View of Harbor

2018 - Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)

8:00 minutes

Jon Rafman

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View of Harbor by Jon Rafman mines the latent cultural imaginary surrounding climate change and society’s collective death drive. In contrast with other recent works that aim to use VR or AR to visualize the impact of climate change, Rafman’s work instead presents the rising sea as an almost anthropomorphized foe, within which strange human-like bodies lurk as the viewer is swept into a kind of watery hellscape. This strong element of fantasy leads the viewer to wonder what type of wish fulfillment is at play—what desire for the museum to be inundated, for the existing social order to be washed away by the deluge?

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Jon Rafman’s practice over the past decade has been marked by in-depth explorations of digital culture. Modeling himself as a kind of Benjamin-esque figure, Rafman has sought out, and immersed himself in, the marginal and ephemeral—from Google Street View images to vorarephilia. Gaming worlds have played a central role in these investigations, and Rafman has tackled the latent romanticism within these as well the “beta male” as a character type associated with gaming spaces—often self-reflexively using his own unconscious as source material. Through these developments, he has cast light on the seismic cultural shifts associated with the internet that paved the way for the dominance of platforms and the emergence of an internet-fueled right-wing.

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Colors:

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• virtual_reality.n.01
• climate.n.01
• environmental.a.02
• fantasy.n.02
• dystopia.n.01