{
  "id": 6244462,
  "title": "Like a Goya of Google, artist Jon Rafman fixates on the internet’s perverse pleasures",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/08/like-a-goya-of-google-artist-jon-rafman-fixates-on-the-internets",
  "topic": "world",
  "section": "World",
  "published": "2026-09-08T04:50:44.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "The Conversation AU",
    "slug": "the-conversation-au",
    "url": "https://theconversation.com/like-a-goya-of-google-artist-jon-rafman-fixates-on-the-internets-perverse-pleasures-289807"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Jon Rafman, the artistic prodigy from Montreal, has taken the internet's dark underbelly and transformed it into captivating art. His current exhibition, Memento Hikikomori, at Brisbane's Institute of Modern Art, explores the themes of mortality and social withdrawal by merging two concepts: memento mori and hikikomori, a Japanese term for extreme social isolation. Rafman's works depict individuals retreating from the physical world to the digital realm, revealing a questionable humanity hidden within the pixels.\n\nBorn in 1981, Rafman quickly gained international recognition in the 2000s for his exploration of fringe web culture. He compares the internet's corporate takeover to the transformation of 19th-century Paris under Baron Haussmann, illustrating how digital giants like Meta, Twitter, and Google have reshaped our online experiences. His subjects range from gamers and trolls to digital wanderers and loners, all portrayed in bleak yet humorous settings that are as seductive as late-night '90s television.\n\nRafman's fascination with artificial intelligence and digital culture is evident in his ongoing project, The Nine Eyes of Google Street View. The series scrubs Google Street View for accidental images, including accidents, violence, and moments of unexpected beauty, transforming Google's mapping technology into a tool for voyeuristic exploration. In The Cleaners (2025), Rafman creates a conspiracy-laden narrative connecting disparate Street View images, offering a haunting meditation on automated surveillance and the people trapped within it.\n\nRafman's video works, such as Main Stream Media Network (2025), delve deeper into machine-made avatars and the stories they tell. These AI-generated characters embody surreal, false-memory-laden narratives, exploring themes of memory, desire, and existential angst from a digital perspective. The artist's works, like Samuel Beckett's for the era of AI companions, invite viewers into a world of digital erasure, manipulation, and fascination.",
  "summary": "Memento Hikikomori is an intoxicating mini-retrospective of Canadian artist Jon Rafman, now on at Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art.",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}