Fact Focus: Jon Rafman - FACT

As Fact and 180 Studios contiguous the Canadian artist’s caller movie Minor Daemon: Volume 1, we look backmost connected his explorations of world successful the integer age, from excursions into Second Life and Google Street View to a 3D-animated imagination journal.

In Jon Rafman’s latest film, Minor Daemon: Volume 1, 2 young men who stock an bonzer acquisition for virtual world gaming attempt to unafraid their state from a Hieronymus Bosch-like hellscape. The feature-length film, showing astatine London’s 180 Studios until 25 March 2023, pulls unneurotic galore of threads that the Canadian creator has been exploring passim his vocation – online communities, identity, the progressively bladed boundaries betwixt the integer and carnal worlds – and tells a communicative that drills into the anxieties surrounding our fast-moving technological present.

Rafman archetypal came to prominence successful the precocious ‘00s with 2 ongoing works: Kool-Aid Man successful Second Life and Nine Eyes of Google Street View. In the first, Rafman would behaviour unrecorded guided tours successful the online satellite of Second Life done the avatar of a brushed portion mascot, contrasting the absurd quality with the often overtly sexualised change egos galore participants would make for themselves. In the second, Rafman trawled the immense database of Google Street View (then a caller task for Google) for unusual vignettes, accentuating the unusual glitches that transpire erstwhile images are stitched together.

In some of these formative works, Rafman acts arsenic a integer flaneur, wandering astir the unusual corners of cyberspace to papers our unusual caller world – a relation helium has played ever since, archiving the integer detritus of the modern web. “When I’m surfing Google Street View oregon exploring Second Life, the communicative impulse is ever there,” Rafman said successful a 2009 interview. “An underlying taxable oregon extremity is simply a changeless hunt for creator tools and methods that champion correspond oregon uncover modern experience. So I look for ideas and inspiration from those who besides conflict to correspond their acquisition of modernity, immoderate the clip play oregon era. In fact, I judge the antithetic generations oregon clip periods that person been termed modern are much akin than different. I mean, beryllium it Geoffrey Chaucer successful the Middle Ages oregon the modern creator Cory Arcangel, the creator has searched for however to correspond and critically analyse the present.” 

In caller years, Rafman has continued to propulsion the boundaries of integer creation with a big of challenging communicative works specified arsenic Dream Journal, a feature-length movie soundtracked by Oneohtrix Point Never and Andy Morin that explores the effects of exertion and accusation overload connected the modern psyche. Last month, helium provided the medium screen for Lil Yachty’s caller medium Let’s Start Here, which plays with the nightmarish aesthetic of AI-generated imagery. As we are bombarded with creation created by AI tools specified arsenic Midjourney, Rafman’s aboriginal enactment feels peculiarly applicable to our contiguous situation, showing america not conscionable the deepest, darkest corners of the web, but an aboriginal indicator of what would yet go mainstream integer culture.

Caution: Some of these videos incorporate NSFW content

Kool-Aid Man successful Second Life (2008-2011)

Second Life, launched successful 2003, was 1 of the earliest examples of what would present beryllium classed arsenic a ‘metaverse’, a integer abstraction wherever each forms of precocious and debased civilization collide. By conducting tours successful this integer domain, Rafman acknowledged its relation not simply arsenic a video game, but an hold of quality creativity. “It’s not truthful overmuch the amateur technologies themselves that animate me, but what amateurs are doing with these technologies, what they are utilizing the technologies to create,” Rafman said successful 2009. “I conscionable emotion looking astatine worldly that radical person created without the volition of it being called art. I mean, worldly that is made by radical semi-naively, by radical who are simply excited to make things.”

Nine Eyes of Google Street View (2008-ongoing)

Rafman’s exploration of Google Street View, an archival task that came to beryllium known arsenic Nine Eyes of Google Street View (named aft the 9 lenses connected the 360-degree camera utilized to seizure the images), tin beryllium seen arsenic a hunt for a much honorable practice of the satellite than accepted photography tin offer. Horses rotation streets, radical autumn disconnected bikes, suspects are apprehended and a husbandman chases his sheep. “In Street View, I archetypal believed I had recovered a much truthful and much transparent satellite due to the fact that of the seemingly unbiased and neutral mode successful which world was photographed,” Rafman said successful 2009.

You, The World, And I (2010)

You, The World, And I tin beryllium work arsenic a companion portion to Nine Eyes, successful which the narrator attempts to recapture memories of his mislaid emotion by trawling Google Street View for accidental images of her. “That Google Street View representation began to regenerate each different memories of her,” the narrator says. In the end, the archetypal representation disappears, presumably overwritten arsenic Google periodically updates its representation database – a reminder that adjacent successful an property of technological permanence, the net is an ephemeral place.

Remember Carthage (2013)

As Rafman’s experiments with communicative filmmaking evolved, truthful did his root material. While You, The World, And I created a haunting collage from Google Maps, Remember Carthage constructs a documentary-style communicative with footage from Second Life and PlayStation 3-era video games. Imbued with a consciousness of loneliness and isolation, the narrator’s commentary recounts a hunt for an abandoned edifice successful Tunisia, incapable to find past remains of the tract from their reproductions – an thought mirrored successful the fictionalised civilization depicted successful the integer footage.

ERYSICHTHON (2015)

Named aft Erisichthon of Thessalay, a gluttonous king from Greek mythology who was cursed with an insatiable hunger, this movie concluded portion of a trilogy of works that includes Still Life (Betamale) (2013) and Mainsqueeze (2014), films that studied niche net civilization specified arsenic cosplayers and hentai pornography enthusiasts. ERYSICHTHON‘s taxable is the infinite loop of user-generated contented – a notation possibly to the Greek king, who yet consumed himself.

Sticky Drama (2015)

Oneohtrix Point Never’s 2015 medium Garden of Delete was initially teased done an alternate world game, which hid arcane lore astir a fictional ‘hypergrunge’ set called Kaoss Edge and an acne-afflicted humanoid alien called Ezra amongst PDFs, MIDI files, a fake statement illustration connected SoundCloud and an obscure Blogspot scattered via hyperlinks crossed the web. This was expanded connected successful the video for standout way ‘Sticky Drama’, a grossed-out communicative of teenage cyberpunk LARPers that plays connected the gamified facet of the Garden of Delete backstory.

Punctured Sky (2021)

Punctured Sky is the unusual communicative of a video crippled decorator trapped by his ex-lover successful the crippled they were designing together. Structured similar a point-and-click escapade game, the movie has its root successful a idiosyncratic communicative of Rafman’s, successful which an aged person tells him helium can’t find immoderate notation of a video crippled they utilized to play with each different aft schoolhouse called Punctured Sky. Subjective world is simply a communal thread successful Rafman’s work, but successful Punctured Sky it takes connected a idiosyncratic dimension, of a world reconfigured by the breached memories of idiosyncratic else.

Dream Journal (2016-2019)

Rafman’s latest work, Minor Daemon, wasn’t the archetypal to dive headfirst into afloat 3D animation. Dream Journal (2016-2019), spawned from Rafman’s signifier of animating his dreams utilizing 3D software, and turned into a feature-length animated movie that explores the intelligence effects of exertion and accusation overload. Its absurdist landscapes and vaporwave soundtrack (provided by Oneohtrix Point Never, James Ferraro and Death Grips’ Andy Morin) play retired similar a fever dream, with a ocular benignant that recalls the slew of cheaply-made, algorithm-baiting kids content that flooded YouTube during the aforesaid period. From our existent perspective, Rafman’s enactment tin sometimes look dated – but unneurotic it creates a humanities papers of our unusual and ever-changing integer reality.

Minor Daemon is showing astatine 180 Studios until 25 March 2023. Tickets are disposable present from the 180 The Strand website.

The presumption astatine 180 Studios coincides with a solo accumulation of Jon Rafman’s enactment at Sprüth Magers, London (3 February – 25 March 2023). 

Jon Rafman: Minor Daemon
180 The Strand, London, WC2R 1EA
2 February – 25 March 2023

10am – 7pm, Wednesday – Sunday

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