Jon Rafman
Proof of Concept
Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles
February 15—April 12, 2025″>
Proof of Concept, Jon Rafman’s latest exhibition at Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles features a groundbreaking installation that reimagines television for the AI age.
Jon Rafman
Proof of Concept
Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles
February 15—April 12, 2025″>
Building on the artist’s long-standing exploration of digital culture and virtual worlds, Rafman has created a living, mutable stream of music videos, animations and experimental content—a hypnotic mirror of our digital era. Blending the collective viewing experience of MTV’s golden age with new technologies, Proof of Concept investigates our evolving relationship with artificial intelligence, nostalgia and media consumption.
Jon Rafman
Proof of Concept
Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles
February 15—April 12, 2025″>
Jon Rafman
Proof of Concept
Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles
February 15—April 12, 2025″>
Central to the exhibition is Rafman’s expansive video and installation Main Stream Media Network (2025), which sheathes the entire exhibition space, surrounding visitors with characters, settings and paraphernalia related to newly invented bands and musical genres.
Created with a range of video and AI-assisted technologies, the work succinctly illustrates two poles of Rafman’s practice that have structured so many of his projects: technological experimentation and narrative world-building.
Jon Rafman
Proof of Concept
Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles
February 15—April 12, 2025″>
On the screen, viewers encounter music videos broadcast through “Real Time Music,” an MSM Network subdivision, by Cloudy Heart, Iron Tears, Wicked Hatchet, Flux Arcana and others—examples of whom also appear on the exterior gallery windows in Cloutbomb (MSM Network) (2025), on merchandise, and in the first issue of MSM Magazine, also on view.
All were created with AI and reworked by Rafman and a team of collaborators, who produced not just their personae, but also entire albums, back stories and subcultures. Some, like Cloudy Heart, have already amassed a robust, and very real-world, Twitter and Spotify following.
Other segments of Main Stream Media Network include numerous animations of the TV channel’s perpetually morphing logo, as well as interstitial animations under the heading of “Slop TV.” (“AI Slop” is a frequent putdown for the preponderant imagery built from AI prompts). These feature both wordless and narrative encounters depicting situations that feel at once real, uncanny and foreign. Slop TV draws upon the history of 1980s and 1990s MTV, where programs such as Liquid Television (1991–95) presented experimental shorts, some of which launched indelible cultural touchstones like Beavis and Butt-head that helped shape the late-twentieth-century monoculture.
Rafman’s major new eight-channel video, Short Story 1 (2025) – excerpts of which also appear on the Main Stream Media Network channel – offers yet another, equally disquieting vision of reality. Built from writings uploaded daily by the anonymous Reddit user “shortstory1,” the video features individuals recounting episodes from their everyday life in a not-so-distant future.
Rafman offers no moral take on AI, instead deploying it as one tool among many available to him as he constructs alternative realities and storylines—and propels them into the “meat space” of the everyday world.
Jon Rafman, Proof of Concept –April 12th, 2025 Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles
About the artist
Jon Rafman (*1981, Montreal) lives and works in Los Angeles. Solo exhibitions include Whangarei Museum of Art, New Zealand (2024), Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2024), 180 The Strand, London (2023); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2022), Ordet, Milan (2022), La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2021), Centraal Museum, Utrecht (2020), Fondazione Modena Arti Visive (2018), Sprüth Magers, Berlin (2017), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2016), Westfälischer Kunstverein, Muenster (2016), Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal (2015) and The Zabludowicz Collection, London (2015). His works have been featured in prominent international group exhibitions, including KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2024), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (2023), Kunstmuseum Bonn (2021), Belgrade Biennale (2021), the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), Sharjah Biennial (2019 and 2017), the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2018), Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal (2017), K11 Art Shanghai (2017), Les Abattoirs, Toulouse (2017), Berlin Biennial 9 (2016), Manifesta Biennial for European Art 11 (2016), Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2015), Biennale de Lyon (2015) and Fridericianum, Kassel (2013).