page_title: Jon Rafman
section_title: Work
hierarchical_section_title: Jon Rafman / Work
caption_attribution_description: English: Jon Rafman
context_page_description: Jon Rafman 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. He is widely known for exhibiting found images from Google Street View in his online artwork 9-Eyes.
context_section_description: 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.
  In July 2020, allegations of sexual abuse and abuse of power were made against him, specifically involving using his power to sexually prey on young women. In the wake of these accounts, three major museums cancelled planned Rafman exhibits and his Montreal gallery dropped him.
caption: Rafman giving a lecture in Moscow, Spring 2012
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