Neon Parc

The title of his show ‘Memento Hikikomori’ combines two ideas, memento mori, remembering our mortality, and hikikomori, Japan’s reclusive adolescent hermits. Emblematic of our contemporary moment, and our relationships to film, television, music, culture, hikikomori have shut themselves off from the world. For Rafman they have something in common with ascetics who cultivate detachment from earthly desires—a refusal of meatspace. They instead create online worlds within worlds, spiralling into fascinating niches, atomised experiences.

Rafman’s show features his ongoing project ‘Nine Eyes’ (2008–), where he trawls through billions of Google Street View photographs to find poetic glitches and moments of human vulnerability and surreal vulgarity that rupture the cold, machinic mapping of cities and suburbs.

‘Main Stream Media Network’ (2025–6) is an evolving, AI-generated TV channel, full of slop for the brainrot generation. An ambitious act of world building, it features a cast of distinctive pop stars, 3D-animated cartoons with inscrutable narratives, and disturbing documentary short stories. It’s as if we have tuned into an MTV broadcast from a parallel dimension. Rafman’s use of AI is not moralistic or didactic, but curious. It shows how nostalgia feeds into generative AI models, revealing the libidinal darkness of youth culture.

‘Memento Hikikomori’ also includes AI-generated paintings, reclusive video-viewing pods, and key Rafman videos—including ‘Punctured Sky’ (2021), ‘Still Life’ (Betamale) (2013), and ‘Kool-Aid Man in Second Life’ (2008–11)—contending with the technological mediation of memory, the formation of selfhood and identity, and the unconscious of collective online experience.

Curated by Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer.