Join us at the IMA for our first On Rafman lectures—a series of short presentations by academics, artists, curators, and writers that unpick the central themes of John Rafman: Memento Hikikomori.
Tara Heffernan Chaos, Folly, Slop: Jon Rafman’s Hells
Heffernan contends that artists today are ineffectual. They are exemplars of the liberal subject—bound by managerial etiquette and incoherent pluralism, numbed to sexual deviancy and vice. Jon Rafman is a notable exception. Dredging subjects and stories from the generative cultural cesspits of 4chan and Reddit to produce profound AI slop and other forms of degraded imagery, his expansive worlds are best understood in comparison to the likes of Bruegel and Goya. Like them, he transforms scenes of everyday life and cultural detritus into panoramic visions of collective folly, cruelty, and moral collapse. As Robert Hughes quipped in his monograph Heaven and Hell in Western Art (1968), ‘truth is not dishonoured by the “base” shapes it takes to make itself visible to the eyes of the profane’. Rather than reading Rafman simply as a chronicler of internet culture or as a digital flaneur, Heffernan argues that his work reconstructs a symbolic language for evil. His hells animate forces illegible to the clinical, facts-focused subject, incapable of comprehending the chaos of our present moment and the powers and principalities at work.
Stephanie Berlangieri Outsourcing Cognition, Automating Culture: Contemporary Art and Technologies of Thought
Against a backdrop of generative AI, neurotechnology, and increasingly sophisticated attempts to model and intervene in the brain, cognition has become a contested terrain. Berlangieri considers a shift from technologies that shape the conditions of thought to those that increasingly participate in cognitive processes themselves. Through examples from contemporary art, she examines outsourcing and capture of cognition, attempts to read and reconstruct neural activity, and challenges to the idea of the autonomous human mind. She also considers what these developments mean for cultural production, as authorship becomes distributed across humans and computational systems and automated culture expands in volume and speed.
-
Tara Heffernan is an art historian and critic. Her writing focuses on modernism, the avant-garde, conceptual art, and the lineages of cultural bohemianism and the New Left. In 2024, she judged the National Portrait Gallery’s Darling Portrait Prize and guest-edited Un Magazine 18.1. She is working on an anthology of writings on kitsch and is Artistic and Editorial Director of the Palm Springs School for Social Research, a para-academic institution dedicated to revitalising Frankfurt School theory. She recently submitted her PhD thesis at the University of Melbourne on the postwar Italian artist Piero Manzoni.
Stephanie Berlangieri is a curator and writer based in Naarm/Melbourne, where she is Curator Research at Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA). Her research engages with digital technology, labour, and formations of subjectivity, and their impact on contemporary social life. Her current project examines how recent advancements in artificial intelligence and neurotechnologies are redistributing cognitive processes across human and technical systems. Her recent exhibitions include Knowing Otherwise (MUMA, 2026), Desire Is a Machine (Institute of Modern Art, 2025), Stolon Press: Flat Earth (MUMA, 2025), and Duty of Care (Institute of Modern Art and Griffith University Art Museum, Meanjin/Brisbane, 2024). Berlangieri has written for Art Monthly Australasia, ArtAsiaPacific, Artist Profile, and Art and Australia.
