Gallery page for Jon Rafman’s LA exhibition 'Proof of Concept'—an installation streaming mutable music videos, animations and experimental digital content.
Jon Rafman’s latest exhibition at the Los Angeles gallery features a groundbreaking 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 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.
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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.
Created with a range of video and AI-assisted technologies, the work succinctly illustrates two poles of Rafman’s practice that have structured so many of his projects: technological experimentation and narrative world-building.
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.
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Other segments of Main Stream Media Network include numerous animations of the TV channel’s perpetually morphing logo, as well as interstitial animations under the heading of “Slop TV.” (“AI Slop” is a frequent putdown for the preponderant imagery built from AI prompts). These feature both wordless and narrative encounters depicting situations that feel at once r
