Выставка Джона Рафмана «Memento Hikikomori» в Брисбене исследует цифровую зависимость и эстетику интернет-мусора

Jon Rafman is a master of turning the internet’s trash, excess and alienation into strangely seductive art. Memento Hikikomori is his intoxicating mini-retrospective at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art (IMA). It combines two ideas: memento mori, the reminder of our mortality, and hikikomori, the Japanese term associated with extreme social withdrawal. The combination suits Rafman. His works repeatedly depict people retreating from the physical world into digital ones, finding traces of a questionable humanity behind the pixels. Flâneur of the fringe web Born in Montreal, Canada, in 1981, Rafman emerged in the international art world in the 2000s, mining the stranger corners of internet culture before social media changed everything. He has described himself as a kind of flâneur of the fringe web, comparing Baron Haussmann’s remaking of 19th-century Paris – which helped destroy the street culture Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur wandered through – to the corporate takeover of the internet by Meta, Twitter and Google. His subjects are gamers, trolls, online obsessives and lonely digital wanderers. His worlds are bleak, but extremely funny, and as seductive as the trashiest of ’90s-era daytime TV. His works recall Jean Baudrillard’s provocative postmodern idea that reality has become inseparable from the images and simulations around us. Turning AI slop and digital hyperstimulation into art, Rafman adopts the excesses of digital culture to the point at which reality itself starts to feel fabricated. In The Nine Eyes of Google Street View (2008–), Rafman, in an ongoing work, searches Google Street View for accidental images: strange encounters, accidents, violence and moments of unexpected beauty. Printed as ordinary 15×10cm photographs, the images form a continuous line across two large gallery spaces. Google’s cameras were designed to map the world efficiently; Rafman finds poetry in their mistakes. The project turns Google’s mapping of the planet into an exercise in God-like voyeurism. Rafman is searching an inhuman image system for signs of the surreal and atypical. Some images recall what photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called the “ decisive moment ”: the instant when an ordinary scene becomes extraordinary. People are caught mid-fall, bodies are warped by digital glitches, animals appear improbably in the street. Rafman gives us fleeting confrontations, accidents and other small ruptures in everyday life. This concept is brilliantly extended in The Cleaners (2025), which invents conspiratorial narrative connections between disparate Street View images. The work is a haunting meditation on automated surveillance and the people caught within it. Rafman effectively sequences and fictionalises his Street View material into a video work about digital erasure. He takes the viewer through documented streets as they are progressively deleted, distorted and transformed. The hypnotic visuals are accompanied by an ominous voiceover that gives the journey the atmosphere of a dystopian thriller. Machine dreams Elsewhere, Rafman turns his attention from machine visions to machine-made avatars. Video works such as Punctured Sky (2021) and Main Stream Media Network (2025) are populated by computer-generated characters telling surreal, false-memory laden stories. They speak of memory, desire and existential angst as though burdened by rich inner lives, despite being avatars with no existence beyond their digital realities. Main Stream Media Network resembles an MTV-like television broadcast from a parallel universe. Watching from a couch surrounded by fake concrete ruins and floor prints of gamer trash, viewers watch AI-looking presenters and MTV-style interludes package the weirdness of internet subcultures for trashy consumption. It’s Samuel Beckett for the era of the AI companion. Keep watching For all its pessimism, Rafman’s work is remarkably enjoyable. When I first encountered his Dream Journal at the 2019 Venice Biennale – a feverish 94-minute video that turns video-game scenarios into a Boschian montage – I expected to spend five or ten minutes in its darkened installation space. I ended up staying for two hours. If nothing else, Rafman knows how to keep us looking. Small details often become more memorable than larger narratives: a stuttering avatar, a malformed body or an unexpectedly beautiful but fucked-up digital scene. Rafman does not stand outside internet culture to explain what’s wrong with it. Instead, he reproduces its methods of attraction, luring us with the same novelty and stimulation that keep us hooked. Like Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), which disparages consumerism and violence while being seemingly intoxicated by them, Rafman is fascinated by the social mores he condemns. His deployment of trolls, gamers, pornography and digital trash can look more like obsession than criticism. This uneasy proximity gives the work its weight, risking complicity to keep us inside the lures of digital culture that might be diminishing or damaging us. There is something of the digital sublime here. Traditionally, the sublime describes awe and fear before something overwhelmingly large or powerful. Rafman relocates that feeling to digital culture. His infinity is not a mountain range or raging ocean; it’s the endless scroll at our fingertips. Thoughtfully curated by Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer, Rafman’s labyrinthine lowbrow sagas are both crude and formally inventive, lulling us deep into dark-web digital babbling. Like a Goya of Google, Rafman fixates on distrust, paranoia and perverse pleasures. Everyone here is hooked on something and every obsession has its own rabbit hole, reproducing the brain-rot logic of commodified online engagement that is designed to keep us all looking. Jon Rafman: Memento Hikikomori is at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, until September 27.