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.

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.

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.

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 real, uncanny and foreign. Slop TV draws upon the history of 1980s and 1990s MTV, where programs such as Liquid Television (1991–95) presented experimental shorts, some of which launched indelible cultural touchstones like Beavis and Butt-head that helped shape the late-twentieth-century monoculture.

Finally, Rafman’s major new eight-channel video, Short Story 1 (2025) – excerpts of which also appear on the Main Stream Media Network channel – offers yet another, equally disquieting vision of reality. Built from writings uploaded daily by the anonymous Reddit user “shortstory1,” the video features individuals recounting episodes from their everyday life in a not-so-distant future.

The placid, corporate interview style they present to the viewer differs sharply from the dystopian nature of their narratives. We learn of societies in which emotions are forced, under penalty of torture; where psyches continually bounce from one body to the next, animal or human; and where you will float off the earth unless tethered to a fresh corpse.

Rafman’s transplantation of the shortstory1 universe onto actual bodies—actors who have given permission to use their likeness for AI “deepfake” manipulation (in no different a manner as models on stock footage sites)—sets up a rich, if worrisome, confrontation between the real and the virtual, between truth and artifice.