Earlier this year rap duo Kanye West and Ty Dolla $ign prepared fans for the release of a new album with a video for their track ‘Vultures’.
The eerie, nightmarish film includes sepia-colored clips of owls, wolves, a grinning clown, men in black cloaks holding guns, and buildings collapsing in smoke. Its a series of symbols of dystopia we’ve become familiar with from the internet, and the work of a Canadian artist as comfortable making music videos and video games as exhibiting around the world in galleries.
A still from Shadowbanned (2018) Photo: Jon Rafman
Jon Rafman has a survey of recent film work called Oh, the humanity! opening at Whangārei Art Museum on December 20. It is, the museum say, “a harrowing meditation on the digital era’s fraught promises, and how they may have ultimately been broken.”
Graduating from art school in the mid 2000s, Rafman’s career since has seen him dubbed an internet artist.
Jon Rafman Photo: Dan Wilton
His work has obsessively followed and meditated on the development of cultures and their aesthetics online. His is a serious dedication to the disturbance of our psyche from perhaps spending too much time online - but also the liberation that it has offered everybody to build community and create art.
The first phase of Rafman’s career was propelled by more optimistic times on the internet at the beginning of this century with the introduction of Web 2.0.
This was when many were enjoying the potential of a democratised digital space. Where being creative and building cultures online was newer territory and without the same domination of social media and other commercial forces.
Rafman became known for his work based on long marathon runs through Google Street View. He was a self-described Romantic looking to capture screenshots of sublime beauty and humanity within the giant realms of what has been described as the world’s greatest documentary project.
The ‘Nine Eyes of Google Street View’ project has been ongoing since 2008.
He was also on Second Life, the oldest of the multiplayer virtual worlds that allows people to create an avatar for themselves and interact with other users and user-created content, creating a wealth of subcultures.
By the 2010s however things were getting darker. Rafman’s focus followed, to the rise of an underbelly of user-generated content appearing on image-based bulletin board 4chan. He began to explore a grubbier interest in images of the grotesque and the abject, signalled by the figure of the troll online and the action of ‘shitposting’.
Rafman has been labelled a few times as like a modern-day Hieronymus Bosch, depicting a “contaminated but fun world” full of weird creatures, freaky avatars, and fractured identities. Fantasy has run amok. But he also reminds us that its from chaos and ruin that culture emerges anew, and we need to face the abject rather than suppress it
Jon Rafman Under The Sun 2019 Photo: Jon Rafman
Now, Rafman is working increasingly with AI, exploring the creative potential of prompts, and no longer always needing animators to realise his work for him.
He remains engaged with how the internet is profoundly affecting our view of the world, increasingly seeing the world differently from our very own neighbours
Exhibition Oh, the humanity! presents a series of films created between 2013 and 2021. They combine found images, custom animation and 3D models with footage from video games and other sources.
Mark Amery spoke to Jon Rafman in America for RNZ’s Culture 101.
