Poor Magic

Experimental narrative animation using hobbyist 3D animation and inspired by niche genres of computer-generated erotica.

An essay film in the tradition of experimental documentarians like Chris Marker or Harun Farocki, Remember Carthage takes the viewer on an epic journey in search of an abandoned resort town deep in the Sahara desert. However, one travels not through archival or personal images but through footage sourced from PS3 video games and Second Life, depicting ancient civilizations that seem at once familiar and totally fantastical.

Center of a three-channel video. Narration over computer-generated landscapes and figures.

Jon Rafman's short features computer-generated renders of the Twin Towers and a narration from Charles Baudelaire's "Le Guignon."

‘Still Life (Betamale)’ draws images from a range of online fetish sites, engaging with the theme of obsessive desire. The narrated version of the album track is immersed in the simultaneously captivating and disturbing world of internet subcultures.

A series of character studies by Jon Rafman, loosely inspired by reddit copypasta.

A compelling mix of attraction and repulsion, Mainsqueeze is entirely composed of footage found online, surfing the deep web.

Two samurais fight on a beach.

Legendary Reality is a science-fiction essay film that portrays the recollections of a solitary narrator imprisoned in his own mind. Using a non-linear structure that weaves together dreams and memory, Jon Rafman creates a stream-of-consciousness meditation on art, identity and time that draw on the work of Leonard Cohen. The film intercuts digitally processed found photos and 3D landscapes sourced from video games to tell the enigmatic voyage of one man's soul.

Dissonance of the digital and physical archive.

SHADOWBANNED (2018) uses the aesthetics of internet conspiracy theories to tell the story of an anonymous narrator on an enigmatic, transdimensional journey. The film unfolds across multiple universes wherein dreams are recycled waste products and meaning has been all but lost. The narrator arms himself with artificial memories of artificial pasts in order to protect himself from the future. SHADOWBANNED is a meditation on the perception of history, esoteric culture and the implosion of meaning in our hyper-accelerated times.

In ᖴᗩᑕIᗩᒪᔕ I, Jon Rafman alters a selection of these unwrapped head textures and animates the transformation in the style of VFX breakdown reels, typically used to showcase the special effects in movies and games.

A triptych video installation exploring collective consciousness, digital entities, and internet culture.

This single-channel video explores the effects of technology and information overload on the contemporary psyche. Set in a virtual tech-noir urban space populated by strange hybrids of non-humans and augmented people, part of the expansive, fractured narrative focuses on the continued adventures of Xanax Girl and her search for her companion—a hybrid dog/seal with the head of a boy—who has been abducted. The film, which arose from the artist’s daily practice of animating his dreams using hobbyist 3D software, weaves together deep-web imagery with hardboiled detective story tropes and repressed libidinal fantasies to create a nightmarish vision of an internet addict’s unconscious. The film features an original score by Oneohtrix Point Never and James Ferraro.

Tortured by a vague memory, a man interviews three women to see if he met them in the past.

Erysichthon is the final element in a trilogy of videos including Still Life (Betamale) and Mainsqueeze. Like the other videos of the series, it comprises found images from the web, user-created contents and video clips. These examples of subcultures are investigated through the theme of devouring and ingesting, used as a metaphor for our culture of consumption and our relationship to the virtual world.