From navigation as a screen practice to navigation as an analytical practice: the project of a comparative analysis, both historical and theoretical, of screen media compels us to rethink not only present-day media practices but our way of thinking about these practices in terms of what they mean. When our focus is more on the movements and inscriptions of media than on particular texts, our thinking about the issues entails different questions, concepts, and perspectives: a different epistemology. In other words, not only does the location or site-specificity of screens and the locating of screens affect media practices, but also the way we understand them. In this study, I have suggested that we can productively investigate the intersection of space and mobility as site and practice – a perspective on both object and analysis. This shifts our attention away from representation to navigation.

For this argument, I have been looking at both artistic and commercial screens in public spaces, most prominently in places of transit such as airports and stations. These screens play with the tension between mobility – of trains and travelers – and locatedness: the stillness of situated objects, surfaces, material structures embedded in architecture, the fabric of our cities. Therefore, I would like to conclude with a short reflection on an example of ‘still’ screens – the works or installations of art or advertisement that suggest, create or reflect on the movement surrounding them, or the movement in their spatial presence.

In the Vuosaari Metro Station in Helsinki, among a labyrinthine mass of constructivist metal pipes, a series of concave polycarbonate semi-translucent abstract sheets block and at the same time encourage the view of the sky through the glass ceiling. With the eleven pieces, Finnish artist Jussi Niva challenges the distinction between still and moving vision. Passengers on the trains arriving, as well as people waiting to board the train, see their vision of the outside blocked by the computer-controlled airbrushed sheets of the series entitled Expose, from 1998. By virtue of their function, we can call the sheets screens.

The imagery on the screens is unstable. Not frontally positioned, they are semitransparent, and reflect light differently, at each particular moment offering images of the ever-changing sky. The width of the intervention in the skeleton of the building, and the curves of the screens, suggests panoramic vision.