Online Art Gaming

The internet, that ever more inescapable fact of modern life, should be fair game for artists seeking to understand and reframe the world they and we know. That is the essential MO behind the current Santa Barbara Museum of Art exhibition Random Access Memory: Internet Art, in which three artists — Zhanyi Chen, Claire Hentschker, and Andrew Norman Wilson — embrace materials and data from the internet, including and sometimes accentuating glitches and inherent absurdities of that realm.

Call it “found art/cyber-funk art,” with work that can be playful, curious and gently subversive. No one is harmed in the making of this art: The internet has no feelings, regardless of what it wants us to believe. The show has the added allure of its being presented in a brick-and-mortar museum space, versus the isolated (and isolating) dimension of private screens. 

Entering the media-art-geared Story Gallery upstairs in the museum, we are naturally drawn into the largest and most kinetic piece in the show, Hentschker’s “Ghost Coaster: the Star Jet Coaster, 2002-2012.” Channeling her youthful memories of riding the famous and now defunct coaster (due to Hurricane Sandy’s destructive path), the artist dreamily deconstructs actual “Ride POV” videos of the coaster in action. 

Using, and creatively abusing, the “photogrammetry” software used by archeologists and conservators, she has created a strange and hypnotically altered version of the original subjective view “ride along” video sources. She effectively blurs the line between reality and some otherworldly, semi-abstracted simulacrum thereof. 

A different brand of gamesmanship is afoot with Chen’s “How to Create Your Satellite Birth Chart,” from her fictitious “Artificial Satellite Astrology” scheme. This 2025 conceptual concoction offers us a mock-functional process of using satellites to harness the power of prophetic insights to navigate our astrological fates and sign-reading. A small nearby touch screen allows us to use the “A.S.trology” website, as a repository of bogus self-realization. And yet the scent of science is in the air.

Behind Chen’s elaborate system — system as artwork — she tweaks and softly satirizes the smug and rational presumptions of superiority which often defines the internet, and the implied super-human expertise of Claude and his AI allies.

It can be said that the 2011 vintage of Andrew Norman Wilson’s “Global Countdown” makes it a veritable historic artifact, by the rapidly evolving standards of the internet. But its relevance remains fresh. Like Chen, he calls into question the presumed rationality of things cyber, by randomly collaging imagery, video and music data from the stock media marketplace site pond5.com. 

The result is a mash-up in which we feel we’re being sold something or informed of some information, but without any clear indication of what that is. The phrase “pond5.com” is repeated like a mantra, alongside snippets of generic music pabulum such as we associate from weather/sports/news channel fare. It all becomes a fuzzy, featureless, and yet somehow meditative blur amid the contextual perplexity, as can happen in case of info and internet overload.

Especially in the era of advancing incursions of AI into daily life of modernites, the internet pretends to be concerned with and compassionate toward each of us as individuals, algorithmically “personalizing” interactions with its users. In fact, it qualifies under Albert Camus’s description of the “benign indifference of the universe.” 

It remains up to us, and the exploratory nature of artists’ mindsets, to make sense of it. Or nonsense. Both occur in this compact but intriguing show. 

Random Access Memory: Internet Art is on view at Santa Barbara Museum of Art (1130 State St.) through September 27. See sbma.net.