Rafman Reimagines the Internet's Excesses as Art

Jon Rafman is an artist known for transforming the internet's excesses into seductive art. His latest mini-retrospective, Memento Hikikomori, at Brisbane's Institute of Modern Art combines memento mori and hikikomori concepts.

Memento Hikikomori explores people retreating from the physical world into digital ones, with Rafman depicting questionable humanity behind pixels. Born in Montreal in 1981, Rafman emerged in the international art world in the 2000s by mining internet culture's stranger corners before social media took over.

Rafman compares himself to a flâneur of the fringe web, highlighting corporate takeovers of the internet by Meta, Twitter, and Google. His subjects include gamers, trolls, online obsessives, and lonely digital wanderers in bleak but humorous worlds that feel fabricated, recalling Jean Baudrillard's postmodern concept of reality blending with images and simulations.