This book began with a question about all the installation art and performance that I was seeing in the early 2000s in New York galleries and museums, wondering where this art came from historically. That led me down a rabbit hole for more than a dozen years, and back in time to 1849 and Richard Wagner’s writing about what he called the Gesamtkunstwerk—the total work of art. After years of research across art history, philosophy, social theory, and network theory, Unseparate: Modernism, Interdisciplinary Art, and Network Aesthetics finally emerged. What I propose in the book is that we need to look again at modernism to understand where contemporary performance and installation art come from, and that a conceptual way to look at this is through the lens of network thinking, or what is called network aesthetics. That’s to say, I wanted to rethink the standard art-historical reading of European modernist art as principally devoted to expressions of fragmentation (think Cubism or Ezra Pound’s Cantos or George Antheil’s composition, the Ballet Mécanique) that were fueled by the traumas of war and reactions to new technologies that were altering their times. Instead, I make the claim that there was always another urge in modernism toward the salutary possibilities of wholeness, of integration in place of fragmentation, which Wagner first proposed, having fled Germany, where his political talks and writing about uniting the country’s principalities into a single nation nearly got him arrested. As an exile in Zurich, he took that political thinking and reframed it as an artistic proposition for an imagined new kind of art—an art unified from disparate parts (dance, music, poetry, drama, and scenography) into something whole, something total.My book combines history, theory, and prose poems, suggesting that key moments in the annals of modernist art—including Wagner’s music-dramas, the art of Paul Cézanne and Marcel Duchamp, Hugo Ball and the Cabaret Voltaire, and Walter Gropius’s conception of the Bauhaus—are all expressions of proto-networks that joined together different artistic disciplines and ways of thinking into constellated forms. Each of them went about this differently, and the idea of wholeness and totality did not always lead to beneficent forms of connectivity and openness. Sometimes, it became twisted into forms of radical control. But reading backward from our own time of omnipresent connectivity in networked societies to a revised history of modernism helps us to make sense of the past as well as of the present, not only in contemporary interdisciplinary art but also in politics and the structure of society.