With a nod to the past, he taps into Internet’s images

Database art, in which information is the artist’s main medium, has been around for about 20 years, and it is becoming increasingly prevalent. Locally, it popped up last year in George Legrady and Angus Forbes’s “Cell Tango,’’ a visual concert of ever-changing photos shot with cellphones, in the Davis Museum and Cultural Center at Wellesley College.

This kind of work, which changes before the viewer’s eyes and occasionally as a result of the viewer’s actions, has an urgency and freshness that commands attention in ways markedly different than a painting can. You may be diverted by a stream of digital imagery; you may contemplate a painting. Versteeg would be a truly great artist if he were able to capture both responses in one work of art, but that may be impossible. Excitement will always trump contemplation. It’s how we’re wired.

In an homage to Jasper Johns, Versteeg’s “Flag’’ is a flat-screen monitor mounted high on the wall, featuring an American flag continually “painted’’ with smudgy digital brushstrokes as images from the Internet pop up over its surface. Gradually, the flag paints over them, and more images arise. A program based on a dictionary of 17,000 random words selects the images from the Internet. While I was there, pictures of an old airplane, an azalea plant, a pile of fashion magazines, and an old print of sailing ships, among others, flashed over the screen, then slowly got consumed by the flag.

In his own breakthrough flag paintings of the 1950s, Johns appropriated the flag so viewers could see it anew, looking beyond the complicated scrim of nationalism that can obscure an object with such heavy symbolic content. Versteeg’s work is not as wrenchingly provocative, but it is a clever portrayal of the democratization of the Internet, and an apt representation of the United States as an ever-changing, ever-integrating organism.