User:Pleun/grad/thesis

Working Title

Exploring the micro internetculture Vaporwave as a Minor Literature.

Main Question

How can Vaporwave manifest as a 21st century Minor Literature?
Will Vaporwave manifest as the language of the future?
Will Vaporwave be reappropiated as the language of the alt-right?

Outline

Introduction

The analogy of the bombastic void.
The Post-Apocalyptic Shopping Mall
The allegory of the frog and the sadboy

Conclusion

Introduction

At the start of this decennium in the midst of global capitalism and an endless data stream, a new subculture emerged from the depths Seapunk had just drowned in: Vaporwave, or more suitably stylised: v a p o r w a v e. Seapunk itself was a heavily aestheticized electronic musical genre with a rich visual culture revolving around aquatic-themed 3D renders and nineties nostalgia. It was the first internet-born musical and visual subculture to break out into mainstream media, but it would prove to be short-lived. Its height in popularity simultaneously meant its death, when in one week a new music video for the song 'Atlantis' of pop and rap princess Azealia Banks came out and Rihanna gave a performance on SNL, both with aesthetics heavily influenced by Seapunk. Azealia and Rihanna weren't meant to ride dolphins on a cyan glittery ocean any more than any other well-established face of musical capitalism was. The subculture wasn't meant to go mainstream, so when it did it immediately fizzled out.

It was commonly theorised Vaporwave would have a similar faith, so much so that “Vaporwave is dead” itself became a meme. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. In 2017 its 'post-apocalyptic mall' aesthetic is still very much around and is still gaining popularity. Where Seapunk failed to survive its own success, Vaporwave seems to have a little bit more to say.

Born in 2010, the micro internet subculture Vaporwave began as an “ironic critique of global capitalism in the form of sample based infomercials and home shopping networks”^[1] that used the empty promises of capitalism as a critique by heavily overusing brand A E S T H E T I C in combination with frequently returning and often nostalgic icons like the VHS tape.

Vaporwave is fascinating in the ways it's constantly contradicting itself. The act of doublethink seems to be based at the core of the movement. Doublethink is a term coined by George Orwell in his novel 1984 by which he meant a simultaneous belief in two contradicting ideas. The subculture is nostalgic but futuristic, criticising but idolising capitalism, idealising a zoned-out state with its endless GIF-loops, but clashing that with attention-grabbing heavy aesthetics.

Vaporwave creates its own hyperreality where you enter a world of pastel perfect plastic, LED lit busts of Helios – the Greek god of the sun – and cyan-blue waterfalls seen on old monitors with Windows '95 left after an apocalypse in the Japanese city of Kyoto. You can only see the criticism in a second glance – beyond the flashy images and the post-apocalyptic mall music.

In 2015 the subculture completely transformed into the subject of its own critique when MTV and Tumblr started to incorporate the visual style in their redesigned identities. This is when the prophecy was thought to be fulfilled and the movement was declared dead by many within their online community. Thanks to a wider spread base of artists and a more adaptable style, Vaporwave not only survived, but it is actually more popular than ever. Simultaneously also thanks to this widespread base its intentions are becoming blurrier. In 2017 we are at a crossroad again because of that same adaptability. Recently it has been reappropriated to convey messages of the alt-right.

MAIN QUESTION: How could vaporwave ...

In this thesis, I will be looking at a few aspects of Vaporwave that are most pressing. In the first chapter, I will look at why Vaporwave is so successful via theory on hyperreality and our indulging in it. In the second one, I want to analyse a few returning icons to see how Vaporwave communicates. I will be looking at how what I described in chapter one is showing within the culture. In the last chapter, I will describe the reappropriation of the alt-right and how that influences the subculture.

This thesis will be focussed on the visual language of Vaporwave over Vaporwave as a musical genre. Furthermore, there will be gaps concerning the alt-right movement and .... (ACHTERAF AANVULLEN)

CHAPTER 1: The analogy of a bombastic void

Welcome to the void

フローラルの専門店

The tiles on the floor are a hard pastel pink checkered with black. The mere sight of it tells me I must be close. I am wandering through big empty neon-lit halls searching for the Floral Shoppe. The walls are painted with the same pastel pink as the big squares on the floor. In the distance, I see a cityscape through a window. Or maybe it is just a painting on the wall. With the appearance of Helios’ bust on my left, I know I have arrived. But something alienates me. It is the bust. It has no face.^[2]

"See, it's a crazy world we're living in" sings Jamiroquai in his song Virtual Insanity in 1996 about the seemingly endless virtual world we wander and get lost in. In the chorus of the song, he argues that we are governed by our love for twisting the intended use of new technology and therefore our futures are in hyperreality. Later in the song, he predicts the apocalypse, with lyrics about how this has got to change before "No more will we be".

Futures made of that virtual insanity now,
Always seem to, be governed by our love,
For useless, twisting, of that new technology"

The term hyperreality was coined fifteen years earlier in the text Simulacra and Simulation (1981) by Jean Baudrillard. He argues symbols and signs replaced reality to the point we can't distinguish the real from simulation anymore. These simulacra are no copies of reality but are real in their own right. They construct perceived reality while preceding reality. The hyperreal has no connection with the real, nor does it try to hide reality.

He describes four stages of representation, of which hyperreality occurs in the last two stages. (1) The first one is a copy of the original of which we believe it is truthful. It is a direct reflection of the original work. (2) The second stage is a corrupt copy or a perversion of reality. The image is unfaithful but it still hints at reality. (3) The next stage is a copy without an original. It claims to be truthful and show reality, but it is no representation. (4) And lastly, the fourth one has no connection to reality whatsoever. At this stage, the hyperreal is equivalent to the real, as the hyperreal doesn't need to pretend to be real anymore. The hyperreal needs to prove itself only in hyperreal terms.

Zizek, 9/11, woke us up? Hypernormalisation

In this chapter, I am going to describe how vaporwave came to be, but looking to society, not the artist themselves. Via writing about hyperreality, and how we got from indulging in it to trying to escape from it again, with looking at texts of Baudrillard, Zizek (he states that after 9/11 we "woke up again" in the text he wrote shortly after, but now it turns out we didn't wake up but rather dove deeper into a post-truth), Hypernormalisation (The tendency of our modern western society of trying to escape from instead of dealing with the complexities of this world, while keeping up appearances of a fully functioning society.), nostalgia and doublethink.

CHAPTER 2: The Post-Apocalyptic Shopping Mall

MAIN QUESTION: Is the minor literature of vaporwave sharpening or flattening?

There's nobody here. There's nobody here. There's nobody here. There's nobody here. There's nobody here. There's nobody here. There's nobody here. There's nobody here. There's nobody here. There's nobody here. There's nobody here. There's nobody here. There's nobody here. There's nobody here. There's nobody here. There's nobody here. There's nobody here. There's nobody here.

"The poor image is an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image. Its genealogy is dubious. Its filenames are deliberately misspelled. " – Journal #10 - Hito Steyerl - In Defense of the Poor Image, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/

From Kyoto to Mount Fiji (The Vaporwave Atlas): An in-depth analysis of the Vaporwave image culture.

The Vaporwave Atlas An in-depth analysis of the Vaporwave image culture. (All the icons of vaporwave that are spread out throughout the thesis could be collected to form some sort of atlas)

The Empty Shopping Mall

The Window's '95 logo

The Fiji Water Bottle

The Arizona Iced tea

The Japanese character / Kanji

The Elevator

The Palmtree

The Pyramid

The Road

The CD

The City Scape

The Sea

The Desert

The VHS Tape

The Manga Character

The 3D Render

The Pastel

The Dolphin

The Skeleton

The City Kyoto

The Grid

The Girl A blond girl in pastel looks slightly off camera while repeating the same sentence for three minutes. Her features seem perfect, her voice soft, her posture still. Everything about her is plastic and meaningless. It's the perfect illustration of a lack of depth we find in the quick satisfaction of consumer culture, a consumerist void.

The Bubble The soft motions of a shiny globe gliding through the air, reflecting light on a thin fluorescent film. Beautiful: it's completely empty inside.

In this chapter, I will look at the visual language of vaporwave as a visual culture. I want to analyse a few returning icons to see how they express what I perceive as "what vaporwave wants to communicate", which is a wish to escape this hyperreal world and a heavy nostalgia. So I am basically going to look at what I described in chapter one and how that is showing within the culture. A lot of describing images and the icons I see returning. (What I wrote before: I want to specify which elements are central to a Vaporwave image, and then with a few of them trace back where they come from and why they keep popping up)

The Icons I want to address are: The Roman Statue

CHAPTER 3: The allegory of the frog and the sadboy

MAIN QUESTION: The soundtrack of the Alt-Right (Fashwave): What is the relation between Vaporwave and the Alt-Right?

Suicideyear, Sad Boys [...] Sad Boys, we on deck, "Am I awake?", I got to check [...] Emotion boys we in the UFO, Skies pink when I'm on ecstasy, In Tokyo, playing Mario, Sad Boys blastin' your stereos.

"Dozens of Vaporwave artists gathered in Montreal over the weekend to discuss the genres growing Nazi problem." DJ Karoda Nite agrees. “I love making music, but if neo nazis keep using my tracks in their propaganda videos, I might have to stop releasing more albums,” says Karoda. “I don’t want to help enable their hatred. Music should be about bringing people together, not about establishing a 4th Reich under God Emperor Trump, lord of the Americas, or whatever the fuck it is that fascists are trying to do.” – Ravenews, 09/02/17, http://www.ravenews.ca/en/read/2016/february/09/

In this chapter I am going to analyse the Sadboy (a known identity in meme-culture). I think the sadboy is a strong link in internetculture between subcultures like vaporwave, meme-culture and the alt-right. The sadboy could be described as a typical privileged white teenage boy living in the basement of his parents house, strolling on the internet, finding platforms like 4chan and 8chan to bitch about him having a terrible life without friends or a girlfriend. These teens are highly active on these forums and within game culture. They spend more hours a day in hyperreality than the actual world outside. Radicalised versions of the sadboy dominate the alt-right at the moment. A sad version of alt-right icon Pepe the frog is much used to identify a sadboy. Rapper Yung Lean – a cloud-rapper (cloud rap is a sub-genre of vaporwave) – started using the term sadboys to describe him and his fellow rappers within the same genre. The name is gaining popularity fast. Sadboys are not directly linked to alt-righters that much yet, but I believe they very much describe the same type. To me, the sadboy is the link between two worlds that I believe are going to collide soon. This is proven already by the new subculture within vaporwave which is called "Fashwave", an alt-right version of vaporwave with aesthetics and lyrics that very much combine the two.

The Icons I want to address are:

The Sadboy aangevuld met een aantal icons binnen vaporwave die binnen de "sadboy aesthetic" vallen.
Pepe the Frog aangevuld met icons en taalgebruik van de alt-right
Fashwave

Conclusion

(ALMOST NO HUMANS: post-human world?)

Bits and pieces

Sara:

Capitalism, look at critiques of capitalism. Marx for instance.

Manifesto is in the images themselves
Constellation of images

15 February: re-submit
outline, 5 key texts, first chapter draft, second chapter start

The first computer my family bought was set up at a central desk in the living room for everyone to see and to use. An odd bulky thing which took forever to finally show the iconic Windows '95 logo. It went on to make the monotone sounds of a dial-up modem we all nostalgically look back to today, so we could open up Internet Explorer to visit the Dutch predecessor of Google: startpagina.nl and from there surf into cyberspace.

What makes Vaporwave stick better than its predecessors? Welcome to the void!

Literature

Vaporwave

Articles:

INSPIRATION AND RELATED TEXTS:

Hito Steyerl – In defense of the poor image, e-flux
Sontag – Notes On Camp, 1964
El Lissitzky – storia di due quadrati (deprivation and propaganda)

Iconology

Oulipo

Fashwave:

Books:

Babbling Corpse, Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts - Grafton Tanner (PDF)
Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past - Simon Reynolds (PDF)
Kafka - Towards a Minor Literature

Music:

Macintosh Plus (one of the most influential albums)
Yung Lean
Blank Banshee
death's dynamic shroud.wmv
Saint Pepsi
マクロスMACROSS 82-99
Internet Club
Oneohtrix Point Never
James Ferraro

Video:

Vaporwave Fashion

↑ Urban Dictionary, http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=vaporwave
↑ Abstract description of the cover of the album Floral Shoppe by Macintosh Plus. One song of this album is seen as the Vaporwave anthem, as it not only made Vaporwave break out to a bigger audience but also perfectly captures its aura.

[1] Urban Dictionary, http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=vaporwave

[2] Abstract description of the cover of the album Floral Shoppe by Macintosh Plus. One song of this album is seen as the Vaporwave anthem, as it not only made Vaporwave break out to a bigger audience but also perfectly captures its aura.

[1]

[2]