An Aesthesia of Networks ─ Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology

Today almost every aspect of life for which data exists can be rendered as a network.Financial data, social networks, biological ecologies: all are visualized in links and nodes, linesconnecting dots. A network visualization of a corporate infrastructure could look remarkably similarto that of a terrorist organization. In An Aesthesia of Networks, Anna Munsterargues that this uniformity has flattened our experience of networks as active and relationalprocesses and assemblages. She counters the "network anaesthesia" that results from thispervasive mimesis by reinserting the question of experience, or aesthesia, into networked cultureand aesthetics. Rather than asking how humans experience computers and networks, Munster asks hownetworks experience -- what operations they perform and undergo to change andproduce new forms of experience. Drawing on William James's radical empiricism, she asserts thatnetworked experience is assembled first and foremost through relations, which make up its mostimmediately sensed and perceived aspect. Munster critically considers a range of contemporaryartistic and cultural practices that engage with network technologies and techniques, includingdatabases and data mining, the domination of search in online activity, and the proliferation ofviral media through YouTube. These practices -- from artists who "undermine" data tomusicians and VJs who use intranetworked audio and video software environments -- are concerned withthe relationality at the core of today's network experience.