Vaporwave
Vaporwave is the 2010s internet music and art style of slowed mall music, Windows 95, Greek busts and pink-teal gradients. What each of its symbols is saying.
What is vaporwave?
Vaporwave is a music genre and visual style from the early 2010s that recycles the commercial sounds and images of the 1980s and 1990s: muzak, corporate jingles, early web graphics and shopping malls. The name is a pun on vaporware, software that gets announced and never ships.
It grew on Bandcamp, YouTube and Tumblr instead of in clubs, and the sound and the pictures arrived together. A typical track was a few seconds of a forgotten soft-rock or lounge record, slowed down and looped until it sounded hollow, and its cover was put together from the same sort of found material.
What do the vaporwave symbols mean?
Most of them once stood for luxury or for the future and now look dated. The cover of Macintosh Plus's Floral Shoppe (2011) put a classical bust of Helios on a checkerboard floor, and the bust became the genre's mascot: high culture as a lobby decoration. Windows 95 dialog boxes and clumsy early 3D renders point to the first consumer internet. Palm trees, dolphins, marble and fountains come from hotel atriums and travel brochures.
Japanese text recalls the 1980s, when Japan stood for electronics and economic boom, and writers on the genre have criticized that borrowing as techno-orientalism. In a 2012 essay for Dummy, the critic Adam Harper asked whether vaporwave critiques consumer capitalism or gives in to it, and answered that it does both and neither.
Where does the spaced-out ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣ text come from?
Those wide letters aren't ordinary letters with spaces in between. They are fullwidth forms, a block of Unicode characters from U+FF01 to U+FF5E that lets Latin letters sit in the same square cells as Chinese and Japanese characters. Set in a Western font they look stretched and a little off, which suits the style. The word itself became a running joke and a tag for the whole scene.
The colors and the copied look
The palette is pastel and synthetic: hot pink, cyan, lavender and seafoam, mostly in gradients, the colors of a 1990s screensaver or the neon trim in a mall food court. Synthwave shares the pink and cyan but sets them against black with hard neon edges and an action-movie mood. Vaporwave is softer, emptier and more ironic.
Low quality is part of the look. JPEG blocks, VHS tracking lines and washed-out tape colors all say that the image was found and copied many times before it reached you.
Making a vaporwave picture
Vaporwave Effect grades a photo into violet shadows, pink midtones and mint highlights and adds the odd glitch band. The grade works best on a picture with a large plain area, like a sky or a wall, where the gradient can show, and a single object that reads as found: a statue, a potted palm, a soda can. For a caption, use fullwidth characters, or capitals with a space after each letter if your font lacks them.
