Jon Rafman. Main Stream Media

Anthropologist of the Virtual Present

Jon Rafman is one of the most significant artists exploring the digital age. His videos and films offer a perspective that is both euphoric and analytical, showing how we as a society deal with the internet and its constant changes. Rafman’s practice combines masterfully told stories with eerie, computer-generated images. It draws on both artificial intelligence and the virtual worlds of user platforms such as Second Life. This publication accompanies the artist’s first solo exhibition in a German museum and presents an overview of his work since 2008: Early works such as Nine Eyes of Google Street View (2008–ongoing) and Kool-Aid Man in Second Life (2008–11), as well as later works such as the feature-length video Dream Journal, which was shown at the 58th Venice Biennale, as well as Rafman’s latest work, Main Stream Media Network (2025–26), a pastiche of the historic MTV that evokes the 1980s with the help of AI models.