Vaporwave and Aesthetics
Vaporwave is an art movement, born in the early 2010s, that often toys with feelings of nostalgia, dream states, decay, the mundane, longing for pasts that never existed, and for futures that will never arrive. It is sometimes viewed as a meme, sometimes doused in irony, and sometimes interpreted as a serious critique of capitalism. It can be all of (or noneof) these things.
The music of vaporwave samples sounds from the 80s and 90s; and processes them to sound like they're coming from degraded VHS tapes, from distant shopping malls, and from fading memories. Pop songs, ad jingles, weather channel muzak, and corporate training materials are slowed-down, distorted, drenched in reverb, and layered alongside warbly synths and flutters of dissonance, leaving the listener with an almost warm-fuzzy feeling.
The visual art associated with vaporwave intertwines vintage computer graphics, pop culture references, pink and teal gradients, classic video games, hazy skylines, all too-perfect shopping mall interiors, late night 1980s television ads, corporate jargon, Greek busts, and Japanese. Often, these elements are filtered and glitched, appearing as relics from a future we dreamed of -- before that dream faded from memory.
The vaporwave aesthetic extends beyond the music, the album covers, and the music videos... to the text itself.
Vaporwave text is a strange poetry. Artist names, album titles, track titles, and bios contain text that serves to amplify many of the feelings that vaporwave music and visual art draw out of us.
Source:
Vaporwave and Unicode Analysis
What is vaporwave? Vaporwave is an art movement, born in the early 2010s, that often toys with feelings of nostalgia, dream states, decay…
Vaporwave and Unicode Analysis | Hacker News
See also:
Vaporwave
Vaporwave is a music genre branching from electronic hypnagogic pop, which was what much of its music was labelled as before the term Vaporwave was coined, but the unique and iconic visual aesthetic cultivated alongside it is now, debatably, more popular and recognizable than the music itself. Vapor…
All of this just has me thinking, with a smile on my face:
World Wide Web... keep on keeping on.