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An aesthesia of networks: conjunctive experience in art and technology

Network experience in technology and art is critically evaluated in Anna Munster’s insightful engagement with conjunction in contemporary virtual environments. Munster argues that networks experienced as relational processes and active assemblages offer a counter to the flattening of corporatized network experience. She reflects on the latter as a ‘network anesthesia’ elucidating the relations underlying corporate networks and the operations they perform based on predicting behaviour. A counter, relational ‘aesthesia’ is then explored via analyses of a range of cultural practices including the online activity of ‘search’, viral media through YouTube, data art and musicians and VJs working in networked environments. Munster argues that experimental use of networks produces new forms of experience that may intervene with normative corporate networking. In the book’s first section, the experience of looping as a repetitive, persistent network operation is given historical reference. The early, overlooked diagramming of the Internet is considered alongside the ‘great cartographies’ such as Paul Baran’s 1964 image for the RAND Corporation. This mapped a network of distributed communications through links and nodes and as a ‘frontier for U.S. defense’ came to dominate the ‘netscape’. Munster shows that today the link-node approach to networks continues to underpin our connectivist imaginary. Analysing the 1999 ‘sublime imagescape’ of Hal Burch and William Cheswick’s image of the network of connectivity between major Internet servers, she explores how the connectivist imaginary has seduced our attention. As a normative, repetitive vision the model has a ‘frozen’ quality that gives it coherence. Against such stasis Munster argues, via William James, for critical engagement with the particularities and complexities of network forces in order to understand their real experience. Throughout the text, Munster draws convincingly on the Jamesian understanding that it is the very relations of conjunction that generate experience. It is not that experience is simply connected in the sense implied in theories of participatory online culture. Such an approach, Munster argues, ‘helps us find a way out of the now overdetermined and superabundant social and organizational network analyses’ (2013, 7). The Jamesian concept of experience as a mosaic operating at the edges reflects the collective experience of networking generated in the video installations of artist Natalie Bookchin, such as her piece ‘Mass Ornament’ (2009). Based on downloaded YouTube videos of people recording themselves dancing, this form of ‘art’ demarcates an online experience that functions outside the indices of knowledge of networked corporatism. It is an experience distinct to ‘knowing the world’ through relational databases such as Google Earth and its reterritorializing cartographic quest – a ‘quest’ that Munster suggests represents the ‘revenge of the map’ in the sense that such networks ultimately generate online experiences that are empty of socialization. Through subtle analyses Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2016 Vol. 30, No. 2, 254–27