For all its pessimism, Rafman’s work is remarkably enjoyable.
When I first encountered his Dream Journal at the 2019 Venice Biennale – a feverish 94-minute video that turns video-game scenarios into a Boschian montage – I expected to spend five or ten minutes in its darkened installation space. I ended up staying for two hours.
If nothing else, Rafman knows how to keep us looking. Small details often become more memorable than larger narratives: a stuttering avatar, a malformed body or an unexpectedly beautiful but fucked-up digital scene.
Rafman does not stand outside internet culture to explain what’s wrong with it.
Instead, he reproduces its methods of attraction, luring us with the same novelty and stimulation that keep us hooked.
His deployment of trolls, gamers, pornography and digital trash can look more like obsession than criticism. This uneasy proximity gives the work its weight, risking complicity to keep us inside the lures of digital culture that might be diminishing or damaging us.
There is something of the digital sublime here. Traditionally, the sublime describes awe and fear before something overwhelmingly large or powerful. Rafman relocates that feeling to digital culture.
His infinity is not a mountain range or raging ocean; it’s the endless scroll at our fingertips.
Thoughtfully curated by Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer, Rafman’s labyrinthine lowbrow sagas are both crude and formally inventive, lulling us deep into dark-web digital babbling.
Like a Goya of Google, Rafman fixates on distrust, paranoia and perverse pleasures.
Everyone here is hooked on something and every obsession has its own rabbit hole, reproducing the brain-rot logic of commodified online engagement that is designed to keep us all looking.
Jon Rafman: Memento Hikikomori is at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, until September 27.
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