Nanna Verhoeff

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Utrecht University

Nanna Verhoeff’s new book is a a must for anybody interested in visual culture and media theory. It offers a rich and stimulating theoretical account of the central dimension of our contemporary existence – interfacing and navigating both data and physical world through a variety of screens (game consoles, mobile phones, car interfaces, GPS devices...

In this collection of essays, we advance the notion of urban interfaces to explore how situated media, art, and performances (co-)constitute and (co-)construct the public spaces of our mediatized cities. Central is the question how urban interfaces may act as privileged sites to negotiate contemporary frictions in and about these spaces – frictions...

Screens on (the) Streets We encounter more and more screens and other media on the street. They address us and reflect on urban, public space and our position within it. Verhoeff introduces a conceptual framework that provides insight into how screens as media architecture both shape and set public space in motion. It also helps us to see and under...

This concise, precise, and inclusive dictionary contributes to a growing, transforming, and living research culture within both humanities scholarship and professional practices within the creative sectors. Its format of succinct starting definitions, demonstrations of possible routes of further development, and references to new and revisited conc...

This book offers a discussion of the screens, installations, and media architecture that populate contemporary urban public spaces. It proposes a methodological approach and conceptual toolset for the critical examination, not only of what these screens do, but also of what we can do with them. The book contains a collection of theoretical concepts...

With this collection of articles, we aim to explore the merits of creative methods for researching contemporary cities and urban culture. In the context of various social, environmental, and political crises on multiple and intersecting local, global, and planetary scales, it is imperative to understand the contemporary condition of urban living. W...

As a contribution to a book that seeks to explore experiences of life and its forms in the contemporary city, I will attempt to map out some of the aspects and elements, movements, and strategies, that we deploy to live, act and inter-act in our urban environments, specifically now that our social fabric has been so thoroughly uprooted by the COVID...

Taking up the challenges of the datafication of culture, as well as of the scholarship of cultural inquiry itself, this collection contributes to the critical debate about data and algorithms. How can we understand the quality and significance of current socio-technical transformations that result from datafication and algorithmization? How can we...

Taking up the challenges of the datafication of culture, as well as of the scholarship of cultural inquiry itself, this collection contributes to the critical debate about data and algorithms. How can we understand the quality and significance of current socio-technical transformations that result from datafication and algorithmization? How can we...

Taking up the challenges of the datafication of culture, as well as of the scholarship of cultural inquiry itself, this collection contributes to the critical debate about data and algorithms. How can we understand the quality and significance of current socio-technical transformations that result from datafication and algorithmization? How can we...

In response to some current examples of experimental interface design in times of the COVID-19 pandemic – corona data dashboards, a contact tracking app, and an art intervention of distance design in public space – this article brings perspectives and insights from multiple disciplinary fields, several concepts, and a set of arguments together for...

Looking around in the cities where we live and work in the Netherlands, and the international cities we connect with through the various media channels we use, we see arrows, circles, points and lines popping up everywhere. They add fugitive inscriptions on pavements, grass, monuments and walls—surfaces that act as canvasses for imagery and writing...

This chapter will investigate a set of artistic and activist augmented reality (AR) projects that in various ways revolve around the curation of urban, public, and institutional spaces. These projects demonstrate intersections between principles of design, mobile design, and performative cartography, and urban curation—principles that we can recogn...

Digital and networked media are characterized by a fundamental disconnection between the modes of operating of these media, the human sensorium and knowledge. In order for humans to consciously participate in this expanded domain of sensibility, additional mediation is required to ‘presentify’ what is not accessible to human perception. This situat...

Screen Space Reconfigured is the first edited volume that critically and theoretically examines the many novel renderings of space brought to us by 21st century screens. Exploring key cases such as post-perspectival space, 3D, vertical framing, haptics, and layering, this volume takes stock of emerging forms of screen space and spatialities as they...

Screen Space Reconfigured is the first edited volume that critically and theoretically examines the many novel renderings of space brought to us by 21st century screens. Exploring key cases such as post-perspectival space, 3D, vertical framing, haptics, and layering, this volume takes stock of emerging forms of screen space and spatialities as they...

In this essay, I examine how the trope of navigation in 3D moving images can work towards an intimate and haptic encounter with other times and other places. The particular navigational construction of space in time in 3D moving images can be considered a cartography of time. This is a haptic cartography of exploration of the surfaces on which this...

Nanna Verhoeff considers recent screen-based public art installations that extend from their architectural site into surrounding urban space in order to engage techniques of 'remote sensing', interactivity, and public display. In these installations, Verhoeff identifies a genre of artwork that aims to raise awareness of urban social issues by visua...

Against the grain of the growing literature on screens, Screen Genealogies argues that the present excess of screens cannot be understood as an expansion and multiplication of the movie screen nor of the video display. Rather, screens continually exceed the optical histories in which they are most commonly inscribed. As contemporary screens become...

Introduction In this collection of essays we wish to propose the notion of urban interfaces as a lens through which we can explore how situated media, art, and performances shape, critically reflect on, intervene in, and reimagine contemporary, urban public spaces. We focus on contemporary cities as complex, socially dynamic and increasingly perfor...

We propose a set of analytical concepts that help analyse how media/ interfaces situate us within our cities and in connection with the invisible digital data that surround us. We recognize a set of architectural, cartographic and archaeological principles that structure the way the interfaces allow us to navigate the city as an emergent and layere...

This special issue takes up new media in situ, addressing how new media technologies have the potential to re-orient us and, by extension, radically intervene in our understandings of place'specifically the public spaces of the city'and our place in it. We not only explore the specificities of these new media technologies and the cultural practices...

In my contribution I want to approach media architecture – specifically media façades and urban screens – as urban interfaces. In particular, I want to do justice to the social (“inter”) and dynamic (“-ing”) aspect of interfacing: in time – “historical”, temporary, and processual – and place – located, positioning, communicating. When departing fro...

This special issue takes up new media in situ, addressing how new media technologies have the potential to re-orient us and, by extension, radically intervene in our understandings of place—specifically the public spaces of the city—and our place in it. We not only explore the specificities of these new media technologies and the cultural practices...

[This is the online-first version of the essay that is part of the special issue on Urban Cartographies for the journal Television and New Media, edited by Heidi Rae Cooley, Nanna Verhoeff and Heather Zwicker (forthcoming 2017): http://tvn.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/09/14/1527476416667818.full.pdf+htm ] This article analyzes the way media techn...

We live in an era of screens. No longer just the place where we view movies, or watch TV at night, screens are now ubiquitous, the source of the majority of information we consume daily, and a crucial component of our basic interactions with colleagues, friends, and family. This transformation has happened almost without us realizing it-and certain...

Moving images of travel and exploration have a long history. In this essay I will examine how the trope of navigation in 3D moving images can work towards an intimate and haptic encounter with other times and other places. The particular navigational construction of space in time in 3D moving images can be considered as a cartography of time. This...

This article establishes three main arguments centred on these themes. First, we propose that the analysis of media artworks, installations and other locative-based media projects bring different conceptual and theoretical tools to the already growing fields of software studies (Manovich, 2013) and the relationship of code and algorithms to cities...

In response to the question what urban media art can do, and what we can do with urban media art, I want to approach urban media art – specifically media façades and urban screens – as surfaces for interfacing with and within urban spaces. To do justice to their social (“inter”) and dynamic (“-ing”) aspects, I take the interface, or the active verb...

The category mobile media architecture, mobile design between “media” and “architecture” consists of urban interfaces: digital screens used in urban public space, often in conjunction with location-based and/or mobile media technologies. These interfaces intervene temporarily, yet fundamentally, in the city's built environment. I consider the spati...

The DC9 workshop takes place on June 27, 2015 in Limerick, Ireland and is titled "Hackable Cities: From Subversive City Making to Systemic Change". The notion of "hacking" originates from the world of media technologies but is increasingly often being used for creative ideals and practices of city making. "City hacking" evokes more participatory, i...

This short article reflects on short videos of action cam footage that are widely disseminated on online platforms. These first-person perspective shorts are compared to early cinema’s phantom rides in the use of point-of-view shots, and a dizzying effect of heightened mobility and versatility in camera movements. ‘Short’ in form and duration, high...

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 technolog...

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 g...

This paper brings together Science and Technology Studies, Game Studies, and Media- and Performance Studies in a reflection on performativity and deixis in digital mapping practices and mobile interfaces for navigation and play. Playful mapping practices and the shift from the map as form of representation to the map as interactive, if not ludic, i...

With the canonical phrase “the medium is the message”, Marshall McLuhan refers to the inherent self-reflexivity of media. Regardless of the content or message, the medium puts forward the specificity of its technology and the way that it “shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.” (1964: 9) To take this to its extreme...

In this chapter, I discuss iPhone navigation as a performative practice in mobile and interactive augmented reality tours. I take the iPhone as a theoretical object and examine its specificity as the prime—yet not exclusive— example of today’s generation of smartphones, their layered interfaces and the navigation practices enabled by the many appli...

Theoretical objects are things that compel us to propose, interrogate, and theorize. They counter the influence of approaches that try to define, position, and fix. The mobile, handheld game console offers us a specific kind of theoretical object. A hybrid screen device that encompasses multiple interfaces, it raises questions about the specificity...

Nintendo updated and expanded the commercially successful Game Boy (1989) and its successors, the Game Boy Color (1998) and the Game Boy Advance (2001). The DS is marketed as a revolutionary console, because it allegedly offers radically new possibilities for game play. The new ‘specs’ or technological features of the DS are, indeed, various: voice...

In this essay we wish to reflect on the particular relevance to the topic of early cinema’s distribution in the digital age. A decentralization of production – e.g. in terms of creative and discursive input – and the increase of cultural participation have fundamentally changed the traditional cultural and economical function of distribution. Now t...

Verhoeff investigates the emergence of the western genre, made in the first two decades of cinema (1895-1915). By analyzing many unknown and forgotten films from international archives she traces the relationships between films about the American West, their surrounding films, and other popular media such as photography, painting, (pulp) literature...

Travel was and is a major preoccupation in both emerging cinema (1900) and today's digital imagery (2000). With travel as both a narrative and visual trope par-excellence, new media reinvent the relationship between showing and telling. Using examples from both ends of the 20 th century, I wish to demonstrate similarities and differences between th...

tentoonstelling Indianen in Brussel � Wereldtentoonstelling van 1935 (Jubelparkmuseum)

Opening of the installation Frontera v.2 at Montevideo/Time Based Arts: Netherlands Institute for Media Art

NECS