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 various 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 mobility, 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 phenomena 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 transportation, 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 relation 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 navigation. 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.