Anna Munster

The experience of networks as the immediate sensing of relations between humans and nonhuman technical elements in assemblages such as viral media and databases. 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, lines connecting dots. A network visualization of a corporate infrastructure could look remarkably similar to that of a terrorist organization. In An Aesthesia of Networks, Anna Munster argues that this uniformity has flattened our experience of networks as active and relational processes and assemblages. She counters the “network anaesthesia” that results from this pervasive mimesis by reinserting the question of experience, or aesthesia, into networked culture and aesthetics. Rather than asking how humans experience computers and networks, Munster asks how networks experience—what operations they perform and undergo to change and produce new forms of experience. Drawing on William James's radical empiricism, she asserts that networked experience is assembled first and foremost through relations, which make up its most immediately sensed and perceived aspect. Munster critically considers a range of contemporary artistic and cultural practices that engage with network technologies and techniques, including databases and data mining, the domination of search in online activity, and the proliferation of viral media through YouTube. These practices—from artists who “undermine” data to musicians and VJs who use intranetworked audio and video software environments—are concerned with the relationality at the core of today's network experience.

Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology

An Aesthesia of Networks

Erin Manning

Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen

All "media-tion" stages and distributes real, embodied - that is, immediate, events. The concept of immediation entails that cultural, technical, aesthetic objects, subjects, and events can no longer be abstracted from the ways in which they contribute to and are changed by broader ecologies. Immediation I and II seek to engage the entwined questions of relation, event and ecology from outside already claimed territories, nomenclature and calls to action. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

Immediation II

Today almost every aspect of life for which data exists can be rendered as a network. This text argues that the tendency for most organizational structures to look the same has flattened our experience of networks as active & relational processes & assemblages. Rather than looking to see how humans experience networks, the author examines how networks 'experience' - what operations they perform & undergo to change & produce new forms of experience.

Immediation seeks to engage the entwined questions of relation, event and ecology from outside already claimed territories, nomenclature and calls to action. Exploring qualities of relationality, spacetimes of the event and transversal fields of thinking-making through expanded research, this book generates novel concepts for immediating.

Anna Munster

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