Jon Rafman

Jon Rafman (born 1981) is an artist, filmmaker, and essayist. His work centers around the emotional, social and existential impact of technology on contemporary life. His artwork has gained international attention and was exhibited in 2015 at Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (Montreal). He is widely known for exhibiting found images from Google Street View in his online artwork 9-Eyes (2009-ongoing).

Rafman was born in Montreal, Canada. He holds an M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.A. in Philosophy and Literature from McGill University. He lives in Montreal.

Rafman's work focuses on technology and digital media, often using narrative to emphasize the ways in which they connect users back to society and history. Much of his work focuses on melancholy in modern social interactions, communities and virtual realities (primarily Google Earth, Google Street View and Second Life), while still bringing light to the beauty of them in a manner sometimes inspired by Romanticism. His videos and art utilize personal moments intended to reveal how pop culture ephemera and subcultures shape individual desires, and will often define those individuals in return.

Rafman's Kool-Aid Man in Second Life project involves a tour around the virtual universe of Second Life, which is hosted by his avatar, a 3D render of the Kool-Aid Man. The project deals with how users employ social exploits in order to conjure an idealized self and, with success, entertain sexual fetishes in the virtual world.

In September 2013, Rafman collaborated with Brooklyn-based experimental musician Oneohtrix Point Never, formally known as Daniel Lopatin, on a music video for Still Life to accompany the release of R Plus Seven on Warp Records. The two later collaborated to create a two-part music video for Sticky Drama, from Lopatin's 2015 album Garden of Delete.

Solo exhibitions

• Annals of Time Lost, Future Gallery, Berlin, April 2013
• A Man Digging, Seventeen Gallery, London, May 2013
• You Are Standing in an Open Field, Zach Feuer Gallery New York, September 2013
• I have ten thousand compound eyes and each is named suffering, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, May 2016
• Il Viaggiatore Mentale, Palazzina dei Giardini, Modena, September 2018

Group exhibitions

• Rencontres d’Arles
• New Jpegs, Johan Berggren Gallery in Malmo, Sweden, 2011
• Free, New Museum, New York, 2010
• Speculations on Anonymous Materials, The Fridericianum, Kassel, 2013
• The Saatchi Gallery, 2012
• Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, 2010
• Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, 2012
• Palais de Tokyo, 2012

• Communicating the Archive: Physical Migration. Regional State Archives in Gothenburg. Rafman's work was included, as was an essay by Sandra Rafman, on the archival impulses of Rafman's work.