Jon Rafman presents Dream Journal

Length: 86 minutes

Country: Canada

Dream Journal is a surrealist epic that examines the effects of information overload on the contemporary psyche while weaving together deep web vernacular and subconscious fantasies. The idea arose from the artist’s exercises in recording his dreams and animating them using hobbyist 3D software. In the film, two young female protagonists, one of them an archetypical millennial, and the other a kid-warrior, embark upon a psychedelic journey across a succession of hellscapes. The storyline reflects our experience of the internet, the erratic movement between web pages and hyperlinks. Disfigured faces, scenes of violence and torture, and macabre nightclubs offer parallels to Dante’s Inferno.

The film is scored by Oneohtrix Point Never and James Ferraro.

Rafman’s work focuses on technology and digital media, often using narrative to emphasize the ways in which they connect users back to society and history. Much of his work focuses on melancholy in modern social interactions, communities, and virtual realities (primarily Google Earth, Google Street View, and Second Life), while still bringing light to their beauty in a manner sometimes inspired by Romanticism. His videos and art utilize personal moments intended to reveal how pop culture ephemera and subcultures shape individual desires, and will often define those individuals in return.