![\"85_AC05_Sorenson_Rafman_You](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/85_AC05_Sorenson_Rafman_You-are-standing-in-an-open-field-Gale-scaled.jpg\")
You Are Standing in an Open Field (Gale)<\/em><\/em>, 2015.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Strictly within the narratives of his screen works, Rafman often summons the attitude of a melancholic fl\u00e2neur. Yet his dreamy, Benjaminian arcades are offset by the architecture of game coding,3<\/sup><\/a> 3 <\/a> - See Catherine Russell, \u201cWalter Benjamin and the Virtual: Politics, Art, and Mediation in the Age of Global Culture,\u201d Transformations, (<\/em>November 15, 2007), http:\/\/www.transformationsjournal.org\/journal\/issue_15\/editorial.shtml.<\/span> the windows to his world more attuned to Microsoft than Alberti\u2019s classic treatise.4<\/sup><\/a> 4 <\/a> - See Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft<\/em> (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2006), 11\u200a\u2013\u200a90.<\/span> Thus Codes of Honor<\/em> (2011) sketches a like-minded homage to arcade gaming, combining play sequences with a film noir-esque voice-over, telling us of the artist\u2019s devotion to coin-operated booths in the quasi-dandy tone of teenage suburban angst. The trilogy produced between 2013 and 2015\u200a\u2014\u200aconsisting of Still Life (Betamale)<\/em>, Mainsqueeze<\/em> and ERYSICHTHON<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200amix footage found on YouTube and darker recesses of the deep web. Here cosplay suicides skillfully mash up against Futanari porn (manga chicks with dicks) and other flavours of shock and horror, easily kept at an ironic distance by media-savvy viewers much bombarded by ad campaigns on a daily basis.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Whether Rafman intends to disturb his audiences or not is still up for debate, but he does succeed at metonymically turning geek culture into art when exposing their favourite commodities in You Are Standing in an Open Field<\/em> (2015). Fast-food leftovers, cigarette butts and the like are compounded in and around the cracks of grey computer keyboards, and set against neoclassical paintings of shipwrecks, waterfalls or bushy landscapes displayed on a flat monitor, or more bluntly pasted as wallpaper behind the rubble of consumer waste. Thick transparent resin is brushed over these photoshopped prints, perhaps to overstate the flip from virtual images onto the realms of painterly objects, or even to confirm the take\u00adover of high art circles by geek royalty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rafman\u2019s accumulations of retrofitted computer imagery and trashy commodities also successfully break the usually strong ties between technology and futurism. These digitally enhanced works have refreshingly little to do with science fiction, so to better resonate with our contemporary yet immaterial times. While Foucault\u2019s baby-boomer rhetoric of panoptic architecture might have interpreted the artist\u2019s screen addiction as a form of self-inflicted incarceration, here Slavoj \u017di\u017eek\u2019s free-association of God and gamers5<\/sup><\/a> 5 <\/a> - See Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, \u201c<\/em>The Reality of the Virtual,\u201d Youtube video, 39:33, posted by Casper B\u00f8rretzen, August 20, 2012, accessed July 7, 2015, https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch? v=RnTQhIRcrno.<\/span> should more closely encapsulate Rafman\u2019s position. The psycho\u00adanalytic philosopher proposes a parallel between the pixelated fields at the outskirts of game storylines and the blurry quarks at the edge of particle physics\u200a\u2014\u200awhere neither game designers nor deity had anticipated their subjects to wander out so far, and did not bother to render in such details. Rafman\u2019s work at the MACM suggests this is precisely what he is doing, exposing the fringes of both the imaginary and the real, seeking moments that have not yet conceptually or metaphysically reached optimal resolution. <\/p>\n![\"85_AC05_Sorenson_Rafman_Still](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/85_AC05_Sorenson_Rafman_Still-life-scaled.jpg\")
Still Life (Betamale)<\/em>, 2013.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n