Jon Rafman (Canadian, b. 1981) is a video and installation artist who mines the internet for user-generated images, video clips and screenshots to explore how digital media reshapes identity, memory and behavior.,He studied philosophy and literature at McGill University in Montreal before earning an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and lives and works in Montreal.
He first gained attention for 9 Eyes, a project that curates uncanny, unplanned images captured by Google Street View's camera cars into a body of art.Between 2013 and 2015 he made a trilogy of videos — Still Life (Betamale), Mainsqueeze and Erysichthon — that explore internet subcultures through user-created content, with Erysichthon premiering at the 13th Biennale de Lyon.In 2015 the Zabludowicz Collection in London gave him his first major UK solo show, staging his videos inside sets including a ball-pit hot tub and a padded “squeeze chair” so viewers could watch them in immersive physical settings. The show included Sticky Drama (2015), his first feature-style film, made with Warp Records and musician Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) and shot with more than 35 London children acting out a live-action-roleplay fantasy.
In 2016 the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam gave him a solo show titled “I have ten thousand compound eyes and each is named suffering”, and that year he also presented the Oculus Rift piece View of Pariser Platz at the 9th Berlin Biennale.,In 2022 he held concurrent solo shows at Sprüth Magers and Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin.His work turned increasingly toward AI-generated imagery, including the visuals he made for Kanye West and Ty Dolla $ign's 2024 album Vultures, built from prompts that push the software toward visual incoherence rather than realism.In a 2025 roundtable on post-AI art with Avery Singer, Simon Denny, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, he said that “working with AI means living with constant change”, and that “what I made with AI five years ago feels more distant from today than daguerreotypes were from later photography”.He also examined the ethics of Google's camera cars in the exhibition “Report a Concern - the Nine Eyes Archives” at the Louisiana Museum of Art in Copenhagen.