Jon Rafman

‘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.

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

Kool-Aid Man in Second Life- Jon Rafman interview with Nicholas O'Brien (2009)

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.

Jon Rafman's short features computer-generated renders of the Twin Towers and a narration from Charles Baudelaire's "Le Guignon."

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

Neptune's Empire: Second Life ambience (2011) by Jon Rafman Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse: And even the like precurse of fierce events, As harbingers preceding still the fates And prologue to the omen coming on, Have heaven and earth together demonstrated Unto our climatures and countrymen.-- But soft, behold! lo, where it comes again!

Landscapes for Neon Parallel - Game Ambience (2015) by Jon Rafman

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.

Featuring a cast of over 35 children, with Oneohtrix Point Never’s soundtrack, Sticky Drama portrays the development of a role-playing game set in a fantastical and violent world in which its participants struggle to preserve their memory and past histories.

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.

Experimental narrative animation using hobbyist 3D animation and inspired by niche genres of computer-generated erotica.

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

Tales of a street historian.

A series of character studies by Jon Rafman, loosely inspired by reddit copypasta.

A journey through virtual death.

Short film by Jon Rafman.

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.