With these examples, I have tried to discern some aspects that characterize the variety of screens in the streets. I have included the aesthetic dimension in this analysis, in order to be able to establish the performative operations of the differ-ent screens that compose the variegated screenspaces of contemporary urban areas. These operations include selection, scale-shifting, display, animation, pro-gramming and installation. These screens play with visual attraction, surprise, and the reversal of the domains of‘inside’and‘outside’. In this I see a self-reflex-ivity in the form of critique of and commentary on urban surroundings, on the virtuality of screen-based‘tele-vision’, and mobilization. Screens are programmed with connectivity, based on communication and exchange–for example the Play-ing Flickrevent for which the screens were connected with Internet. These aspects make these screens on site part of the spatializing practices of interactivity and performativity, as they facilitate participation and feedback.
In line with the screens that allow for interactive programming, we can see another phenomenon in the development of software-based urban screens– so-calledresponsiveor interactive installations. Andreas Broeckmann observes in the screen installation Sensorby Carsten Nicolai, a screen in Berlin in 2006 that was responsive to visual and sonic data input from the environment:
The façade was conceived as an abstracting mirror that reflects light back into the environment as a response to the urban activity in the square–an architec-ture that“talks back”through the medium of a screen façade. (2009: 114) This dialogic functioning, the “talking back”of responsive screens, exceeds a communication model of input and output, as well as a conceptualization of interactivity that is built on that mechanic understanding of communication.
Moreover, interactivity suggests a possibly infinite interchange back and forth and a suggestion of equality between user and machine, spectator and screen.
The idea of responsiveness does not pretend to be more than that: input hassome
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kind ofoutput. Its significance is in the possibilities. It is not the“response”per se, but the responsivity of the screen that matters. Moreover, this responsivity entails the ability to respond on the part of the spectators, making to their respon-sibility.
We can see this in a dialogue of presence: the physical presence and occupancy of space that generates particular screen content through contact, and an experi-ence of a bi-located presexperi-ence on the part of the spectator, much like an avatar.
Like mirrors, responsive screens show the effects of presence. The mirroring of these screens can include camera-based mimetic transport – from off-screen presence to on-screen depiction–but it implies more than just a mimetic similar-ity. It implies an intricate relationship between these spaces. In the next chapter, I will continue my discussion of interactivity or responsivity as a form of haptic engagement and dialogue in case of touchscreens, and more general, as a form of screenic navigation. Here, it is relevant when we consider the working of these responsive screens on site, as part of a location-specific dispositif.
An example is a responsive screen developed by Chris O’Shea for the BBC’s Big Screen project, called Hand from Above(2009) which premiered in Liverpool and was re-installed in the Dutch city of Utrecht in 2011.18The setup of this installa-tion on Clayton Square is inspired by the figure of Goliath inGoliath and the Land of the Giants. The screen shows a big hand ‘touching’ the filmed spectators on screen.
Fig 4.10:Hand From Above(Chris O’Shea, 2009). Photo: Chris O’Shea.
The physical presence is doubled: people see themselves on screen and at the same time their ‘reflection’ is being manipulated, pressed down or tickled or stroked, by the hand on screen. This doubling can be seen as the extension of a communication based on speech or action, to a communication based on located-ness and a material and physical presence.
As screens like these have become consoles for software applications, the dis-positif of cinematic projection that is based on the fundamental relationship between, yet also separation of, spectator and screen, has become more complex.
Screens allow for–in fact need–a response, which also confers a responsibility on the spectator. Projection implies distance and separation, while responsivity implies a (experience-based) spatial hybridity of a mobile sphere. This is what I called thespacecificityof the dispositif: the way the spacing of screens and specta-tors is performative in that it creates an experience of this spatial relationship.
This is the way in which the screens as interfaces transform urban experience, thus not only taking place, but truly making space.
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5. Performative Cartography
Throughout this book I am concerned with the visual regime of navigation, that is, a specific mode of interaction at the intersection of visuality and mobility. My ambition has been to use a comparative diachronic perspective to approach var-ious screen arrangements and screen practices, focusing on their hybrid status as part of a dispositif (viewing arrangement) that provides particular rules of engagement in a visual regime of navigation. As I have argued, screens are sites of innovation and change, but also historically constant in that they space mobi-lity, albeit mobilities of different kinds. Unlike forms of historical research that establish continuous genealogies or synchronic epistemes, I adopt a comparative perspective on navigation with shifting, discontinuous bi-polar reference points in the past, in order to grasp the dialectic of oldness and newness in the phenom-ena I have studied. In this framework, I have treated navigation as a mode of vision that emerges in modernity, part and parcel of modern modes of transporta-tion, fostered in panoramic painting, embedded in urban space, converging in mobile cartographic practices.
In this chapter, I explore digital mapping technologies that allow for active viewing to actually co-create visual representation in mobility. Such interactive practices underscore two aspects of mobile screens: performative cartography and haptic engagement. First, I briefly reflect back on the screen arrangements addressed in previous chapters, establishing the central concepts of screenspace and the mobile dispositif. Second, I briefly position interactive navigation in rela-tion to three scholarly fields in which thinking in terms of cartography has been embedded. I offer this overview in order to outline a conception of performative cartography that does justice to both its traditional background and the innovative potential of interactive navigation. Third, I will address performative cartography in the case of the iPhone, an example of the latest generation of smartphones at the time of writing, a prime example of a hybrid device enabling interactive navi-gation. Fourth, I explore three principles of performative cartography in locative media practices: tagging, plotting and stitching. The three strands involved in locative media practices then converge in the fifth section, devoted to augmented reality browsing. These practices have in common a solicitation of what I will discuss in the sixth section as haptic engagement. These reflections on navigation with and on screens lead to a view of navigation as a visual regime from the perspective of methodology. Navigating through contemporary as well as histori-cal screen technologies and practices, we not only encounter, but also construct
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meaning through comparison and in negotiation. In closing, I will reflect on the visual regime of navigation, which provides conceptual coherence to this study.