On-line Art Gaming – The Santa Barbara Independent

The web, that ever extra inescapable reality of contemporary life, must be honest sport for artists searching for to grasp and reframe the world they and we all know. That is the important m.o. behind the present Santa Barbara Museum of Art exhibition Random Access Memory: Internet Art, during which three artists — Zhanyi Chen, Claire Hentschker, and Andrew Norman Wilson — embrace supplies and knowledge from the web, together with and generally accentuating glitches and inherent absurdities of that realm.

Call it “found art/cyber-funk art,” with work that may be playful, curious and gently subversive. No one is harmed within the making of this artwork: the web has no emotions, no matter what it needs us to consider. The present has the added attract of its being introduced in a brick-and-mortar museum house, vs. the remoted (and isolating) dimension of personal screens. 

Entering the media art-geared Story Gallery upstairs within the museum, we’re naturally drawn into the most important and most kinetic piece within the present, Hentschker’s “Ghost Coaster: the Star Jet Coaster, 2002-2012.” Channeling her youthful reminiscences of driving the well-known and now defunct coaster (as a result of Hurricane Sandy’s harmful path), the artist dreamily deconstructs precise “Ride POV” movies of the coaster in motion. 

Using, and creatively abusing, the “photogrammetry” software program utilized by archeologists and conservators, she has created a wierd and hypnotically altered model of the unique subjective view “ride along” video sources. She successfully blurs the road between actuality and a few otherworldly, semi-abstracted simulacrum thereof. 

A unique model 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 affords us a mock-functional technique of utilizing satellites to harness the ability of prophetic insights to navigate our astrological fates and sign-reading. A small close by contact display permits us to make use of the “A.S.trology” web site, as a repository of bogus self-realization. And but the scent of science is within the air.

Behind Chen’s elaborate system — system as art work — she tweaks and softly satirizes the smug and rational presumptions of superiority which regularly defines the web, and the implied super-human experience of Claude and his AI allies.

It may be stated that the 2011 classic of Andrew Norman Wilson’s “Global Countdown” makes it a veritable historic artifact, by the quickly evolving requirements of the web. But its relevance stays recent. Like Chen, he calls into query the presumed rationality of issues cyber, by randomly collaging imagery, video and music knowledge from the inventory media market website pond5.com. 

The result’s a mash-up during which we really feel we’re being bought one thing or knowledgeable of some info, however with none clear indication of what that’s. The phrase “pond5.com” is repeated like a mantra, alongside snippets of generic music pabulum similar to we affiliate from climate/sports activities/information channel fare. It all turns into a fuzzy, featureless, and but by some means meditative blur amidst the contextual perplexity, as can occur in case of information and web overload.

Especially within the period of advancing incursions of AI into day by day lifetime of modernites, the web pretends to be involved with and compassionate in direction of every of us as people, algorithmically “personalizing” interactions with its customers. In reality, it qualifies beneath Albert Camus’ description of the “benign indifference of the universe.” 

It stays as much as us, and the exploratory nature of artists’ mindsets, to make sense of it. Or nonsense. Both happen on this compact however intriguing present. 

Random Access Memory: Internet Art is on view at Santa Barbara Museum of Art by way of September 27, sbma.net.