Mom’s nightmare: John Rafman resurrects gaming rooms from the 90s.
Photo: Jon Rafman/Sprüth Magers
The center of Berlin was »historically reconstructed« in the 90s. In order to sweep German history under the carpet, a kind of Prussian theme park was eagerly built and renovated, which is almost completely privatized territory. People with no interest in tourism, consumption or paid work seem rather out of place in Friedrichstadt.
In a pavilion in the park of the Kronprinzenpalais, where Erich Honecker organized cocktail parties in GDR times, there is an art association that, like the building, calls itself the Schinkel Pavilion. On September 15th, dozens of cool kids, freshly hatched from the internet, could be seen here forming a long line in front of the entrance, only to sit inside sweating in the dark watching videos. Videos that look like computer games from the time when the young visitors were still children.
It is the opening of the exhibition »Egregors and Grimoires« by US artist Jon Rafman: the title refers to metaphysical beings who hallucinate people collectively, and magic books in which spells for conjuring up such figures can be found. In the age of digitization of all possible areas of life in a completely enlightened or sedated society, mythical figures return through mass psychoses in Rafman’s cosmos. The computer magic of virtual worlds is becoming more and more real.
Rafman became famous, among other things, for indiscreet and sad pictures of Google Earth, which he collected on a blog and which can still be viewed on the Internet (www.9-eyes.com). He also filmed his dream diaries using public domain 3 programs and sent »Kool-Aid-Man«, the mascot of the beverage brand Kool Aid, into the virtual world »Second Life«, in which normally only players behind human avatars interact with each other.
Anyone who enters the ground floor of the Schinkel Pavilion these days can first grab an exhibition poster for the teenager’s room and then stare at a large image that makes Mom’s nightmare come true: a littered table with a screen and keyboard, everything is full of packaging for electronic entertainment media, action figures , cigarette butts and fast food boxes. A hidden object of colorful brand lettering and signs of neglect and the precarious omnipotence of thought that grips people who have been captured by their computers.
The first highlight of the exhibition, the video work »Punctured Sky«, runs on the back of the hidden object. A narrator, whose body we never see, after meeting a seriously ill ex-boyfriend, maybe his only one, sets out in search of an online role-playing game that they spent countless fulfilling hours playing in their youth. But “Punctured Sky”, also the title of the game, cannot be found. No gaming forum can help, no old game database knows it, the narrator feels “gaslit by the universe”, duped by the universe.
Then he gets a message from a forum user who wants to meet him in the multiplayer online version of the gangster epic »GTA IV«. There, in the world of »GTA IV«, he shoots the protagonist the address of an industrial park on a container with a submachine gun.
Rafman built a world where the unseen protagonist moves through still images. The world is 2D and in rather poor resolution. You rarely see each other there – if you do, then in Internet cafes, shops for gamers or in parking lots. People have pig noses, movements are fidgety. Each voice sounds as if reading a script with great exhaustion. The hunt for the lost experience of playful full-time employment in an RPG takes place in a world of decals and sloppy backdrops that were state of the art in the 90s. It seems as if the motifs of digital loneliness and a gambled Incel youth are so shabby that only outdated technology is appropriate – and that also brings a kind of digital nostalgia with it: You might have had in game environments that are based on very similar technical Prerequisites based, fun times.
A triptych by Rafman hangs in a narrow corridor of the Schinkel Pavilion, on which images found in the depths of the Internet are alternately displayed. Disgust and curiosity, Christian image composition and the calm, alternating character of video advertising space become one here. The second major video work, which lasts longer than an hour, is »Minor Daemon (Vol. 1)«. We follow the story of two boys who end up in the same jail: Billy is the unplanned child of a crime boss and accidentally has a guest gore by a bull at a Dionysian spring break party; Minor Daemon himself is born in a slaughterhouse, fished out of the garbage by a child catcher, and sold off to an old brat who trains kids to play some kind of brutal virtual reality Quidditch.
This gladiator fight brings the boys together in prison as they try to break free from captivity, which fails and ends in death and devil. There’s non-stop puking, shitting, fucking, slaughtering in this post-apocalyptic coming-of-age film that looks like mid-noughties video games. Until you eventually get used to it and follow a relatively consistent plot in which fathers are murdered like in Oedipus and faces are transplanted like in the film »Face/Off«.
Since Rafman’s works are not quite up to date with the technology of their time, they depict something decaying and ephemeral in a repulsive and at the same time deadly sad way: the animation programs and game engines of the childhood of those who are likely to see these videos today are obsolete. The scrap penultimate generation of consoles only offers home for leprous intermediate beings. The lifeworlds are atomized, interpersonal relationships are a joke.
Without explicitly tackling political issues, Rafman’s video worlds offer an insight into the hell of a thoroughly digitized consumer society that shuts itself down with substitute orgies. In »Punctured Sky«, sex takes place in the toilets of poisoned basements in half-empty office complexes; Billy’s childhood sweetheart from “Minor Daemon (Vol. 1)” later prostitutes herself as a dominatrix for old men with amputated legs and arms who want to play dogs in latex costumes. After a visit to the Schinkel Pavilion, if you stroll through the almost deserted Berlin-Mitte, you can either catch yourself mistaking night owls walking by for video game characters. Or one can ask whether Rafman shouldn’t be a little to blame for not even attempting to break his own picture hells and instead just settles into shock, numbness and alienation almost at ease.
Jon Rafman, »Egregors and Grimoires«, until December 31, Schinkel-Pavillon, Berlin.
