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

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

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.

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.

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