Vaporwave
Vaporwave is the first major art aesthetic born on the internet. Emerging from music micro-scenes around 2010-2011 (the album cover of Macintosh Plus' Floral Shoppe - a bust, palm trees, pink and teal - is the ur-image), it repurposed the commercial imagery of 1980s-90s consumer capitalism: early-web graphics, Windows 95 chrome, Japanese text, Greek and Roman statuary, tropical sunsets, dead malls, and VHS glitches. The mood is ambiguous - equal parts affection and critique, dream and hauntology - and the visual grammar spread far beyond music into graphic design, fashion, and game art. As an aesthetic born of aggregation and remix, it also deliberately resists clean authorship: its canon is anonymous GIFs as much as named works.
Defining characteristics
- Nostalgia for 1980s-90s corporate and consumer imagery
- Glitch artifacts: VHS tracking, scan lines, JPEG compression errors
- Classical statuary, palms, neon gradients, teal-and-pink palettes
- Japanese katakana and corporate logos as decorative motifs
- Surreal, empty spaces: malls, pools, lobbies, sunsets
- Internet-native remix culture; deliberate authorial anonymity
Key figures
- Macintosh Plus (Vektroid) (active from 2011) — Floral Shoppe (2011) defined the visual and sonic vocabulary
- Saint Pepsi / Skylar Spence (active from 2012) — Pop-facing strain of the aesthetic
- Blank Banshee (active from 2013) — Merged the aesthetic with trap production and 3D vapor visuals
Example works
- Floral Shoppe (album art) — Vektroid (as Macintosh Plus) (2011)
- Blank Banshee 0 — Blank Banshee (2013)
- Chuck Person's Eccojams Vol. 1 — Daniel Lopatin (2010)
Sources
- Vaporwave - Wikipedia encyclopedia
- Hauntology - Wikipedia encyclopedia
- Hauntology (music) - Wikipedia encyclopedia