errantsignal
patreon
Broken Reality, Vaporwave, and Irony
🕑 Added 2019-02-01 04:59:36 +0000 UTCSo... I step a bit outside my wheelhouse with this one, and while I tried to Do The Reading I'm still worried I'm going to be inundated with people saying that I either take vaporwave far too seriously or dismiss the entire thing as a joke too easily. And I'm prepping emotionally for that, because I think it's sort of an inevitability that I get both given what I understand of the genre.
That said! This is video about Broken Reality, an imaginary virtual chatroom from (at least!) the year 2045 where you can chat with friends and buy fancy beverages and even go on a cruise! It's an exploration based game that has pretty colors and lots and lots of low-poly dolphins. It's got chill music, some occasional funny jokes, a mysterious backstory to piece together, and some cool commentary on technology and culture as filtered through an aesthetic birthed on the internet!
....It's also seeped in all of the meme-ry and layers of irony that one gets from originating on the internet. And that can lead to problems when it tries to do anything serious or meaningful. Is the game a pile of cutesy references and internet in-jokes, or is it the tale of a broken chatroom and the relationship of those who created it? It's both. It's neither. It's vaporwave.
Okay that sounded cooler in my head. Just watch the video, you'll see what I mean.
Comments
Ty Underwood
'secret little haven' is much closer to the ideas that the first wave of vaporwave artists had, you seemed to get at that.
Ty Underwood
some of the originating vaporwave work you cited has been tragically and almost willfully misunderstood by the people that were initially consuming it. Some of those albums (at least according to friends of the artists) were utterly sincere and utterly personal explorations, and the first wave of fans projected the sense of winking irony that essentially poisoned the well towards that middle class chapo edgy accelerationist stuff. I would hate to see that retroactively applied to Flower Shoppe etc.
Darron Perry Jr
It's like the art movement Dadaism. It's only serious until you take it seriously, then it's fucking with you lol
Josh Foreman
Interesting stuff here. I was not aware of this genre of music. Sadly, I was an adult when the geocities/AOL aesthetic broke, so I have no nostalgia for it. But still love seeing people clearly so passionate about it.
