Vaporwave essay

Lisa Frank 420. For those who remember the adorable and aggressively colorful depictions of smiling kittens and puppies they had on their notebooks in elementary school, the name Lisa Frank might mean something. For others, the name might not mean so much, but they would recognize the art style if presented it. The specific order of the numbers four, two, and zero might have a stronger meaning. To meet someone in a college setting who, at the very least, has not heard of the date 4/20 in reference to cannabis Easter, is nigh impossible. Together, with an artist for children’s stationery, “Lisa Frank 420” gives us the title of one of the most recognizable songs in the music genre Vaporwave.

Vaporwave is that white cup with the cyan and purple splash design on it. Vaporwave is the commercial of the humanoid moon with sunglasses playing piano on top of a giant Big Mac. Vaporwave is the static on your box television creeping in to distort the image and slightly obscure the audio in a fuzzy shroud. Objectively, Vaporwave is a music genre that relies heavily on taking elements of songs that already exist, “samples,” and using them as modified vocal tracks or instrumentals for a whole new song. Vaporwave doesn’t stop there though, as it has also become an art form. Not many musical genres could boast that they have an art form whose shared name is exclusively associated with it. Vaporwave can. Within the past few years I have been contributing to the art movement, creating pieces that are mainly wallpapers for phones or computer backgrounds, sometimes making a profile picture or two, or even trying my hand at the requests I saw on forum posts. One user asked that someone “Vaporwavify” the photo of them wearing a gas mask, obscuring their gender or identity, and sitting in what could only be their bedroom at their parent’s house, its walls an uninteresting beige that militant parents would enforce on a growing child, the German flag hanging behind them. The anonymous message board 4chan is where it was digitally uttered, and the website is meant for housing discussion on threads that only stay around temporarily, before they are archived and no longer present in the flow of discussion on the site.

This was not the case for our roughly 100-post threads in the “wallpapers, general” section of the website that I visited for almost 2 years straight, viewing every new thread on a bi-weekly basis. Nothing of major consequence or significant large scale cultural impact ever really happened. We posted our art, critiquing the modified images strongly with either “shit tier” or “nice,” and then once in a while someone like me would pipe up that they had created “OC” or “original content.” In hopes that I could reproduce what I’d seen so many other Vaporwave artists do, I would post an image modified with a purple to cyan gradient, including copy/pasted 3d renderings of objects in a small kaleidoscope-like pattern in the corners similar to the subject matter of the background image. The piece would also contain the eyes of a character in the image obscured by a censor bar with text reading something depressing or wistful like the quote from Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland “It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”

I surely had it down. I understood how to use a structure for the art style, which seemed to have a set list of rules relating to the necessary filters and colors needed in the piece, seemed to have a required group of things that had to be in the image to make it a Vaporwave. Just as surely, I did not have it down. Times like these are when I began to see people discussing how “all the images are the same” and “this content is barely original.” The art form seemed to be at a standstill, as so many people were trying to copy the trends of the most commonly posted images, rarely putting any twists or modifications on the base picture being used in the wallpaper, let alone trying to make new strides in the development of the genre. So I set out to learn a bit more about this artform that had captured me with its color scheme and versed itself in focusing on the “aesthetics” of a Fiji Water bottle design, or how the Arizona Green Tea can is so pleasant to look at.

I learned that the music genre was primarily the major part of the Vaporwave movement. 90s nostalgia was a large factor in how the music was built and gained momentum. Commercial B-roll music and songs from the era were constantly slowed down and remixed to create many of the tracks that were prominent in the genre. The music had an interesting anti-capitalist lore to it, in a way,where it was meant to sound like what artists predicted a future of consumer culture music to sound like. The idea that corporations would use the music world to sell their products was an overarching atmospheric presence in the life cycle of the Vaporwave genre. Considering that bits of songs, and even full ones, are now made and produced by companies to be played as an advertisement on the radio or on television highlights that the ideas Vaporwave as a music genre toyed with were, in fact, not far from reality.

The artform stemmed from the music genre. People tried to capture the feelings they had when they listened to Vaporwave, and it’s almost otherworldly sound. Visual Vaporwave also took heavy influences from some of the leading album's art in the genre, and attempted to capture the same style and color scheme presented on them. The VHS effect added to many images was a foundation for the genre, as it added to the idea that the image represented a form of music that adopted many of its sounds from the 90s, when television was not viewed on glorious 72 inch HDTVs, but instead on grainy boxes that could only catch a signal from the air with their large metallic antenna. During the time where I acquired knowledge on what “scanlines” were, and how to add “noise” to a photoshop image, I learned more and more that 4chan is almost entirely comprised of people being assholes to one another, and that they hate it when the website and its users are described in things like public social media, or in essays being read by the average citizen.

I would not recommend visiting this site if you like pleasant things and do not appreciate reading messages from people who think “Hitler did nothing wrong” or that even using the phrase, “Hitler did nothing wrong” in an ironic way is still hilarious. It was hard enough to interact with those who were just in the tiny subthread of Vaporwave, as it was inundated with Nazi wallpapers at least three times per thread, on a weekly basis. Hard to feel like you’re part of decent community when every fifth image posted featured Trump smiling on a phone looking so happy and peaceful, or the phrase “Reclaim your birthright” plastered over some fascist's statue. More likely than not, if you were to look up Vaporwave online, you would not be met with the facist imagery as frequently as say, anime edits, or general 90s nostalgia complete with Roman busts. Still I had the concern in my mind that one day this artform would be equated with the Neo-Nazi culture, and I would witness something I loved be taken over by Hitler youth. I’m still bitter about the “Ok” finger sign being co-opted by far-right culture.

I still wanted to contribute my art to the site because I could get blunt feedback, any word that what I’ve created was either good or had a flaw I could work on. As I began the systematic purchase and consumption of Fiji Water each paycheck, and started listening to such big names in Vaporwave music as Macintosh Plus, Saint Pepsi, and Blank Banshee, I felt myself entering a “phase.” Of course, some of my friends were always quick to make me feel like when I had a fixation on something, I was being annoyingly overwhelming with it and it was “going to be over in a month,” never considering that it would eventually balance out with my other interests and become a part of my identity. I suppose that is how his cynicism works sometimes. Regardless, I kept with it. I was in college, I was free from the daily unavoidable high school exposure to my friends and was able to pursue new things to a degree that was seemingly nonexistent before. So on I crafted, making wallpapers in Adobe Photoshop, overlaying vector art of a cherry blossom tree on a sea foam green background onto the necktie of a member of Daft Punk, and then moving his image in front of a starry picture of a nebula, complete with color correction to make it fit the previously mentioned color scheme of cyan and purple.

I thought hard and studied the themes that made up the artform, analyzing what I could and drawing connections between the images I saw most frequently reposted, of which these  images were called “quality content” or “God tier.” With the discipline that comes from hobby-like enjoyment, I broke down many components of the most well known pieces in the genre, a genre also entirely born online, and almost certainly only shared and discussed there as well. Hopefully, to someone's potential enjoyment, I expanded on a two piece set I had seen. They involved a geometric logo above the words "Mercury Energy" for one, and "Jupiter Interstellar Travel" for another. No matter how hard I tried, and how frequently I reverse image searched, I could never pinpoint who the original artist was. Regardless, I made seven more of my own wallpapers, one for each other planet (including Pluto as well), copying the theme of the first two, and even hunting down a font that was almost identical to the one used in the anonymous artist's wallpapers. I designed my own logos for each image from scratch, and came up with my own fictional phrases to link to each stellar body. The best of the collection had to be my "Neptune Aquatics" piece, featuring a deep blue teardrop logo with a tiny turquoise circle at its base. After experiencing what it felt like to copy the style of someone else's work, I finally came up with what I thought was a decent formula for making my own original piece. I had my toolkit, and began crafting my magnum opus.

There was a frequently used and circulated gif from an older TV show called Danger 5. It was of one of the characters looking through a magazine titled, “Sensible Chuckle,” in which he gives just that action while turning the pages of the magazine. The gif was, in my experience, used in two very different ways. It could have been to express a condescending laugh at whomever received the reply, or might have been to demonstrate that the original post brought a good laugh to the commenter. The gif was somewhat paradoxical, its uses being flippant or sincere depending on how you read the context. The former was most frequently how I witnessed it used.

I set to work finding the perfect frame of the gif to edit, capturing the moment in one image. From there I relied on my toolkit built up from observing all the works that came before this one, and used each component of Photoshop I knew well enough. For the next three hours I made progress, backtracked, erased, and modified my work. Perpetually, I was stared in the face by the laughing man in the image (played by Sean James Murphy), but I did not feel mockery from him. The way I felt was primarily a feeling of joy, of rising to meet the challenge. It was a runner’s high, being felt by me, 300 pounds, sitting in my bed with a keyboard on my lap and a mouse on my end table trying to find the best picture to overlay on the magazine the character was reading. I was the rock climber, reaching the last piton before the summit, and using all my strength to pull myself up. Finally, I settled on a final form for my art that I felt used the aesthetics of the Vaporwave artform that I hoped was new and innovative enough in its own right.

“Sensible chuckle .gif guy” reading a magazine with another artist’s work on it, smiling, the surface of his eyes looking like a tiny starscape, an indigo-to-fuschia gradient in a circle formation floating around his head that almost looked like the halo around Jesus’s head on those magnets your mother had on the fridge, and a few filters that made the whole image look like it was on a cathode tube TV. After saving and exporting the image to a decent resolution that 4chan would accept, I uploaded it to the current Vaporwave thread and gave the classic “New OC. Give feedback.” I went to sleep hoping to revisit in a few days with some positive comments and helpful criticisms.

“I fucking love Danger 5”, and “Perfect.” Discourse was at a minimum, and occasionally on new threads I would post it, but not every time. I also made more edits copying the elements, now of my own style, and applying them to new characters and images. Although there was no major praise for my initial wallpaper, I had somehow established myself as “different.” I put my foot down, and for a second, I felt like my print remained. From there, the threads became simply one image post after another, with either comments like, “Could you all please stop filling any ‘oc’ you make with arizona bottles? It’s so overused it just ruins the pape” (wallpaper). The last one was met with a hilarious reply in which the user screenshotted the comment and put it into a wallpaper. Including Arizona bottles.

One day, visiting a thread a few months after I had presented my starry-eyed, sensibly chuckling piece, I saw a user post it. To see someone considered my art good enough to repost on their own terms, and that they didn't try to take credit, made me proud that I had gained a level of renown. I replied with a short comment about how I was happy to see someone else thought my art represented their view of the genre. This high point in my life came with a cost of it leading to what is currently a low point in the Vaporwave movement. While the next year of my college career was closing out I began to notice how the threads moved at a sluggish pace. What used to be five to ten posts a day had now become one post every five to ten days. No longer did people facilitate discussion on what Vaporwave meant to them, and how they felt about it. It hardly ever seemed like anyone was posting original content, or at least nobody was trying to claim their accompanying image was anymore. Gone were the days of constructive (sometimes destructive) criticism, and certainly gone were the proclamations that a piece was as memorable as the Golden Master’s, as revolutionary as Bowie, as well crafted as Pulp Fiction.

The threads are so small these days. Only seven replies each, and some are just comments of “let this meme die.” Imagine, how Andy Warhol would have reacted, after the prime time of pop art had moved on and the movement he was integral in spreading had passed, being told to let his work die. Being inadvertently classified as nothing more than a jokester, whose pieces was merely to get a laugh out of others. Being informed by those who were not touched by his contributions that the time for his art was over, and his life's work was nothing more than a trendy shot at causing laughs. I feel like a part of my history has disappeared, and that an interest I loved so strongly is truly fading away. I lament a love lost on the “fad” of Vaporwave, a genre that introduced me to my favourite color scheme and helped me create my very first set of art. Before I had even began my first engagement with form, there was a part of the movement in which the slogan “Vaporwave is dead. Long live Vaporwave” was used frequently. I feel the effects of that now, as the only places I find the movement’s art or music are when I go looking for them. I see that so much of culture is shared online, yet I have never naturally stumbled upon Vaporwave in the digital world, and have always had to search it out. It’s not something I’ve ever seen anyone in public express love for or idolize. Nor is it something anyone has ever heard of from the name alone. When I see Vapowave style art on the clothing people wear, and they tell me they have never heard of it, I have never felt the impulse to condescendingly educate them on it, or even gatekeep it. Instead I show them my work, other’s work, and hope that the brief window I open into an artform I am in love with will help them realize they love it, too. Pour one Fiji water out for Vaporwave.