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.

Jon Rafman (b. 1981 in Montréal; lives in Los Angeles) is an artist, filmmaker, and essayist. He studied philosophy and literature at McGill University in Montréal and earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. At the heart of his work lies the question of how technologies shape our perception and consciousness. His works are exhibited internationally; recent solo exhibitions have taken place at the Centraal Museum Utrecht (2020), the Fondazione Modena Arti Visive (2018), and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2016), among others.