The vaporwave aesthetic and the music playing behind an infomercial for public access purgatory

"Vaporwave isn’t just something you listen to either, it’s something you experience, and experiences include visuals. Vaporwave visual art, simply referred to as 'aesthetics,' is varied but tends to honor some core tenets. If you’re looking at something pink and teal with a marble classical bust and a glitchy Windows 95 logo, you’re probably looking at a vaporwave aesthetic. If you’re watching a YouTube video with a title written in a weirdly soothing stretched out font, you’re probably watching a vaporwave aesthetic.

If you haven’t guessed by now, vaporwave is a bit of a joke, or more accurately, an internet meme. Vaporwave’s trippy immediate artistic ancestor 'seapunk' was a running inside joke on Tumblr during 2011 about fashion and art and music inspired by the ocean. The look and sound of a psychedelic club run by a hipster Ariel from The Little Mermaid is a pretty accurate summation. Neon seapunk imagery even found its way into Rihanna’s 2012 Saturday Night Live performance, confounding many viewers with its colorful and stylish but garish, cheap, and seemingly unprofessional grainy green screen look. The exact difference between seapunk and vaporwave is blurry, but as far as I understand vaporwave trades the aquatic focus for a fascination with the emptiness of aging and/or amateur glossy commercialism. It’s the music playing behind an infomercial for public access purgatory."

(Jordan Minor, 03 June 2016)

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Lee Scratch Perry's Vision of Paradise

"This is the ultimate portrait of one of the icons of contemporary music. Shooting over 15 years, Volker Schaner had unprecedented access to the man who can lay claim to be a godfather of both reggae and dub. Lee 'Scratch' Perry's Vision of Paradise is funny, poetic and frequently mind-blowing."

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The Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini

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Pierre Hébert: Around Perception (1968)

"Around Perception is a groundbreaking experiment on computer–based animation, consisting of 11 audiovisual events designed to baffle cognition and unrest comfortable notions of reality. Unlike most of his later films, Hébert chose not to collaborate with top–notch experimental musicians and created the soundtrack himself. In this, he followed a method also used by Norman McLaren: to scratch sound directly onto the film itself. The relation between sound and picture, however, is not as symbiotic as in McLaren's Synchromy: although there are organic reactions between the two domains, one is not a direct translation of the other. This, of course, need not be seen as a weakness. Indeed, with its fast–paced changes of color and geometrical patterns, and the employment of Columbia–like richly crafted electronic tones, Around Perception works as a tremendously hallucinatory exercise in trompe l'oeil (and l'oreille) techniques. Or, as stated by Hébert himself at the beginning of the film, an exercise 'for the mind and against the mind'."

(The Sound of Eye)

Fig.1 "Around Perception", Director: Pierre Hébert, Year: 1968, Time: 16 mins, Music: Pierre Hébert.

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Czech Film Posters of the 1960s

"The birth of the Czech creative film poster phenomenon in the early sixties can be credited to Karel Vaca, Karel Teissig, Richard Fremund, Vladimir Tesar, Jiri Balcar, Jaroslav Fiser, Zdenek Ziegler, Milan Grygar, Bedrich Dlouhy, Zdenek Palcr and others. In the late sixties and during the seventies they were joined by Josef Vyletal, Olga Polackova–Vyletalova, Jiri Rathousky, Alexej Jaros, Karel Machalek, Petr Pos, Jiri Salamoun, Vratislav Hlavaty, Zdenek Vlach and Antonin Sladek. In the streets, but soon also at film festival exhibitions, in art galleries and cinema premises, Czech film poster rapidly won the favor of the public for its creative imagination, poetic and lyrical atmosphere. It was characteristic by the use of collage, rollage, photomontage, retouching, striking graphic designs, wity typographic visual puns and surrealist dreamy interpretation. Mass reproductions of works of art flooded the billboards in towns and cities and changed them into sidewalk open air galleries. In the course of the 1960s, Czech film poster designers found inspiration in the informal style, applying its forms of structural abstraction and lettrism, later on in pop–art and op–art, using the then popular psychedelic forms and colors. Artists frequently employed styles inspired by the film forms, such as enlarged close–up, merging of symbolic and metaphoric visual levels and repeated details."

(Marta Sylvestrova, Museu de Arte de Macau)

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