SANTA BARBARA, CA.- The Santa Barbara Museum of Art will present RANDOM-ACCESS MEMORY: Internet Art (March 15–September 27, 2026), an exhibition that brings together digital projects by three multimedia artists: Zhanyi Chen, Claire Hentschker, and Andrew Norman Wilson. This is the first exhibition at SBMA solely dedicated to the Internet as both a source and a subject.

The Internet is the ubiquitous medium of 21st-century life and our primary mode of connection, entertainment, and research. Despite its familiarity, the Internet continuously resists predictability. RANDOM-ACCESS MEMORY frames the web as a living memory system—ever-changing, contradictory, and subject to distortion—where personal histories blur into collective narratives.

From early “net.art” HTML experiments to digital content shaped by today's algorithm- driven platforms, artists have embraced both the possibilities and constraints of the web as creative tools. In RANDOM-ACCESS MEMORY, the Internet is actively and critically examined as opposed to treated as a neutral backdrop. All three projects are crafted from highly specific and traceable online sources; the results are curious and unexpectedly poetic.

Claire Hentschker, a multimedia artist and designer, combines DIY experimentation with personal storytelling. In Ghost Coaster: The Star Jet Coaster, 2002–2012 (2019), she reconstructs a destroyed New Jersey roller coaster, a fond memory from her childhood, using only screenshots taken from YouTube ride-through videos.

Hentschker experiments with using (or perhaps, misusing) photogrammetry, a visualization software often used for archaeology and conservation. The program transforms the incomplete data into a glitch-filled and dream-like 3D environment for one last ride, reflecting how digital tools can both preserve and distort the past.

Andrew Norman Wilson, a contemporary filmmaker who began his career making Internet-related video art, brings a critical eye to media systems. Global Countdown (2011) assembles watermarked footage and sound from the stock asset marketplace Pond5.com into a looping spiral described by the artist as “a news program, completely devoid of human presence.” Stripped of context, these familiar visual cues take on a humorous and uncanny quality, hinting at how media aesthetics manufacture authority while also mimicking the non-stop rhythms of contemporary news cycles.

Multimedia artist Zhanyi Chen blends science, spirituality, and online subcultures to create evocative installations. Two works featured in the exhibition examine how satellite data may dictate our choices.

In How to Create Your Satellite Birth Chart (2025), Chen invents a faux astrological system based on the placements of satellites rather than planets and stars, presented in the quintessential style of a YouTube tutorial. Astrological Concrete Poetry to Clouds Written by Weather Satellites (2020) translates live satellite data into slowly drifting word constellations projected onto the ceiling, turning real-time readings into meditative poetry.

What unites these artists is a fascination with error and glitch. Rather than hiding the imperfections of technology, the artists foreground it, revealing how random chance is central to both digital systems and human experience. The Internet here is not clean or rational; it is messy, absurd, mythical, and strangely elegiac.

RANDOM-ACCESS MEMORY: Internet Art is curated by Andrew Witte, SBMA Curatorial Assistant of Photography and New Media.