"We are now living in a super, hyper-extended information society," says curator Masafumi Fukugawa, "and that idea was the starting point for our new exhibition."

Fukagawa is one of five curators of "Being-in-the-Wired-World," a group exhibition at Kawasaki City Museum that features eight emerging artists (or artist duos) commissioned to make work responding to the "new world of communication, technology and media."

From afar, the exhibition could be seen as a flailing grab for quick contemporary currency by showing the "virtual art" of the "post-Internet age." Up close, however, "Being-in-the-Wired-World" is a far more ambitious and articulate expression of our media-saturated lives than the kind of artworks those keywords are typically associated with. There are no 3-D renderings of roman columns here, no conceptual Facebook artworks, no #newaesthetic-styled images of machine-vision (live cams, 3-D map glitches, video games). Google and YouTube didn't make a single appearance. The work here is subtle, complicated and human.