Vaporwave Aesthetics: Internet Nostalgia and the Utopian Impulse

Vapor—by definition, it's something that tends to resist being pinned down. Vapor trails linger as faint hexagrams in the sky, but they soon diffuse, melting into air. They are signs of loss and fading, intangibility and transience (epitomized by the eponymous Ride song, a classic of the indie "shoegaze" genre). ¹ Similar things could be said about waves—by the time you notice one it's already passing you by. New waves soon become old waves. And yet waves never really move at all, they're just transferring energy from one place to another. Beneath the surface, there's inertia and calm. Join these two words together and no surprise the result is enigmatic.

It's late July 2009 and you're listlessly trawling YouTube, alone in front of a screen in the early hours of the morning. You catch a glimpse of what looks like a rainbow path disappearing into the distance, pixelated and lurid neon against a digital night sky. ² You click. It has been uploaded by a user calling themselves "sunsetcorp," whose channel has only a handful of videos all between 1:30 and 2:30 minutes long: this one is called "nobody here"; there is another called "angel," one called "computer vision," and one called "demerol." Your video begins. The rolling road begins to move, swaying in slow motion from left to right, then right to left against a computerized metropolis and stars of white light overhead. The clip loops several times, and you find yourself in a paradoxical state of stasis-in-motion, Sisyphean yet strangely tranquil. The clip has a soundtrack, eerie yet familiar: a sotto voce Chris de Burgh emerges singing a mellifluous phrase from his 1986 hit "The Lady in Red"—the line "there's nobody here." But the soft, seductive song appears to be stuck on infinite repeat, slowed down, stretched out, pitch-shifted, and saturated with disorientating echo effects, de Burgh's voice multiplied and shadowing itself on this one line looped seamlessly over and over. Once a paradigm of human intimacy, the sonic fragment becomes uncanny, imbued with a diametrically opposite meaning: it's the sound of a disembodied voice, of hollowness and vacuity. This de Burgh is revealed to be a figment of recording technology, an acoustic revenant: there is literally nobody here. ³ But you can't stop listening to it. You play the clip over again and wonder how an amorous adult contemporary pop ballad has been made so redolent of cybernetic alienation and the existential melancholia of the internet age. Somehow this video isn't annoying or trashy—it's oddly sublime, hypnotic, habit-forming.

"Somehow this video isn't annoying or trashy—it's oddly sublime, hypnotic, habit-forming" .

You might have been inclined to comment on the video, with something in typical internet parlance, at once impishly ironic and acutely earnest, sincere and self-mocking: "the road to salvation," "this is so beautiful," "this is just mesmerizing <3," "I could watch this forever," "The sole reason Youtube should exist," "You have no idea how many times I listen to this! Thanks!" "this is the single greatest experience I have ever had." ⁴ Some users asked where the visuals had come from, suggesting they had the feel of Mario Kart 64—an early 3D racing game made for the Nintendo 64 console and released in Japan in December 1996. The visuals are, in fact, not from Mario Kart but from a now extremely rare laserdisc arcade game by the Japanese Taito Corporation called Laser Grand Prix, produced in 1984 and thus of a similar era to "The Lady in Red." ⁵ The rainbow road appears as part of a short animated sequence at the beginning of the game (which otherwise contains live-action footage of a Grand Prix racetrack) and again as part of a final "fantastic race" featuring surreal and futuristic CGI animation accompanied by archetypal 1980s synthesizer refrains. If you'd returned to scroll through these YouTube comments a year later, you might have seen one that was particularly prescient: "Your vids...