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Jon Rafman
Jon Rafman (born 1981) is a Canadian 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) and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. 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 consists of films and participatory tours around the virtual universe of Second Life, which is hosted by his avatar, a 3D render of the Kool-Aid Man. Rafman conducted these tours live, inviting audience members to take part in the exploration of the virtual world as he guided and contextualized the experience Kool-Aid Man in Second life is a quasi-ethnographic tour of the wildly varied fantasies invented and pursued by denizens of the web's murkier corners. Rafman describes this project as an exploration of new communities that formed as the internet became a ubiquitous aspect of modern life.
In 2008, Rafman started Nine Eyes of Google Street View, a long-term archival photo project which uses screenshots of Google Street View images as its source. These images from across the world are arranged in a massive database and published in books, on blogs and as prints for his various exhibitions. Rafman later began to keep an ongoing Tumblr blog where he would post his Google Street View images.
In 2016, Rafman's animated feature-length film Dream Journal premiered at the Sprüth Magers gallery in Berlin. Inspired by Rafman's habit of recording and animating his dreams, the film through a series of dream episodes explores the effects that technology and the internet have on the human psyche. Rafman has called the process of working on the film a form of "worldbuilding" with the desire to create a Boschian-like vision of our current hellscape.
In 2024, Jon Rafman introduced cloudyheart, one of the first AI-driven musical artist in history. Rafman revealed this project on X (formerly Twitter).
Jon Rafman's oeuvre has been situated within the Post-Internet art movement. He has risen to acclaim with his project Nine Eyes of Google Street View, which developed a distinctly post-internet approach to photography. His work has been included in numerous prestigious international biennials, including the 58th Venice Biennale, 13th Lyon Biennale, 9th Berlin Biennale, and Manifesta 11.
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Jon Rafman
Jon Rafman (born 1981) is a Canadian 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) and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. 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 consists of films and participatory tours around the virtual universe of Second Life, which is hosted by his avatar, a 3D render of the Kool-Aid Man. Rafman conducted these tours live, inviting audience members to take part in the exploration of the virtual world as he guided and contextualized the experience Kool-Aid Man in Second life is a quasi-ethnographic tour of the wildly varied fantasies invented and pursued by denizens of the web's murkier corners. Rafman describes this project as an exploration of new communities that formed as the internet became a ubiquitous aspect of modern life.
In 2008, Rafman started Nine Eyes of Google Street View, a long-term archival photo project which uses screenshots of Google Street View images as its source. These images from across the world are arranged in a massive database and published in books, on blogs and as prints for his various exhibitions. Rafman later began to keep an ongoing Tumblr blog where he would post his Google Street View images.
In 2016, Rafman's animated feature-length film Dream Journal premiered at the Sprüth Magers gallery in Berlin. Inspired by Rafman's habit of recording and animating his dreams, the film through a series of dream episodes explores the effects that technology and the internet have on the human psyche. Rafman has called the process of working on the film a form of "worldbuilding" with the desire to create a Boschian-like vision of our current hellscape.
In 2024, Jon Rafman introduced cloudyheart, one of the first AI-driven musical artist in history. Rafman revealed this project on X (formerly Twitter).
Jon Rafman's oeuvre has been situated within the Post-Internet art movement. He has risen to acclaim with his project Nine Eyes of Google Street View, which developed a distinctly post-internet approach to photography. His work has been included in numerous prestigious international biennials, including the 58th Venice Biennale, 13th Lyon Biennale, 9th Berlin Biennale, and Manifesta 11.