Jon Rafman: Minor Daemon and Ebrah k’dabri

Buckle up and join the Canadian post-internet artist on a trip to his digital inferno. The squeamish should stay away

Jon Rafman, Minor Daemon Vol 1, Film Still. 180 Studios, London, 3 February – 25 March 2023. © Jon Rafman.

Minor Daemon, 180 Studios, London
2 February – 25 March 2023

Ebrah k’dabri, Sprüth Magers, London
3 February – 25 March 2023

by JOE LLOYD

If the internet is hell, the Canadian artist Jon Rafman (b1981, Montreal) is its Virgil. His work immerses us in an inferno populated by the niche communities – furies and cosplayers, hentai fans and food-on-flesh fetishists – that persist even as the internet has become the essential facilitator of business and services, and being online has become a necessary, round-the-clock state rather than an elective one. Many artists have co-opted the aesthetic of the early internet: WordArt, flat images on a sci-fi background, cats, crystals, arcane characters, vapourware. But Rafman never deals in kitsch Y2K nostalgia. His work has continuously reacted to new developments. And it contains demons, some of them literal. London is currently playing host to a Rafman double-bill. His gallery, Sprüth Magers, is presenting Ebrah k’dabri, a solo show of recent and new works, while 180 Studios presents the UK premiere of Minor Daemon: Volume 1 (2022), a computer-generated feature-length film.

Jon Rafman, Ebrah k’dabri. Installation view, Sprüth Magers, London, 3 February – 25 March 2023. Photo: Ben Westoby.

Rafman rose to prominence in the late 00s with a pair of projects plunging into very different crevasses of the internet. Kool-Aid Man in Second Life (2008-11) saw Rafman become a digital psycho-geographer of Second Life, an online platform where users can create their own worlds and interact as avatars, now viewed as an early incarnation of the metaverse. Rafman logged in as a representation of the Kool-Aid mascot and adventures through various largely abandoned user-constructed domains, occasionally stumbling on some erotic entanglement. Nine Eyes of Google Street View (2008-) gathers the accidents and glitches of Google Street View, especially those places where animals and people have been captured on camera.

Jon Rafman, Minor Daemon Vol 1, Film Still. 180 Studios, London, 3 February – 25 March 2023. © Jon Rafman.

Over time, Rafman’s work has gradually moved towards narrative. He started adding monologues to his gleaned digital footage and images. Dream Journal (2016-19) saw him leap into fully fledged computer animation, while Punctured Sky (2021), on display at Sprüth Magers, apes a point-and-click adventure game. He has also started to reach out beyond the art world. He has collaborated with the electronic composer and producer Oneohtrix Point Never and designed the cover of the new album by the rapper Lil Yachty. “I see a growing disillusionment with the art industry,” he said in a 2020 interview with Spike. “I never wanted to be an ‘art-world artist’, but rather to be more connected to culture as a whole.”

Jon Rafman, Ebrah k’dabri. Installation view, Sprüth Magers, London, 3 February – 25 March 2023. Photo: Ben Westoby.

Despite this, Rafman often exhibits within a gallery context: Ebrah k’dabri is his third solo exhibition at Sprüth Magers since 2018. Yet the physical manifestations of his works seldom seem like the only, or definite, form. Three pieces at the exhibition, Egregore I, II and III (2021), show sequences of images and videos that are often seen on his Instagram account. This is a disquieting virtual cabinet of curiosities: a clock half-filled with baked beans, a furless Furby, a man in an alien mask sitting alone in a parking lot holding a green balloon, four chicken carcasses arranged in a sink like bathers in a hot tub. These pictures are disturbing enough online, where they can be quickly flicked between and form part of an often-disturbing context. Framed and placed in a gallery, away from their usual context, they become more unsettling still.

The exhibition is named after a Hebrew phrase meaning ‘I create like the word’, which some believe to be the root of the magic word abracadabra. It contains several works that have been magicked into existence using computer-learning techniques. He has used text-to-image AI to generate ethereal images (2022) of angels and demons, wrestling boys and sinister technocrats. Viewed up close, these seem to have a sort of painterly patina.  His video work Counterfeit Poast (2022) uses the same technology along with face-tracking iPhone apps to create a series of monologues, a contemporary version of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads. These include a man who loses everything in crypto, a woman against the dog-eating taboo and a teen who wants to become a walrus speaking in almost-human sentences, among others. Their speeches are illustrated with hideous pictures created by the AI, which function almost as a commentary on the spoken words.

Jon Rafman, Minor Daemon Vol 1, Film Still. 180 Studios, London, 3 February – 25 March 2023. © Jon Rafman.

Over at 180 Studios, Rafman’s new film Minor Daemon: Volume 1 (2022) takes this grotesquery and runs with it. The tone is set from the start. Within the first few moments, we hear a hideous squelching sound as an impossibly muscular businessman chomps on his cigar, then watch a surgery-addicted model snort a small mountain of cocaine. From this point on, we are subjected to a near-constant stream of scatology, smut and ultra-violence, played out in a truly abject dystopian future. There is a child born amid the offal of an abattoir then sold as a slave in an online content farm, a high school orgy that climaxes in a bloody act of bestiality, a brutal e-sport that causes seemingly fatal real-life injuries, a character being gnawed by rats and much, much more besides. It is almost impressive in its debasement.

Get past the shock value, and Rafman’s film is compulsively watchable. The animation is crisp: one scene showing prisoners meeting their visitors showcases an impressive range of different fabric textures. Although the characters speak in an indecipherable language, Rafman uses our familiarity with the archetypes they represent to push the story briskly forward. The narrative takes the tropes of a conventional genre story – there is an epic journey across wastelands, a prison break, several pivotal dream sequences that hint at what might come in the sequel – and refreshes them with the sheer nightmarishness of his vision. Rafman’s world is one where there are no easy victories, and even the slightest win requires Herculean effort and luck.

Jon Rafman, Minor Daemon Vol 1, Film Still. 180 Studios, London, 3 February – 25 March 2023. © Jon Rafman.

Much of the piece is structured in minute, seconds-long vignettes that stitch together to form the larger narrative. Rafman aims to create a Boschian hellscape, and the grosser side of his sensibility evokes the fleshly, bodily fluid-filled sensibility of the late middle ages. But there are passages of stilted beauty that resemble the paintings of Salvador Dalí and Giorgio di Chirico, as well as Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain. There is a relentless stream of sight gags, particularly in one late sequence set in an airport filled with implausible characters, that takes the off-kilter humour of animations such as BoJack Horseman and Rick and Morty, then amps it up to 11. For one sequence, the titular character becomes addicted to a psychedelic drug that makes him perceive a distorted version of the already distorted world he inhabits.

Jon Rafman, Minor Daemon Vol 1, Film Still. 180 Studios, London, 3 February – 25 March 2023. © Jon Rafman.

Minor Daemon and Counterfeit Poast share a fondness for the freakish, but they come from different ends of Rafman’s work. The former is precise and intentional, a 90-minute Mouse Trap whose intentionality allows it to present a concentrated view of a post-internet dystopia. The latter is looser, driven by the uncanniness of current AI, still a hair’s-breadth away from being able to create perfect human speech and images. But both offer a full immersion in the weirdness and worries that lie just beneath the surface of the internet.