SANTA BARBARA —The Santa Barbara Museum of Art is pleased to 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.
Claire Hentschker, Ghost Coaster: The Star Jet Coaster, 2002–2012 (still), 2019. Found video from YouTube, reprocessed through photogrammetry, 6:16 minutes. Image courtesy of the artist. © Claire Hentschker.
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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.
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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.
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