Vaporwave Aesthetics: Internet Nostalgia and the Utopian Impulse
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Peer-reviewed
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Cole, Ross https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6281-3099
Abstract
Vaporwave is a term that emerged during the early 2010s to describe a hip, wraithlike nexus of videos, memes, and experimental music on the Internet. This article traces vaporwave’s aesthetic back to the work of Daniel Lopatin and on through its deeply ambivalent relationship with consumer electronics and the mediascape of the 1980s. Vaporwave enjoys toying with a virtual, dehumanized utopia in which utopianism is dead, even as it defamiliarizes and rehabilitates the objects and disorientating non-places of postmodernity. The genre ultimately exemplifies what Svetlana Boym calls the “off-modern”––a form of critical reflection predicated on nostalgia.
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2381-4705
2381-4721
2381-4721
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5
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Project MUSE