Jon Rafman

Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)

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?