Together with film, train travel remains one of modernity’s foremost symbols and allegories for the shift in experience from human-centred to machine-mediated perception. Yet Proust’s text also reads like an anticipation of the spectator’s condition in the digital age. Faced with the visual field’s complexification and fragmentation, brought about by technologies that both enhance and supersede her senses, the contemporary user-spectator must learn to surf the perceptual overload afforded by fast-evolving recording, communication, and display systems, while accepting the sense of lack constitutive of these systems. Paradoxically, technologically augmented perception and access, insofar as they surpass our capacity to process the available sensory data while making us aware of its tantalizing, virtual existence, generate the kind of fault-line that artists and writers have always exploited creatively. As Jane Stadler’s article reminds us, the value of incompleteness should not be understated: in an experience of partial perception, brought about by excess or scarceness, the consciousness of absence or lack fosters our imagination. In Proust’s account of the train journey, it is the failure of the narrator’s body to suture vision’s disjointed field that, in turn, allows the writer to deploy his distinctive style and skill at weaving together “heterogeneous, dislocated, apparently incomposable realities” (During 152). Hence, if our experience of the world is increasingly machine-mediated, imagination and creativity nonetheless remain indelibly tied to a process of embodied perception that relies on synesthetic connections.