If the Internet is an ocean, why do we spend so much time floating on its surface? What's really going on down there? Not just in the deepest, darkest trenches, but among the forgotten protocols, faulty algorithms and emerging parameters outside the busy shipping lanes and far from the crowded life rafts of Facebook and Twitter.
No, an ocean isn't an ideal metaphor, but it's hard to think about abstract interconnected virtual spaces without visualizing them as something tangible — a superhighway, web or cloud.
It's after midnight on a Thursday night in Tokyo and I'm on my laptop looking for something worth diving down for. It's not going so well. I've been snorkelling over the websites of various media arts festivals, the Tumblr portfolios of "new media artists," checking YouTube and Vimeo accounts, browsing online exhibitions of Net.art (and "post-Internet art") and scrolling through discussions on online forums to track down people in Japan who are using the Internet as a medium for art and experimentation.