Screens are ubiquitous in urban visual culture – colossal screen façades, mobile phones, television sets, game consoles. The architecture and spaces in which we operate are infused with screen technologies. This study explores the connections between two predominant characteristics of contemporary culture at play in the omnipresence of screen technologies and practices. These are visuality on the one hand, and mobility on the other. Together, this conceptual and spatial configuration forms what I propose to call a visual regime of navigation, a guiding principle in how, especially but not exclusively at a certain time in history, we interact with screen interfaces. In navigation, vision is an active engagement, keeping an eye out for where to move or what to do next. This active, creative mode of vision can be found, for example, in the interaction with a touchscreen user interface, enabling navigation within the screen device. This seems utterly new, an innovative practice of our time. However, this is related to a much older paradigm of relational mobility, which forms a broader cultural logic with historical roots long predating the technology of mobile screen devices. The predominant role of visuality in today's culture is tightly bound up with the fundamental role of mobility in modern culture and society – geographical and physical by means of travel as well as visual and virtual through media and communication technologies. The visual turn (Mitchell 1994) and the spatial turn (Soja 1996), including recent emphasis on mobility (Urry 2007) in contemporary theory and culture, can converge in what I propose as a spatio-visual or navigational turn. In this book, I argue that navigation is a primary trope in (urban) mobility and visuality. The intersections between mobility and visuality – more specifically, the mobility of visual experience and the screen-based access to such experiences – constitute, then, the subject of this study.

One of the most striking characteristics of screen-based interfaces is the possibility for people in transit to co-create the map of the spatial arrangement in which they are operating. The coincidence of movement and the creation of spatial representations is what I call a performative cartography. In the visual regime of navigation, that which is depicted, such as maps and panoramic views, emerges simultaneously with someone's interaction with a screen-based interface. This simultaneity of making and image makes movement itself a performative, creative act.