The Navigational Gesture: Traces and Tracings at the Mobile Touchscreen Interface

The touchscreen interface is a threshold between site-specific data overlays and one's fingers that touch, swipe, and pinch, to access information about one’s surroundings and, in the process, leave traces - fingerprints - on the screen. The navigational “gesture” is central to the process of making meaning in two forms of deictic transaction: the gesture of raising and pointing a mobile device (e.g., in the case of the augmented reality) and the finger’s pressing on the touchscreen (activating data overlays) – both of which require pointing and touching. The former is future-oriented, pointing toward some destination; the latter is past-oriented, accruing not only traces of where one has been but also the residue of touching the screen. Gesture and touch intersect in the tracing-tracking that transpires in the present and that holds both past (“where I’ve been”) and future (“where I’m headed”). Extending arguments we have made elsewhere about the way navigation shapes and determines how, today, we understand and perform space, time, and subjectivity, in this article we explore how the navigational gesture as a cultural form is related to a deeper cultural logic of indexicality. We consider the relation between the physical use of the mobile micro screen and the haptic experience that this interaction brings about. We address how various traces, produced at the intersection of technology and practice, function to inscribe time in space. Ultimately, we argue that navigation by means of locative (media) technologies proceeds according to a specifically deictic indexicality that opens onto a layeredness that characterizes the mobile present.