Nostalgia Isn't What it Used to Be: On Vaporwave's Glitched, Aspirational Aesthetics

Vaporwave is an internet-native aesthetic movement that emerged in the early 2010s. It directly addresses the presumed condition of living at the “end of history” that was proposed during the 1990s by enmeshing images from aspirational consumerism into an audiovisual aesthetic. This aesthetic is mainly distinguished by its use of the glitch as a unifying element, ironically fusing different forms of noise, muzak and interference with visual and aural refrains and pop culture objects and other images belonging to neoliberal consumerism. This article argues that Vaporwave’s “glitched” aesthetics are the manifestation of an aspirational form of hauntology wherein certain ahistorical visions of the past continue to superimpose themselves over the present through aesthetic means that were once subversive but are now customary. Furthermore, I contend that certain aspects of the work of Chris Marker that allude to the de-historicizing of images through their distortion, and the bleak imagining of an actual post-historical society presented in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s film Pulse, can be taken as a counterbalance to Vaporwave’s fetishization and lack of historical engagement with the images of the “end of history.”