Jon Rafman is an anthropologist-explorer charting the dark heart of the digital world. This Canadian artist scrapes the recesses of the internet, mines 4chan greentexts, strips images from video games, and documents fringe online communities. As a seer of our networked lives, his prescient examination of online alienation offers a taste of our mortal futures.
The title of his show Memento Hikikomori combines two ideas, memento mori, remembering our mortality, and hikikomori, Japan’s reclusive adolescent hermits. Emblematic of our contemporary moment, and our relationships to film, television, music, culture, hikikomori have shut themselves off from the world. For Rafman they have something in common with ascetics who cultivate detachment from earthly desires—a refusal of meatspace. They instead create online worlds within worlds, spiralling into fascinating niches, atomised experiences.
Rafman’s show features his ongoing project Nine Eyes (2008–), where he trawls through billions of Google Street View photographs to find poetic glitches and moments of human vulnerability and surreal vulgarity that rupture the cold, machinic mapping of cities and suburbs.
Main Stream Media Network (2025–6) is an evolving, AI-generated TV channel, full of slop for the brainrot generation. An ambitious act of world building, it features a cast of distinctive pop stars, 3D-animated cartoons with inscrutable narratives, and disturbing documentary short stories. It’s as if we have tuned into an MTV broadcast from a parallel dimension. Rafman’s use of AI is not moralistic or didactic, but curious. It shows how nostalgia feeds into generative AI models, revealing the libidinal darkness of youth culture.
Memento Hikikomori also includes AI-generated paintings, reclusive video-viewing pods, and key Rafman videos—including Punctured Sky (2021), Still Life (Betamale) (2013), and Kool-Aid Man in Second Life (2008–11)—contending with the technological mediation of memory, the formation of selfhood and identity, and the unconscious of collective online experience.
Rafman is represented by Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, and Neon Parc, Naarm/Melbourne.
Jon Rafman (born 1981, Montreal) is an artist, filmmaker, and essayist. His work addresses melancholy in modern social interaction, communities, and virtual realities, while bringing to light their beauty in a manner inspired by romanticism. His work has been included in prestigious biennials, including the 2015 Lyon Biennale, 2016 Berlin Biennale, 2016 Manifesta, and 2019 Venice Biennale. He had a solo show Egregores and Grimoires, Schinkel Pavillion, Berlin, 2022, and presented a project in the Hong Kong Basel Art Fair 2025. He is based in Los Angeles.
