In 2008 my MFA proposal was to look for Monsters at the edge of the internet, I was interested in the parallels between the age of the exploration and the ever-growing digital geography of the internet. I was curious about our on-line collective consciousness – and our projections of otherness into spaces that border areas beyond our familiarity.
<Monsters lie here; robots = “nofollow”>
Are there information monsters at the edges of the Internet?
The Internet is a vast network, whose scale, like that of the universe, is incomprehensible, sublime. As users and net-colonisers, we use search engines to charter our way around a nebulous environment. Even so, these are inadequate tools to expose the Internet’s entirety.
Corresponding to the Age of Exploration, the Age of Information provides us with untold mysteries. Like the cartography of the 15th century – where unknown areas of maps were marked with phrases such as imago mundi (imagined world) – there are areas of the Internet that are also un-mappable. They often exist because their creators have incorrectly tagged them, or have tagged them(search engines crawling the site are asked to ignore these pages, not to display them, like a silent number). These regions are the new terra incognita of our culture.
