Performativity / Expressivity: The Mobile Micro Screen and its Subject

Abstract

Informed by a tradition of cinema and visual culture studies on the one hand, and science and technology studies and new materialism on the other, we mobilize Peircean semiotics in order to theorize new media technologies and related practices. Our question is, in what way performativity and subjectivity are central to an understanding of technology. It is our contention that it is in performative and expressive inscription that technologies have cultural, social and historical embedding and meaning. In the following we will explore how the dispositif of mobility, and the fluid spatio-temporality of emergence that we see as underpinning a visual regime of navigation, require that we acknowledge that technologies, practices, and subjects are in a particularly dynamic relationship.