Jon Rafman’s latest film isn’t an easy watch, and that’s how he likes it. The Canadian artist – whose work toys with digital technology to look at how the internet is ruining, or saving, our lives – is here to turn stomachs, and there’s plenty to make you queasy here.
This newest work is made with commercially available computer imagery software, so it looks like a secret version of early GTA that no one was meant to find. It’s the story of two kids, one born in a decadent, bourgeois, opulent mansion, the other in an abattoir for pig-shaped humans and then dumped in the trash. But their lives somehow take similar paths – through a world strewn with vomit, violence and mythical beasts – and it turns out that both are naturally talented virtual-reality gamers. When both end up in jail, they use their gaming prowess to navigate the hellscape of their world.
It’s a basic, classic narrative, but told with utter vileness. Like someone made a snuff film/coming-of-age movie in The Sims.
This isn’t a great work of cinema, it’s not going to win any Palmes d’Or. But its shouty, glitchy, lo-fi aesthetic works. Art these days is so clean and crisp and easy and approachable, but this really, really isn’t. It’s a coke-addled, violent, puerile, stupid, scatalogical, surreal exploration of online culture, of escaping your life through digital means, of losing ourselves in internet worlds.
Like someone made a snuff film in The Sims
This isn’t the online culture of crypto bros and Bored Apes, this is the digital realm of filthy nerds with Quaver-dust-encrusted keyboards, of offensive memes and tasteless forums. But it’s the work’s nasty ugliness in a world of ultra-clean aesthetics that makes it so appealing.
But what’s Rafman trying to say? What’s the point of all this gore and 8-bit horror? Part of me thinks he is just trying to see what he can get away with in an art gallery. I also think he’s saying that weirdness and perversion and filth and grime are everywhere, just beneath the surface, hidden away by corporations and capitalism, codified, modified and tidied up by them, but it doesn’t have to be like that, there’s another way, there’s freedom out there, and this is a chance to revel in the muck of society for once.
It’s filthy, disgusting and shocking, but so is scrolling through Twitter.
