ABSTRACT
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.
