Santa Barbara Museum of Art Stages 3-Artist Internet Art Show on Hidden Digital Infrastructure
Updated
Updated · whitehotmagazine.com · May 31
Santa Barbara Museum of Art Stages 3-Artist Internet Art Show on Hidden Digital Infrastructure
1 articles · Updated · whitehotmagazine.com · May 31
RANDOM-ACCESS MEMORY: Internet Art at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art frames the internet not as a virtual tool but as infrastructure that shapes perception, memory and everyday life.
Three featured artists drive that argument from different angles: Claire Hentschker treats online archives as decaying ruins, Andrew Norman Wilson shows media loops emptied of lived events, and Zhanyi Chen turns satellite systems into objects of attention and belief.
Hentschker’s Ghost Coaster rebuilds a demolished roller coaster from YouTube ride-through images, with missing visual data producing glitches and collapse that underscore digital preservation as degradation rather than recovery.
Chen’s 2025 dual-channel video How to Create Your Satellite Birth Chart and her 2020 ceiling projection use satellite positions and weather data to recast invisible technical systems as a new kind of cosmology.
The exhibition’s broader claim is that algorithms, data streams and orbital networks now function like a contemporary atmosphere—organizing emotion, orientation and meaning while largely disappearing from view.
Is the internet's inevitable decay a flaw to be fixed, or does its imperfection reveal a more human truth about memory?
As satellites outnumber stars, are we building a new technological cosmology that redefines our connection to the universe?
In an age of endless automated content, is the ultimate act of rebellion simply to look away from the screen?
"Inside SBMA’s 2026 ‘RANDOM-ACCESS MEMORY’: Internet Art, Digital Memory, and the Future of Museum Curation"
Overview
The Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) is presenting its first major exhibition dedicated to Internet art, titled 'RANDOM-ACCESS MEMORY: Internet Art,' from March 15 to September 27, 2026. This show features innovative works by Zhanyi Chen, Claire Hentschker, and Andrew Norman Wilson, who use digital tools, found data, and online aesthetics to explore the internet as both their subject and material. The exhibition offers visitors a timely and critical look at how the internet, now central to modern life, shapes artistic expression and personal experience in the digital age.