Vaporwave as an aesthetic takes a lot of cues from Net.Art and as a subculture revolves around the online space both as a way of sharing audio and visuals and as source material for those audios and visuals. The low fidelity quality and deliberate degradation of perfectly fine audio and images sets it apart distinctly as an attempt to recapture the nostalgia of the early 90’s in a world saturated with modern tech, music and culture. In a sense Vaporwave is a form of escapism as an art form and is less about current technology but an older form of Net.Art.
I like the aesthetic of Vaporwave, but I am concerned with producing work that captures the glitches and the aesthetic of modern tech as opposed to the old as I am in my 20’s and a lot of the ‘nostalgic’ aspects to Vaporwave doesn’t really connect with me personally. I feel it would be disingenuous to pretend they they do and that I can create better work speaking from my own experiences with technology and creating new forms of digital work that are generation specific in some cases. However the gaudy and colorful elements of vaporwave are something I’d like to mimic as the work, despite being surrounded by sometimes random and nonsensical imagery, does still represent the crowded and nonsensical nature of the internet and how different tech is sometimes used in very funny and inappropriate ways. So Vaporwave still holds some relevance today even if things have changed and the imagery of the net is different.
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