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Vaporwave Art: Behind the Vapour
2400 years ago, during the 4th Century BC, Alexander the Great’s conquest across Asia diversified Greek culture, throwing off the Classical cloak and wrapping themselves in the Hellenistic toga, which — using its busts and sculptures — paved the way for vaporwave, above other less important things.
The next cultural milestone that would eventually be considered a definitive aspect of vaporwave aesthetics would perhaps be early in your grandparent’s, or their parent’s lifetime. It was 1934 when Major General George Owen Squier switched his business’s name to Muzak and its direction from phone-music to lift-music.
After that, clunky computers started to appear and by the 90’s their web-design and visual graphics had reached a peak of pixelated, glitchy awkwardness now intrinsic to vaporwave, if nothing else. Glitch art is involved as well, with its own wide history.
An early example of this is Jamie Fenton and Raul Zaritsky’s “Digital TV Dinner” (1978), with audio by Dick Ainsworth. Both the visuals and the music were made by bashing the buttons on a Bally Astrocade console game. One contemporary glitch artist is the awesome Giacomo Carmagnola, who imposes electronic rain over the natural beauty of old black and white portraits.
A less deliberately artistic inspiration is the colour gradients of painful-to-watch…
