If glitch art is an interrogation of the machine and an aesthetic of failure then Vaporwave is an exploration of a future that we were promised but never had. Like all of those encyclopedia articles about a future of flying cars and one pill meals in the 50's to sixties alternative Science Fictions promise of easy love and relationships, psychedelics that would set our minds free for a sharing communal future to now where we look back in fondness at simpler times of 8 bit consoles and home computers we could tinker with or listen to the sound of tapes loading and whirring, to the bright colours of new packaging and plastics, the badge engineering of cars ( the promise of speed and sex appeal of advertising never quite met) or Quantel paint box powered TV graphics on our 4:3 ratio wood-grain TV's - the promise of Prosperos Books that graphics and computers and art would somehow converge in a new form of interactive multimedia experience and VR , always VR, would somehow exist outside of The lawnmower man or even Jonny Mnemonic ( itself a movie that failed to deliver on the promise of its story though lovable still) - the romance of internet spaces we could physically explore or enter into with a 3 dimensional presence instead of this addictive flat screen of monitor or more latterly smartphone.
During this worldwide pandemic still ongoing I am drawn more to Vaporwave than glitch-art as a genre as it says a lot about the emptiness of the world now ( weeks into the pandemic I noticed a lone plane in a spring sky and was surprised that it was the first I'd seen in a while) - if Vaporwave is the sound of dead Malls then the pandemic is a perfect fit of empty grey car parks and sparse shopping centers a meta virus that has transcended the screen to haunt our world - reality and fiction have swapped places - while statues are torn down irl ( rightly) for being signifiers of hate and memorials to colonialist genocide and oppression, rather than the proud monuments to great men ( always only ever great men which in itself is offensive) that they were presented as, the empty plinths echo the emptiness and meaningless of the statues in Vaporwave - reality has indeed encountered an error but the error is that it could ever pretend to be as bright or as interesting ( or as hollow and regretful) as this virtual world we are now sucked into, though we never meet anyone here just signifiers of indeterminate shape and space , we all live in the dead malls now.
And at some point we all need a virtual makeover ( original source photograph for statue via pexels, pexels-michel-caicedo-3713493):
