Jon Rafman
2021In September 2013, Rafman collaborated with Brooklyn-based experimental musician Oneohtrix Point Never, formally known as Daniel Lopatin, on a music video for Still Life to accompany the release of R Plus Seven on Warp Records. The two later collaborated to create a two-part music video for Sticky Drama, from Lopatin's 2015 album Garden of Delete.
Legendary Reality
Jon Rafman
Jon Rafman
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.
Legendary Reality
Ad-vice for a Prophet
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.
Ad-vice for a Prophet
Woods of Arcady
Jon Rafman
""The woods of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy;" – with this line begins Rafman's Woods of Arcady. The work juxtaposes a computer generated recitation of Yeat's poem The Song of the Happy Shepherd, along side video of scenes captured from the artist's explorations of the virtual environment of Second Life. The simultaneously fantastic and vapid virtual landscapes documented by the artist are at home with Yeat's imagery "Where are now the warring kings? An idle word is now their glory."
Woods of Arcady
Annals of Time Lost
Jon Rafman
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.
Annals of Time Lost
Erysichthon
Jon Rafman
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.
Erysichthon
Sticky Drama
Jon Rafman, Daniel Lopatin
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.
Sticky Drama
Still Life (Betamale)
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.
Still Life (Betamale)
You, the World and I
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.
You, the World and I
Dream Journal 2016–2019
Jon Rafman
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.
Dream Journal 2016–2019
