Jon Rafman

Rather than the charms of the lyre, contemporary technological tools, Google Street View and Google Earth, beckon as the pathway for our narrator to regain memories and recapture traces of his lost love. In the film, they are as captivating and enthralling as charming as any lyre in retrieving the other: at first they might seem an open retort to critics of new technology who bemoan the lack of the tangible presence of the other in our interactions on the Internet.

In ᖴᗩᑕIᗩᒪᔕ I, Jon Rafman alters a selection of these unwrapped head textures and animates the transformation in the style of VFX breakdown reels, typically used to showcase the special effects in movies and games.

‘Still Life (Betamale)’ draws images from a range of online fetish sites, engaging with the theme of obsessive desire. The narrated version of the album track is immersed in the simultaneously captivating and disturbing world of internet subcultures.

SHADOWBANNED (2018) uses the aesthetics of internet conspiracy theories to tell the story of an anonymous narrator on an enigmatic, transdimensional journey. The film unfolds across multiple universes wherein dreams are recycled waste products and meaning has been all but lost. The narrator arms himself with artificial memories of artificial pasts in order to protect himself from the future. SHADOWBANNED is a meditation on the perception of history, esoteric culture and the implosion of meaning in our hyper-accelerated times.

Kool-Aid Man travels through a variety of worlds from the video game Second Life.

An essay film in the tradition of experimental documentarians like Chris Marker or Harun Farocki, Remember Carthage takes the viewer on an epic journey in search of an abandoned resort town deep in the Sahara desert. However, one travels not through archival or personal images but through footage sourced from PS3 video games and Second Life, depicting ancient civilizations that seem at once familiar and totally fantastical.

An unseen narrator reunites with his old friend Joey Bernstein in the dingy back room of a comic and games store located in a dead mall. Bernstein asks if the narrator remembers their favorite childhood computer game, Punctured Sky, and informs him that all trace of the game has vanished from history. The narrator then embarks on a quest to uncover the truth behind the mysterious disappearance of Punctured Sky. Along the way, he must contend with a series of strange encounters on and offline and confront the precariousness of memory in the digital age.

“It’s fire and it crashing! . . . This is the worst of the worst catastrophes in the world! Oh, it’s crashing . . . oh, four or five hundred feet into the sky, and it’s a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen. There’s smoke, and there’s flames, now, and the frame is crashing to the ground, not quite to the mooring mast. Oh, the humanity, and all the passengers screaming around here! . . . I can’t talk, ladies and gentlemen. Honest, it’s just laying there, a mass of smoking wreckage, and everybody can hardly breathe and talk . . . Honest, I can hardly breathe. I’m going to step inside where I cannot see it. . . .”

Annals of Time Lost works towards illuminating the individual’s relationship to the archive and the desire for physical presence. The exhibition is archiving a condition that may not exist decades from now. It is itself a record of the anxiety and unease around where, how and what is the physical self when one is in a social relation in cyberspace. Rafman’s work asks us to implicate ourselves in this process as both the creator and the subject, the archivist and the archived.

Nine Eyes of Google Street View: Slideshow (2020) by Jon Rafman

Television for the AI age.

An anonymous narrator, alone in his apartment, cannot tell if his inner life is composed of memories of dreams or memories of reality. Using a mixture of super-8 Kodachrome and nostalgic 1980's advertisements, the film captures the way pop culture ephemera are repetitively imposed on us until we feel they are our creation.

A compelling mix of attraction and repulsion, Mainsqueeze is entirely composed of footage found online, surfing the deep web.

A triptych video installation exploring collective consciousness, digital entities, and internet culture.

The film portrays a post-human dystopia featuring faceless 3-D avatars continuously tortured in abstract digital space, a terrifying image of a future where all humanity is uploaded to a virtual purgatory and endlessly abused.

Minor Daemon, Vol. 1 is set in a surreal dystopia that feels like the deranged fever-dream of Hieronymus Bosch if he grew up on 4chan. It traces the intersecting fortunes of two young men, Billy and Minor Daemon, who share an extraordinary gift for virtual reality gaming and go through a series of nightmarish events.

This single-channel video explores the effects of technology and information overload on the contemporary psyche. Set in a virtual tech-noir urban space populated by strange hybrids of non-humans and augmented people, part of the expansive, fractured narrative focuses on the continued adventures of Xanax Girl and her search for her companion—a hybrid dog/seal with the head of a boy—who has been abducted. The film, which arose from the artist’s daily practice of animating his dreams using hobbyist 3D software, weaves together deep-web imagery with hardboiled detective story tropes and repressed libidinal fantasies to create a nightmarish vision of an internet addict’s unconscious. The film features an original score by Oneohtrix Point Never and James Ferraro.

Erysichthon is the final element in a trilogy of videos including Still Life (Betamale) and Mainsqueeze. Like the other videos of the series, it comprises found images from the web, user-created contents and video clips. These examples of subcultures are investigated through the theme of devouring and ingesting, used as a metaphor for our culture of consumption and our relationship to the virtual world.

Legendary Reality is a science-fiction essay film that portrays the recollections of a solitary narrator imprisoned in his own mind. Using a non-linear structure that weaves together dreams and memory, Jon Rafman creates a stream-of-consciousness meditation on art, identity and time that draw on the work of Leonard Cohen. The film intercuts digitally processed found photos and 3D landscapes sourced from video games to tell the enigmatic voyage of one man's soul.

In a journey that mixes cinematic genres, a legendary arcade video gamer moves seamlessly through actual and virtual space and time. While he cherishes the intense experiences of mastering a renowned video game, or defeating an archrival, he comes to question the significance of his legacy and the tradition itself.