Jon Rafman

You Are Standing In An Open Field (Ideal Landscape) is a new scene in a series of messy desktops showing portraits of absent users. In the background of the rubble on the table, instead of a computer screen as a desktop background, float images of romantic or campy paintings showing heroic panoramic views of nature. The hodgepodge of junk, books, documents, personal items and brief notes is a stereotypical portrait of its absent owner: perhaps the unseen subject is a woman who has recently given birth, a blue-collar beer drinker, a writer or journalist engrossed in work on an article, a teenage boy smoking and feasting on fast food and sugary soda, a nocturnal kid in need of vitamin D, producing electronic music on a rainbow-coloured keyboard, or a girl hoarding fashion magazines, make-up, scented candles and bath bombs... As in the other portraits in this series, the protagonist of the Ideal Landscape has lost control of his daily life as he drifts into the sublime state of online existence, convinced that he is transcending physical limitations while finding himself trapped in a pile of rubbish.

A flickering screen, an unknown yet familiar ’80s game show like tune, and the view of a nighttime highrise landscape set the mood in Neon Parallel 1996. Part live-action footage, video game sequences, simulated chat, poetic voiceover and virtual landscape, Neon Parallel 1996 is an attempt at creating a “lost vaporwave classic.”

It’s like a vague memory of a time gone by, one that’s slipping through our fingers as it’s unfolding, while human desire continues to lead us through a world that seems only partially graspable. As a fragment of a chat exchange reveals, we are left trying to simulate in order to navigate our surroundings. 

spider_: Why are you here?

ang3l: I came to retrace my steps.