(Don’t) Be Evil: Jon Rafman’s Vision of Online Hell
Like a Goya of Google, Rafman fixates on the distrust, disdain, paranoia, and vengeances that motivate our daily practices of doomscrolling, constructing metaphors for humanity on the edge, after the apocalypse has gone mainstream.
Jon Rafman’s first retrospective exhibition in Australia has arrived at the Institute of Modern Art, Meanjin/Brisbane, bringing the artist’s notorious themes of internet alienation and the uncanny valley — along with what Sophie Knezic once termed his “pall of pessimism” — to the Sunshine State. A Los Angeles-based Canadian artist working in video, installation, photography, digital, and AI-assisted media, Rafman (b. Montreal, 1981) is known for producing psych-slop visions of online-connected hell, fashioning nihilistic virtual worlds that explore subjectivity under late capitalism. In keeping with his particularly bleak and sardonic oeuvre, it might be better to say that Rafman explores subjectivity under late late late late capitalism, when digital media has become the most effective tool so far for simulating realities in which all shared perspectives seem unstable.
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(Don’t) Be Evil: Jon Rafman’s Vision of Online Hell by Wes Hill is featured in full in Issue 5 of Memo magazine.
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Wes Hill is Associate Professor of Art, Culture and Education at Southern Cross University, Northern New South Wales.
