Conjunctive and Disjunctive Networks: Affects, Technics, and Arts in the Experience of Relation

Abstract

Approaching network experience, networks – as sociotechnical assemblages, as singular and nonlocalised, as standardized communicative protocols operating across open architectures – must also be thought in close proximity to the affectivity of technically inflected experience. This affectivity is precisely a diffuse vagueness, the state of being permanently everywhere but in no one fixed location and of ongoing readiness to act or interact, to respond. This chapter proposes a network 'aesthesia' that might allow us to not count the already similar, already nodal but encounter what we do not know, sense or own – the imperceptible. Such an aesthesia also requires a rethink of the movements of networks: a shift away from connectivity toward conjunction and its companion, disjunction.