Most popular visual motifs:
- depiction of modern indoor shopping centres, often shown as perfect spaces with marble surfaces and white staircases that seem to rise forever.
- used to evoke the sense that consumer society can give the individual everything they want or need, without setting any limits on their desires.
- virtual plazas, often computer-generated also suggest that this sense of limitlessness is a fantasy.
Video Games
- always depict vintage gaming systems, such as Game Boy and Sega Saturn, suggesting it is not the computer games they are interested in but the ideas of nostalgia they bring.
- themes of unreality, encourage listeners to regress to their childhood days and escape from a less idyllic reality.
Japanese and Asian Imagery
- ideas if escapism.
- the genre tends to depict Asian people (mostly women) against abstracted and hypnagogic (relating to the state immediately before falling asleep) backgrounds and replacing their humanity with an image or dream.
- the sin of Orientalism, Edward Said - transforming reality and people into an artificial, illusory construct.
Neo-Classicism/ Surrealism
- in particular, imagery of Roman statues and Doric columns.
- used often in conjunction with a series of other random objects to provide a juxtaposition which makes it difficult for the viewer to situate the scene in any particular context and therefore depicts vaporwave as a successor to surrealism.
- representative of a life spent largely online.
Hazy Skylines
- fogging up urban environments so that they are only dimly recognisable, another feature said to portray ideas of unreality.
- represents the notion of information overload in the digital age, something which can cloud our perceptions of the world by bombarding us with too many voices and messages to be absorbed.
- ambiguous and vague.
The Living Space
- virtual, simulated natures of 21st Century existence.
- sterile furniture and glossy TV screens make them appear less as places as where we can grow according to our own natures, and more like sites where mass media can reach and condition us without any interference from outside.
Obsolescent Technology and Design
- depictions of outmoded tech and outdated graphic design is largely a comment on the 21st Century's pretensions of being unparalleled in its technological sophistication.
- remind us that these inventions were once state-of-the-art, provoking the realisation that the tech we now accept as cutting edge will one day also seem distinctly unnatural and out of place.
90's Television
- characteristics which present hints of nostalgia.
- simpsonwave, etc.
Summer and Sea
- no immediate obvious relation to consumerism, mass media or virtual reality.
- instead these themes present another idea of escape from the reality of modern existence.
- always depict vintage gaming systems, such as Game Boy and Sega Saturn, suggesting it is not the computer games they are interested in but the ideas of nostalgia they bring.
- themes of unreality, encourage listeners to regress to their childhood days and escape from a less idyllic reality.
Japanese and Asian Imagery
- ideas if escapism.
- the genre tends to depict Asian people (mostly women) against abstracted and hypnagogic (relating to the state immediately before falling asleep) backgrounds and replacing their humanity with an image or dream.
- the sin of Orientalism, Edward Said - transforming reality and people into an artificial, illusory construct.
Neo-Classicism/ Surrealism
- in particular, imagery of Roman statues and Doric columns.
- used often in conjunction with a series of other random objects to provide a juxtaposition which makes it difficult for the viewer to situate the scene in any particular context and therefore depicts vaporwave as a successor to surrealism.
- representative of a life spent largely online.
Hazy Skylines
- fogging up urban environments so that they are only dimly recognisable, another feature said to portray ideas of unreality.
- represents the notion of information overload in the digital age, something which can cloud our perceptions of the world by bombarding us with too many voices and messages to be absorbed.
- ambiguous and vague.
The Living Space
- virtual, simulated natures of 21st Century existence.
- sterile furniture and glossy TV screens make them appear less as places as where we can grow according to our own natures, and more like sites where mass media can reach and condition us without any interference from outside.
Obsolescent Technology and Design
- depictions of outmoded tech and outdated graphic design is largely a comment on the 21st Century's pretensions of being unparalleled in its technological sophistication.
- remind us that these inventions were once state-of-the-art, provoking the realisation that the tech we now accept as cutting edge will one day also seem distinctly unnatural and out of place.
90's Television
- characteristics which present hints of nostalgia.
- simpsonwave, etc.
Summer and Sea
- no immediate obvious relation to consumerism, mass media or virtual reality.
- instead these themes present another idea of escape from the reality of modern existence.
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