Nanna Verhoeff

Mobile screens : the visual regime of navigation

Mobile Screens - 2[-]Contents - 8[-]Acknowledgements - 10[-]List of Illustrations - 12[-]Introduction - 14[-]1. Panoramic Complex - 28[-]2. Self-Reflection - 52[-]3. Theoretical Consoles - 74[-]4. Urban Screens - 100[-]5. Performative Cartography - 134[-]Epilogue: You Are Here! - 168[-]Notes - 172[-]Bibiliography - 182[-]Index of Names and Titles - 200[-]Index of Terms - 204

The West in Early Cinema : After the Beginning

In The West in Early Cinema gaat Nanna Verhoeff op zoek naar de nog onbekende beginjaren van het westerngenre tijdens de eerste twee decennia van het medium film 1895-1915). Aan de hand van onbekende en vergeten films uit internationale filmarchieven traceert zij de relaties tussen films over het Westen, omringende filmgenres uit deze periode, en andere populaire media als fotografie, schilderkunst, (pulp)literatuur, Wild West Shows en populaire etnografie. Deze sporen van het genre tonen een grote actualiteit en variatie, die laat zien op welke manier de film als nieuw medium een vorm vond binnen de toenmalige visuele cultuur.

Theoretical Consoles: Concepts for Gadget Analysis

Theoretical objects are things that compel us to propose, interrogate, and theorize. They counter the influence of approaches that try to define, position, and fix. The mobile, handheld game console offers us a specific kind of theoretical object. A hybrid screen device that encompasses multiple interfaces, it raises questions about the specificity of the screen gadget as object, and about the entanglement of technologies, applications, and practices. Through an analysis of the Nintendo DS game console I argue that such gadgets are best understood as theoretical consoles: objects that raises theoretical questions, precisely, about their hybrid status.

Urban Interfaces: The Cartographies of Screen-Based Installations

This article analyzes the way media technologies provide interfaces for the complexity of cities as historically layered, continuously changing, and intricately connected spaces. Following Branden Hookway and Alexander Galloway, I understand media interfaces as processes rather than objects. An interface is not something; it does something. I propose to focus on the way in which often temporary, mobile, and connected interfaces produce urban cartographies in the very act and process of navigation. This navigation constitutes a performative cartography of ambulant presence, fluid connectivity, and an inherent multiplicity of connections between locations and other subjects. In what follows, I examine a small collection of urban art projects that speak to this description and suggest that the interface’s pursuits of connectivity, and the stakes and claims inseparable from these pursuits, produce and structure urban cartographies. The article then questions in what ways interfaces can create, not a threshold between two dimensions, but spatial transformations of a third kind.

The navigational gesture: Traces and tracings at the mobile touchscreen interface

the touchscreen interface is a threshold between site-specific data overlays and one’s fingers that touch, swipe, and pinch to access information about one’s surroundings and, in the process, leave traces – fingerprints – on the screen. the navigational ‘gesture’ is central to the process of making meaning in two forms of deictic transaction: the gesture of raising and pointing a mobile device (e.g. in the case of the augmented reality) and the finger’s pressing on the touchscreen (activating data overlays) – both of which require pointing and touching. the former is future-oriented, pointing toward some destination; the latter is past-oriented, accruing not only traces of where one has been but also the residue of touching the screen. gesture and touch intersect in the tracing-tracking that transpires in the present and that holds both past (‘where i’ve been’) and future (‘where i’m headed’). Extending arguments we have made elsewhere about the way navigation shapes and determines how, today, we understand and perform space, time, and subjectivity, in this article we explore how the navigational gesture as a cultural form is related to a deeper cultural logic of indexicality. We consider the relation between the physical use of the mobile micro screen and the haptic experience that this interaction brings about. We address how various traces produced at the intersection of technology and practice function to inscribe time in space. ultimately we argue that navigation by means of locative (media) technologies proceeds according to a specifically deictic indexicality that opens onto a layeredness that characterised the mobile present.

Urban Cartographies: Mapping Mobility and Presence

This special issue takes up new media in situ, addressing how new media technologies have the potential to re-orient us and, by extension, radically intervene in our understandings of place—specifically the public spaces of the city—and our place in it. We not only explore the specificities of these new media technologies and the cultural practices they afford but also highlight the intimate relationships they instantiate with their surroundings. The specific case studies highlighted in the contributors’ essays discuss gaming in Canada (Engel) and Japan (Hjorth), the traces of racism in South Carolina (Cooley), the topographical footprint of settler colonialism (Zwicker et al), Hong Kong pace (Wilmott), and artistic experiments that use the city as a laboratory (Verhoeff). What holds all of these contributions together is their indebtedness to creative cartography. This special issue on Urban Cartographies explores the paradoxes of presence, co-presence and absence as represented on and generated by our living, mediating screens.