After working within the field of web design from the late 1990’s I proposed a project for my MFA to search 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: robots = “nofollow” (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 this culture.

I wish to assume the roll of an Internet privateer and set out to document the curiosities, mythology and monsters I find in the corners of our information ocean.  I hope to pull these monsters out of the depths of the electrical sea and watch them slap their salty grotesqueries on my living room carpet.  In documenting these wonders I want to pay homage to exploration and experiment in a metamorphism between physical and imagined space, traditional and digital reproduction.  The chronicle of my journey will be an amalgam of the digital and analog, of pixels and handmade marks, of code and compass roses, science fiction and sea shanties.

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This body of work formed during the early expansion of the internet as a dominant cultural territory. Search engines promised total access, yet whole regions of information remained invisible through mis-tagging, broken indexing, deliberate exclusion and automated error. These hidden zones became contemporary equivalents of terra incognita.

I began to think of the internet as an electrical sea, a space of scale beyond human comprehension. Navigation relied on fragile instruments, fragmented maps and myths in the depths of wikipedia. Like early cartography, its edges were marked by fear, desire, speculation and projection as much as by knowledge.

In these spaces, I found broken images, collapsed narratives, hybrid figures, digital relics, alongside, LEET or L337 Speak, and the backbone CABAL, but if you mention it - it doesn’t exist.

Backbone cabal
(During most of its existence, the cabal (sometimes capitalized) steadfastly denied its own existence; those involved would often respond "There is no Cabal" (sometimes abbreviated as "TINC"'[6]).

The result of this policy was an aura of mystery, even a decade after the cabal mailing list disbanded in late 1988 following an internal fight.[7])

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A series of shrine-based works emerged as part of this investigation. Figures such as Princess Diana, Freddy Krueger, Rambo and Princess Leia were folded into devotional structures that blurred pop icon, fairy tale, martyr and monster. Diana appeared as a naïvely painted half-deer, half-catalogue collage figure, paired with offerings of Fruit Loops and lollies. Freddy received mince. These shrines were tender and grotesque at once. Offerings were sincere and ridiculous in equal measure. They asked how myth, desire, fear and consumption braid together in everyday life.

A Meditation on Consumption at George Paton Gallery in 2005 formed an early threshold into this thinking.

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Across the bodies of work, boundaries repeatedly dissolved. Digital and physical reproduction collapsed into one another. Fiction leaked into documentation. Science fiction braided with domestic ritual. The monstrous became less about spectacle and more about the disorientation that arises when systems no longer cohere as promised.

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By the end of this period, the question shifted. The work no longer asked only where monsters live, but where they migrate to once familiar.

The images from Monsters Lie Here lead directly into Dawn of R.A.M.

Hybrid figures, ritual offerings and unstable mythologies reorganise into larger speculative structures. The monsters do not disappear. They move, with their companions, the humans.

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In true adventure story fashion, the hard drive I kept all my explorations on died. So there is little evidence that I actually trawled the net for months on end. Below are some fragments, with no Rosetta Stone.