Part live-action footage, video game sequences, simulated chat, poetic voiceover and virtual landscape, Neon Parallel 1996 is in Rafman’s own words an attempt at creating a “lost vaporwave classic.”

Neon Parallel 1996

Experimental narrative animation using hobbyist 3D animation and inspired by niche genres of computer-generated erotica.

Dream Journal, May 2016-February 2017

The film portrays a post-human dystopia featuring faceless 3-D avatars continuously tortured in abstract digital space, a terrifying image of a future where all humanity is uploaded to a virtual purgatory and endlessly abused.

Disasters Under the Sun

This single-channel video explores the effects of technology and information overload on the contemporary psyche. Set in a virtual tech-noir urban space populated by strange hybrids of non-humans and augmented people, part of the expansive, fractured narrative focuses on the continued adventures of Xanax Girl and her search for her companion—a hybrid dog/seal with the head of a boy—who has been abducted. The film, which arose from the artist’s daily practice of animating his dreams using hobbyist 3D software, weaves together deep-web imagery with hardboiled detective story tropes and repressed libidinal fantasies to create a nightmarish vision of an internet addict’s unconscious. The film features an original score by Oneohtrix Point Never and James Ferraro.

Dream Journal 2016–2019

An unseen narrator reunites with his old friend Joey Bernstein in the dingy back room of a comic and games store located in a dead mall. Bernstein asks if the narrator remembers their favorite childhood computer game, Punctured Sky, and informs him that all trace of the game has vanished from history. The narrator then embarks on a quest to uncover the truth behind the mysterious disappearance of Punctured Sky. Along the way, he must contend with a series of strange encounters on and offline and confront the precariousness of memory in the digital age.