You Don’t Know You Know This Balenciaga-Backed Artist
Jon Rafman’s fingerprints are everywhere for those who look. The Canadian artist has been lurking within mass culture since his breakout 2008 series “Nine Eyes,” an archive of strange, surrealist images sourced from Google Street View. 18 years later, Rafman has built a career exploring the internet’s deepest corners and strangest subcultures, turning his digital wanderings into absurdist art.
Along the way, Rafman attracted everyone from rappers to fashion designers. He was the brains behind Lil Yachty’s eerie Let's Start Here album cover, featuring an uncanny, AI-warped group of businesspeople in a boardroom, and produced a handful of videos for ¥$’s Vultures 1 record; he contributed to Travis Scott’s 112-page UTOPIA zine, built a maximalist LED tunnel for Balenciaga’s SS19 runway show (and Y2Ked the subsequent campaign film), and in 2013, produced a phrophetic music video for Oneohtrix Point Never’s “Still Life (Betamale)” that paired scenes of hentai and furries with lyrics on digital isolationism — turning the internet’s dark underbelly into content a decade before shitposting went mainstream.
Now, Rafman sits across from me at Düsseldorf’s K21 museum, one day before the public opening of his largest museum exhibition to date, “Main Stream Media,” which transforms his nearly two decades of work into one sprawling, six-part show.
Walking through it alone before my chat with the artist, the spatial design by Liam Denhamer — an architect working with the likes of 2HOLLIS and Playboi Carti — overwhelms the senses: in certain sections, every surface, from wallpapers and curtains to tarps and carpeting, has been screenprinted with disorienting, glitchy collages of Rafman’s art. There are mattresses to lie on, viewing booths to disappear into, and a screening room decorated with chairs made to look like mummified bodies. As one astute Instagrammer commented on Rafman’s post setting up the show: “Dammmmmmmm, looks/feels like the inside of my head.”
Disorientation is a common side effect of Rafman’s work, made with everything from video game engines and AI software to the vast virtual world of Second Life, yet the artist has never been more focused. With “Mean Stream Media” open to the public through September 27, I caught up with Rafman to talk about his cultural collaborations, the collapse of reality, and why the internet has never been more exciting.
You’ve worked with everyone from Balenciaga and Travis Scott to Lil Yachty. How’d you venture into these spaces?
I really feel that art should not just speak to the art world. On some level, I feel like I'm making popular art — not in the pop art tradition, but more by drawing on art history, fan culture and musical subcultures. There shouldn't be a division between different cultural industries. And a lot of the time, it just happens organically. I'm mostly not seeking these things out; they come to me partly because I don't want to make boring art.
I started off working in film, but felt that the vital new culture after I graduated — at the beginning of the Great Recession — was the internet, rather than film. The internet was a new territory. And at that time, there was a real cohesion between music, fashion, and art at that moment, with people like Shayne Oliver and Telfar. We were all aware of each other, making work together.
The 360-degree video you made for Balenciaga Spring/Summer 2019 mirrors a lot of the immersive experience of this new exhibition.
I've been chasing that. I’m sure it cost over $10 million for 16 minutes of a film that only 200 people could see — you couldn't fully express it in the video. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have access to that much capital to create an ephemeral installation at that scale. Only a few of the fashion elite and some bloggers could see it. That's it.
Walking through the exhibition, you really get the sense that you’ve been living inside the internet since the start of your career.
We all are. Media mediates our perception of reality, how we construct our identities, our relationship to the past, to each other, to space. My work, especially early on, was trying to express the internet in a poetic way. I still think the internet is like a mirror of reality, but even that dichotomy has collapsed completely; all reality has collapsed. There's no longer a consensus on what's true and real. We’ve witnessed this transformation from an idealistic [phase] to what we have now, which is this hellscape you can't escape. Because if you’re not part of the stream to some extent, you don’t exist.
Even with culture so extremely fragmented, we’ve never been in a period where things are so blended together.
It's that paradox. There's a sense of homogenization, and on some level, the internet doesn't exist as it once did. The tech monopolies have consolidated enough power that everything flows through four or five social media platforms. You have to fight the algorithms, because they flatten everything; it's like a synthesizer where every button sounds the same, versus one where you can use all the knobs to make your own individual sound.
When I started, you went to websites, and there was a sense of excitement and exploration that largely doesn't exist anymore. Yet I haven't been this excited since the beginning of my net art era because there are all these new tools that let me create worlds. Before, I was exploring worlds, and now I’m able to do things that would’ve cost millions to produce.
A lot of people are sensitive about the use of AI in creative work, yet you've been using it for years — even creating an AI hyperfake pop star avatar, Couldy Heart. How has your experience been in using these tools that largely didn’t exist even five years ago?
I like being in that space where there’s so much hate, and the energy is constantly changing [based on] what people are triggered by. It’s important to always engage with new tools as a way to critique the world. And for me, AI is the ultimate reflection of this collapse of consensus reality; it accelerates and reflects our inability to discern what's real.
Your newest work, “Main Stream Media," is based around the idea of MTV being the final monoculture. Do you think anything like that could ever exist again?
I don't know what's going to happen, but the closest thing I feel to that kind of shared reference point is the language of the internet itself. It makes for a fun challenge: how do you rise above the millions upon millions of other artists making work online who are not part of the rarefied, upper-echelon high art world? That’s partly why I started. I was more excited by a YouTube video made by some guy doing a SimCity walkthrough than by most of what was happening in galleries.
