Jon Rafman: Proof of Concept / Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles
- LA Art Documents
- May 3
- 2 min read
Jon Rafman
Proof of Concept
February 15–May 3, 2025
Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles
Proof of Concept by Jon Rafman features an installation that reimagines television for the AI age. Building on the artist’s long-standing exploration of digital culture and virtual worlds, Rafman has created a living, mutable stream of music videos, animations and experimental content – a hypnotic mirror of our digital era. Blending the collective viewing experience of MTV’s golden age with new technologies, Proof of Concept investigates our evolving relationship with artificial intelligence, nostalgia and media consumption.
Central to the exhibition is Rafman’s expansive video and installation Main Stream Media Network (2025), which sheathes the entire exhibition space, surrounding visitors with characters, settings and paraphernalia related to newly invented bands and musical genres.
On the screen, viewers encounter music videos broadcast through “Real Time Music,” an MSM Network subdivision, by Cloudy Heart, Iron Tears, Wicked Hatchet, Flux Arcana and others—examples of whom also appear on the exterior gallery windows in Cloutbomb (MSM Network) (2025), on merchandise, and in the first issue of MSM Magazine, also on view.
All were created with AI and reworked by Rafman and a team of collaborators, who produced not just their personae, but also entire albums, back stories and subcultures. Some, like Cloudy Heart, have already amassed a robust, and very real-world, Twitter and Spotify following.
Rafman offers no moral take on AI, instead deploying it as one tool among many available to him as he constructs alternative realities and storylines—and propels them into the “meat space” of the everyday world.
Also on view, on an array of early 2000s CRT monitors, are creations by two of MSM Network’s stars, Cloudy Heart and Iron Tears. A young, emo ingenue, Cloudy Heart appears in videos set to ambient music that is meant to encourage studying or sleeping; she stares pensively out train and ship windows, rendered in the pixelated style of early video games.
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