Jon Rafman, **𐤍𐤔𐤉𐤒𐤄 𐤓𐤀𐤔𐤅𐤍𐤄 (First Kiss)**, 2022, Inkjet print and acrylic on canvas 170.2 × 114.3 cm 67 × 45 inches © Jon Rafman. Exhibited at What a Wonderful World, MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome, Italy. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers

Jon Rafman (1981, Montreal) is a multimedia artist working with video, animation, photography, sculpture and installation. His work is a kind of socio-anthropological excavation into the dirty leftovers of the internet as the collective emanation of humanity’s innermost or even filthiest thoughts, fantasies and desires.

Exhibition View of **Counterfeit Poasts**, 2022, in What a Wonderful World at MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome, Italy. © Jon Rafman. Courtesy the artist and MAXXI Rome

One of his earliest and best-known work is Nine Eyes of Google Street View, an anthological work begun in 2008 and continued to the present day in which characteristic elements of Rafman's work were already denoted; the subtle irony that characterises an almost documentary intention renders some disturbing, extremes portraits of humanity, but also rare moments of ordinary poetics, seen through the neutral nine-eyed gaze of the cameras on the top of the Google van.

Still Image from **Counterfeit Poasts**, 2022, in What a Wonderful World at MAXXI – Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome, Italy. © Jon Rafman. Courtesy the artist and MAXXI Rome

The quasi-anthropological analysis of online communities and forums, up to the abyss of the deep web brings us face to face with the relational and emotional implications, sometimes incomprehensible, that develop in online gathering spaces. Particularly evident in Still Life: Betamale (2013), a visual narration punctuated by the sound environment of Oneohtrix Point Never, it is part of a broader trilogy composed of internet-sourced material including hentai pornography and furry-fetishism. At the time of the release, it was launched on its original source: the infamously well-known 4chan, an anonymous and unfiltered imageboard website regarding anime and video games, but even pornography and weapons. Since much of the material was retrieved from 4chan, for many it was a direct confrontation with their “private” lifestyle, eviscerated, acquired and edited by an outsider. What was a sort of intimate yet public exchange between mostly white males leaked out the “safe” zone of the chatroom into someone else’s space, then the art world. And not everyone was happy about it (see https://jonrafman.com/4chan.pdf).

The universe of online subcultures also spills over in Punctured Sky (2021), a work of auto-fiction that, taking up a personal anecdote, recounts in the first person the inconclusive search for a video game from the past - Punctured Sky precisely - that seems to have disappeared from each corner of the net. Crossed by uncanny characters with animalistic traits, the film is inspired by an internet folklore phenomenon known as creepypasta: weird tales and horror stories based on the practice of copy-paste spread this way on the message boards of online forums. The copy-paste method and the enormous amount of collaged images needed to realise the film is a sort of contemporary revisitation of the surrealist “exquise corpse”, supported in the narrative by the use of face-tracking iPhone apps and homemade AI-generated voices.

The collapse of the boundary between truth and construction in Punctured Sky is a kind of disturbing yet ironic commentary on the ability to shape and pervade contemporary conceptions of memory, truth and identity in relation to technology. The uses and the internal architecture of some contemporary technologies have generated new addictions and paranoia; Rafman makes them vivid and tangible, his works are able to throw the viewer into the centre of a very specific consciousness.

Jon Rafman, **Punctured Sky** (still), 2021, 4K video, sound 21 min. Exhibited at ₳Ɽ฿ł₮ɆⱤ Ø₣ ₩ØⱤⱠĐ₴, Ordet, Milan, Italy. © Jon Rafman. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers

In the occasion of the collective exhibition What a Wonderful World, he’s now presenting Counterfeit Poasts (2022) at Maxxi, Rome, a new video installation part of a broader research that is publicly available on the IG account @ronjafman. Realised with an open source software of generative images, these mutant creatures of data garbage reveal our complex relationships with images and memory by these days. Besides the attempts to try make machine vision more and more reliable for corporative interests, Rafman invites to play a sadistic game of confusion: what seems like reliable and recognisable subjects reveal more grotesque details trough the eye of artificial vision. Sneaking around the collective archives of our memory, it steals and mutates the familiar portraits of daily life images into nightmarish machinic delirium. Scrolling down the @ronjafman Instagram account one may see animals, objects and human flesh crashing and melting into each other generating new visions of the ordinary, situated on the borderline between fact and fantasy, beauty and repulsion. As when the tender memory of an adolescent kiss is disfigured by a much more visceral feeling (see: 𐤍𐤔𐤉𐤒𐤄 𐤓𐤀𐤔𐤅𐤍𐤄 (First Kiss), 2022).

In the words of another artist and writer James Bridle in New Dark Age - Technology and the End of the Future (Verso Books, 2018): “Technology, despite its Epimethean and Promethean claims, reflects the actual world, not an ideal one. (…) While it often appears as opaque complexity, is in fact attempting to communicate the state of reality”. Jon Rafman knows this very well.