Jon Rafman's Main Stream Media closes at K21 on Sept. 27
Ten days to catch the survey of the artist who filed the internet's dream
"There is no home," Jon Rafman said about the internet, comparing our desultory scrolling and clicking to the final destinations in epic stories such as The Odyssey. Dream Journal 2016–2019 feels that way, jumping from sequence to sequence through Rafman's interpretation of dreams in the hands of amateur internet animators. A nearly wordless film assembled from the internet's half-formed fantasies, scored by James Ferraro and Oneohtrix Point Never: Dream Journal 2016–2019 is Jon Rafman's most sustained answer to the question of what the internet dreams about. "It's a cautionary tale," says Rafman. "It reveals a consciousness where there is no historical context."
From Dream Journal ’16–’17, an earlier chapter of the serial (excerpt, muted), courtesy Sprüth Magers. Watch with sound on Vimeo.
The excerpt K21 posted is why this matters now: the film anchors Main Stream Media, the first comprehensive survey of Rafman's work in a German museum, and the show closes September 27. Rafman describes the material as the collective unconscious of the internet — “the desires, anxieties and half-formed fantasies of a world increasingly experienced online.” The survey turns the basement of K21 in Düsseldorf into an immersive media landscape spanning nearly two decades: the Betamale Trilogy, Nine Eyes of Google Street View, and Mainstream Media Network (2025), an AI-generated music-television channel that restages the MTV of the 1980s as a fiction of virtual pop stars and invented fan communities.
As a games-adjacent artist, one of the pieces that made Rafman's name was a machinima travelogue — Kool-Aid Man leading tours through Second Life's strangest builds — and Nine Eyes treated Google's camera car like a roaming NPC collecting accidental tableaux. It's the game-engine gaze pointed at the real world, and Dream Journal pushes it inward, casting avatar-like figures in a detective story that never resolves. We've chased the same instinct from the other side, back when we imagined the apocalypse of the day Google Street View stood still.
If Düsseldorf is reachable before the 27th, go — the show is the argument in full. If not, a first monographic publication accompanies the exhibition: the version of the survey that outlives its own deadline.
Stills from Dream Journal ’16–’17. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers.
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