Chapter 1 orients readers to what is at stake in computationally augmented and nondigital responsive media and responsive environments: the potential for ethico-aesthetic experiment. This appeals to artists and philosophers of media who are concerned with ethico-aesthetic as well as political implications in contemporary material practices in media and the technologies of performance. Setting aside transcendentalist appeals to universal immortal frameworks structuring our experience, and in the absence of any Archimedean point external to subjective experience upon which we can lever social and ethico-aesthetic judgment, what remains? How can sociality and pathic subjectivity emerge? This chapter introduces the argument for a deeper approach with the poetic, rather than instrumental or technical, use of continuous topology and related modes of nonatomistic articulation. The argument is substantiated and informed by speculative projects over the past twenty years that challenge existing paradigms in computational media technology and media arts.