An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology

by Anna Munster

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262313513
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	05/17/2013
Series:	Technologies of Lived Abstraction
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	264
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Anna Munster is Associate Professor and a Senior Researcher at the National Institute for Experimental Art at the University of New South Wales. She is the author of Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics.

Table of Contents

Series Foreword ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: Prelude to the Movements of Networks 1

Looping

1 Networked Diagrammatism: From Map and Model to the Internet as Mechanogram 19

2 Welcome to Google Earth: Networks, World Making, and Collective Experience 45

3 Data Undermining: Data Relationality and Networked Experience 73

Refraining

4 Going Viral: Contagion as Networked Affect, Networked Refrain 99

5 Nerves of Data: Contemporary Conjunctions of Networks and Brains 125

Synthesizing

6 Toward Syn-aesthetics: Thinking Synthesis as Relational Mosaic in Digital Audiovisuality 153

7 The Thingness of Networks: Invasion of Pervasiveness versus Concatenated Contraptions 175

Notes 197

Bibliography 213

Index 233

What People are Saying About This

Arthur Kroker

A powerful, compelling, and evocative countergradient against the invisible force field of network topologies, An Aesthesia of Networks disrupts the numbness of contemporary digital perception by exploring the 'patchiness of the network field'—its recursive loops, viral refrains, and complex conjunctions. Writing at the futuristic edge of art and technology, Anna Munster asks an insistent and critically important question, namely how to think in a more complicated, subtle, and relational way in a digital universe where bodies with minds of code and 'nerves of data' circulate in data networks that are viral, contagious, and sometimes as sublime as they are pervasive.

Darren Tofts

Over the last decade, Anna Munster has emerged as a leading voice in the critical and scholarly discussion of networks. This book will have broad appeal to scholars working in the digital humanities, social science, media and communications, and behavioral studies involving neurology, affect, and perception.

Endorsement

In this engaging and well-researched book, Anna Munster casts light on the emergence of various types of networks in the current media landscape. Taking seriously the reality of relations that unfold in and via YouTube videos, database art, and Google, she allows us to sense the ongoing pulsating dynamic in which various networking processes come together—as well as apart.

—Joanna Zylinska, Professor of New Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London

From the Publisher

Over the last decade, Anna Munster has emerged as a leading voice in the critical and scholarly discussion of networks. This book will have broad appeal to scholars working in the digital humanities, social science, media and communications, and behavioral studies involving neurology, affect, and perception.

—Darren Tofts, Professor of Media and Communications, Swinburne University of Technology

A powerful, compelling, and evocative countergradient against the invisible force field of network topologies, An Aesthesia of Networks disrupts the numbness of contemporary digital perception by exploring the 'patchiness of the network field'—its recursive loops, viral refrains, and complex conjunctions. Writing at the futuristic edge of art and technology, Anna Munster asks an insistent and critically important question, namely how to think in a more complicated, subtle, and relational way in a digital universe where bodies with minds of code and 'nerves of data' circulate in data networks that are viral, contagious, and sometimes as sublime as they are pervasive.

—Arthur Kroker, Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and Theory, University of Victoria

In this engaging and well-researched book, Anna Munster casts light on the emergence of various types of networks in the current media landscape. Taking seriously the reality of relations that unfold in and via YouTube videos, database art, and Google, she allows us to sense the ongoing pulsating dynamic in which various networking processes come together—as well as apart.

—Joanna Zylinska, Professor of New Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London

Joanna Zylinska

In this engaging and well-researched book, Anna Munster casts light on the emergence of various types of networks in the current media landscape. Taking seriously the reality of relations that unfold in and via YouTube videos, database art, and Google, she allows us to sense the ongoing pulsating dynamic in which various networking processes come together—as well as apart.