Deadline for applications is Tuesday 18 February to attend our free art-writing course, in collaboration with Bergen Kunsthall and Office for Contemporary Art Norway. Sticky Drama with Oneohtrix Point Never , , production still. Resembling, at turns, the Wordsworthian sublime and Bataillean excess, the centripetal pull of the screen is made only more palpable by the hypnotic recurrence of a washing machine spinning violently into self-destruction.
Whether they , those virtual revellers, want to dance with Rafman is another matter. After all, the subaltern is an understandably tetchy crowd.
In , when Rafman made Still Life Betamale with the musician Daniel Lopatin, who goes by the name Oneohtrix Point Never, he premiered it on the anarchic bulletin board of 4chan. The presentation is friendlier here — the unnerving intimacy of solitary online viewing replaced by the familiar ritual of the public exhibition. Videos are variously and decadently installed: in a filing cabinet, a massage chair, a waterbed.
With fellow visitors, you can watch Mainsqueeze in the awkwardly satisfying comfort of a UV-lit ball pool. At a talk accompanying the exhibition, a sold-out audience of fashionable plussers nod in affirmation as Rafman waxes lyrical about memes, romanticism and collapsing real-virtual dichotomies.
A Man Digging , , video still. The fleeting nature of internet temporality means that it is connectivity, rather than content, which matters. There is a sense that Rafman is constantly between places, cultures, generations: the indignant geekery of net culture and the saccharine swank of the vernissage. Given all this, Rafman is an ideally positioned observer of the transition to digitality over the last few decades, an obsessive witness to the death of so many languages, cultures and formats — from video-game arcades actual places!
