Today, the environment of the internetis omnipresent. We have made significant strides toward renegotiating the relationship between the “digital” and the “physical,” as more or less indistinct spheres. We no longer traverse between them, rather, we inhabit the troubled, messy, multisensory reality of an all-encompassing networked space. While we are aware, indeed, that the internet now constitutes our reality, we remain uncertain of how that reality will come to affect us. On the occasion of DEMO2024, NEW INC is pleased to present Random Access Memory.The exhibition brings together a group of artists from NEW INC’s Art & Code track whose interdisciplinary practices span video, live coding, performance, and interactive media. The exhibition’s title borrows from the well-known computing term abbreviated in the acronym “RAM,” which denotes the temporary storage and retrieval of data. This operates as a metaphor for the way individuals now access their own thoughts and memories—frequently, abruptly, and often mediated by digital devices. The artists draw from topics as diverse as fragrance notes, displacement, air traffic control signals, and ancient Chinese guardians. In Chia Amisola’s browser-based piece, a family’s routine unfolds through pop-ups, loops, and iFrames across scattered websites, looking at themes of memory and decay, rebellion and liberation on the Filipino internet. elekhlela expands their ongoing ensemble work, Jitrจิตร, into a multichannel audiovisual installation. Rooted in the communal nature of Southeast Asian indigenous practices, the work overlays distinct sounds and voices across an array of networked speakers. Banyi Huang’s multimedia project includes both a narrative and a media archive, featuring reference materials that influenced the sketch and design of the 3D characters Qianliyan千裡眼 (Thousand-Mile Eye), 順風耳Shunfeng’er (Wind-Following Ear), and Mazu.

Maya Man’s Notes is a generative art installation that remixes found language from perfume reviews on fragrantica into a unique visual output. Dan Goerlick presents an immersive soundscape of audio merged with live radio feeds from air traffic control towers. Lauren Lee McCarthy’s Saliva Lounge challenges the norm of exchanging our fluid substances with external agents, looking at data privacy, consent, and the intimacy of our own bodies as it relates to the systems around us. And finally, Babette Thomas presents West Oakland: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, a virtual walking tour of West Oakland offered from the perspective of her father, who grew up unhoused in these neighborhoods in the 60s and 70s.

Each of these installations, objects, and time-based media works opens a portal that allows us to enter into the uncanny. Recontextualizing our experience with the digital through the sensorial experiences of sound, touch, and scent, the exhibition invites us to reflect on the feeds we encounter, the impermanence of digital memory, and the fragmented recollection that this continuous loop can produce.