of hitherto dominant fixed and dis-tancing televisual or cinematic screen dispositifs.
Rather than limiting this discussion to a single phenomenon, several modes of screen-based navigation can be seen to contribute to a fundamentally transforma-tive experience of urban space. Screenspace, as I have argued, is constituted by the screens that surround us, the small screens in our hands, and the relation-ships between on- and off-screen spaces that we traverse in fluid motions. All these screens foreground dialogic encounters between visual, virtual, material and physical domains, and as such operate as space- and time-binding set-ups, or dispositifs of performative navigation.
In the previous discussions on urban spaces of mobility and the composite dynamic assemblage of screens in places of transit, I have addressed how archi-tectural and interactive screens raise questions about the structural aspects of screen-baseddispositifs, or screening arrangements. A dispositif that encompasses mobile spectators and architectural screens within an open and accessible space is fundamentally both flexible and permeable, forming a mobile sphere. It is flex-ible because of the variety in scale, position and programming. As argued in Chapter 1, this dispositif is mobile in the sense that media or mobility technolo-gies bring mobility within the arrangement of spectator and screen. As we have seen in Chapter 3, mobile (touch)screens–or to be more precise, the practices of mobile touchscreening–problematize the distinction between making, transmit-ting and receiving images. The ambulant and flexible site-specificity of mobile screens generates a fundamentally mobile sphere, a place where viewing and creating images merge in a visual experience of navigation.
Briefly put, screens bothtakespace andmakespace: they are positioned within space, but they also produce space. As such, they function both as theoretical console and as historically mutable object, in the sense in which I have explained both functions in Chapter 3. But there is more. Screens are also interfaces, since they mediate images and meanings, and provide experiences within particular places. Moreover, they are connected to other screens. For all these reasons com-bined, the content that is displayed cannot be approached as‘fixed’texts–which
is why methodological innovation, like the gadgets based on an old-new dialectic, is needed to understand them in their full impact. Instead of being static texts, screens provide events in-the-making, or within a flow of becoming. This is why, as my point of departure, I propose to approach screen events asprocedural.
It is in relation to the conception of a mobile dispositif, a composite of a multi-tude of screens in a mobile sphere, that this concluding chapter continues my investigation of the performative potential of screening, as both exhibition –or better put, installation – and as interactive practice, through the concept and practice of navigation. Central to this investigation of an expanded field of visual-ity in urban mobilvisual-ity, which amounts to a hybrid, dynamic mobile sphere, is an analysis of the collapse of making and viewing that is central to navigation, as argued in Chapter 2. This collapse further develops the notion of a hybrid spati-ality of a navigable screenspace. Because of the near-collapse of making and receiving, below I will look specifically at the ensuing engagement with screens in which the entire body of the user moves along with the creation of mobile space. This points toward a performative and embodied notion of interactivity as characteristic of navigation as a cultural practice.
As suggested in previous chapters, one of the first theorists of navigation avant-la-lettre was de Certeau with his engaging thoughts about what it means to see a city from within it, walking around inside it, instead of seeing it from above, or from a distance. His thinking about navigational agency, and his cartographic notion of narrative (and vice-versa) have inspired work on navigation in games or other screen-based spaces. Useful and inspiring as his work is, there is some translation to be made when talking not about spatial practices in general, but about how screens space mobility. Moreover, ‘walking’, whether on- or off-screen, is not the only paradigm of mobility.
Nigel Thrift (2004: 45) takes issue with de Certeau’s focus on walking as the paradigmatic practice of mobility that‘speaks’the city. He poses the (rhetorical) question whether the city falls silent when mobility has become primarily vehicu-lar, as is the case with the auto-mobility of car driving in the city. He makes a strong case for interrogating de Certeau’s focus on the pedestrian experience, which seems to exclude one of the main forms of transport in today’s cities.
According to Thrift, de Certeau makes a shift from the incarceration of vehicular (train) mobility, as opposed to walking ‘freely’, to the panoramic experience of vehicular mobility or vision. We can see this panoramic experience as central to a conceptualization of a mode of vision of moving-image screens as virtual panor-amas, as I have argued in the first chapter. Yet in the case of urban screens, we do encounter the spectatorial position of a walker. Virtual mobility, then, meets de Certeau’s pedestrian after all.
In the second chapter I indicated how the spatial as well as physical program-ming urban screens bring about, or perform, invites a deconstruction of both the process of making and of looking, also called‘spectating’, with reference to the
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cinematic role of the spectator. Pervasive and unfinished, these screens come to life in the presence of the mobile, urban spectator, who participates in the con-structive work of screening. I consider this co-productivity of screens as architec-tural (material) interfaces and mobile spectators to be a form of performativity. It is performative in the sense that the practice of this form of screening constructs the spatiotemporal, as well as the experience of urban space in collaboration with the user, without whom the effect would simply not occur. Below I will consider this experience insofar as it is haptic.
This study grew out of a set of core questions about screens of navigation: what is the specificity of mobile screens vis-à-vis their large relatives that cover build-ings or stand among them? What forms of urban mobility are we encountering when we trace the practices that these screens afford? And, when looking at a larger and older landscape of screen media, how do mobile screens challenge us to rethink the relationship between spectator-user, on-screen space, and off-screen space, as established by the off-screen? Here, I take these questions up again, in order to assess the workings of performative navigation in relation to the kind of vision it appears to require for its functioning.
To start with the last question, I proposed in Chapter 3 that one of the main differences between mobile digital screens and larger, what could be called cine-matic or televisual screens is that they are application-based. Rather than surfaces of projection or transmission, they are interfaces of complex software applica-tions that combine different technological properties of the hybrid screen device:
a camera, an interface for online communication and mobile connectivity, a GPS device, compass, and interface for all kinds of digital input and output.
Other examples that we are looking at today, public screens and locative media projects, show us hybridity or convergence of technologies and examples of net-worked connectivity. The screen in such installations is an element of what I call a mobile dispositif. There, we see a constellation of technologies rather than one object, one screen that integrates them within one single interface. Moreover, the mobility of the user of the mobile screen does not change the relationship with the screen as material object in their hand, whereas the mobility of the urban flâneur does influence the physical relationship with the screen, even with the possibilities for interactive engagement with the screens they pass or encounter.
While the direct, physical or tactile contact between user and a mobile screen establishes a more or less static situation, the relationship to the off-screen space, the world surrounding the screen, is perhaps becoming at once more intimate, more flexible and more mobile.
Because of these characteristics of application-based hybridity and– perhaps intimate – closeness, mobile screens involve practices of a mobile and haptic engagement with the screen that fundamentally revise the spatial coordinates of large, fixed and, paradoxically, distancing televisual, cinematic and architectural screen-dispositifs. When the screen becomes an interactive map, camera and
net-worked communication device all in one, these mobile (touch)screens and prac-tices of mobile screening problematize set boundaries of agency between making, transmitting and receiving images–the formerly clear division of roles between who makes, programs and watches them. Moreover, these devices turn the classi-cal screen as flat and distanced–as well as distancing– window on the world, into an interactive, hybrid navigation device that repositions the viewer as central within that world–a deictic center.
It is because of this transformation and loosening of the division of roles in processes of looking that I think of navigation as a performative cartography.
This temporal-spatial navigation is a procedural form of simultaneous making and reading space by exploring a hybrid space of atoms and bits, both the physi-cal and the virtual, through interaction between on- and off-screen navigable space. With the analysis of the performativity of practices of screening, I propose to expand more established notions of one-directional screening as a form of dis-play. After considering how screens contribute to a construction of space, it is in the navigation of the devices and screens themselves that I bring together the three domains central to the visual regime of navigation: screens, space and mobility.
This status of the subject of mobility–either automobilist or pedestrian–has consequences for the cartography at stake in the experience. In order to acknowl-edge that causal relation as well as bring the specific kind of performativity at issue to the fore, I consider performative cartography here as theoutcomeof navi-gation. This reversal of the more usual temporal sequence entails a dialectical performativity. An interactive productivity is established between screen and spec-tator-user, or engager, rather than simply an effect of action-response. This inter-active productivity is fundamental to digital input, where interfaces use keys, mouse, touchscreen, motion sensors, webcam, or voice control input. The more complex form of interaction makes the result more strongly performative; the user is more active and, indeed, creative in the process.
In the opening chapter on the panoramic complex–with a particular config-uration between mobility, perception, and experience – I pointed out how the panoramic experience, constituted within a panoramic complex, is a procedural and active experience: it is constantly involved in making changes, producing new views through both the mobility of the spectator and the spatial construction of the panoramic view. Panoramic vision is produced by means of a moving panor-ama through a car windshield, the mobile spectator moving in relation to a visual field, or on a moving-image screen. This panoramic complex proposes a relation-ship between image and viewer that engages the spectator-subjects with their sur-rounding – the perceptual surrounding that is perceptually within reach, but paradoxically distanced by speed, motion and the separation through the screen or window.
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Here, I continue this idea, but now with another‘complex’, one that bears a family resemblance to the panoramic, namely an interactive ‘navigational com-plex’. While equally involving a relation between mobility, perception and experi-ence, two features distinguish interactive navigation from the panoramic complex. First, navigation is directional: the desire is not for an overview but for a destination, a place to go to. Second, it is constructive: the navigator makes the itinerary, and as such constructs the space. Rather than an arrangement to be taken in or to traverse, interactive navigation is a creative act. Making-in-motion is an action–not a result– of cartography. This implies rethinking what carto-graphy is and does. While emerging out of a long tradition both as a map-making practice and an epistemological model, performative cartography nevertheless is radically new, providing a conceptual challenge to the logic of representation and a practical challenge to some of our most basic assumptions regarding the experi-ence of space and time in navigation.