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Tag: vaporwave essay 2023

Vaporwave Megatext: Glamorama

Posted on November 4, 2024November 10, 2024 by Michael Uhall

VAPORWAVE MEGATEXT:
gLAMORAMA By bRET eASTON eLLIS

Written By: Michael Uhall

 

Published on: Sunday, November 10th, 2024

 

 

“If there is anything that this horrible tragedy can teach us, it’s that a male model’s life is a precious, precious commodity. Just because we have chiseled abs and stunning features, it doesn’t mean that we too can’t not die…” – Zoolander (2001)

Page one tells you everything you need to know about Victor, protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis’ underrated and underread 1999 novel Glamorama: “Who the fuck is Moi? […] I have no idea who this Moi is, baby.” Indeed, this is the question around which everything else in the novel turns: Who is Victor Ward? (This question could almost serve as the vaporwave inversion of the same question, in another context, about a certain John Galt…)

On the one hand, the answer to Victor’s question is straightforward. Ward is a male model, the current “It Boy,” and a stupefyingly vacuous denizen of celebrity and fashion culture. Despite his many aspirations (including scoring a role in the then-satirical idea of Flatliners 2, a movie no one needed or wanted in 1998, or one year after we passed through the event horizon of time itself, in 2017, when this movie, unironically, was actually made…), Victor is one hollow man among many.

 

 

Art by @Cerulea_dlux

When the novel opens, he is trying to open his own small night club, virtually under the nose of his erstwhile boss, Damien, a nightclub owner and also the romantic partner of Alison Poole, with whom Victor is having a meaningless affair. He is a creature of pure appearances. Indeed, you could say his whole life is a meaningless affair – this is one of the recurrent objections raised by his girlfriend, top supermodel Chloe Byrnes: “You don’t care about things that don’t have anything to do with you” (158). “So you don’t have any lip balm?” Victor replies, entirely in earnest.

On the other hand, Victor Ward is also Victor Johnson, son of the ambitious Senator Johnson, who lowkey finds Victor a disappointment and an embarrassment:

 

“You’re not a loser, Victor,” Dad sighs back. ‘You just need to, er, find yourself.” He sighs again. “Find – I don’t know – a new you?” “‘A new you’?” I gasp. “Oh my god, Dad, you do a great job of making me feel useless.” “And opening this club tonight makes you feel what?” “Dad, I know, I know – ” “Victor, I just want – ” “/ just want to do something where it’s all mine,” I stress. “Where I’m not… replaceable.” “So do I.” Dad flinches. (79)

 

But by the end of Glamorama, Victor, in fact, has seemingly been replaced, whether by a Manchurian Candidate version of himself or by some postmodern literary surrogate. At this point, Victor Johnson and Victor Ward quite literally seem to split in two – and this is not a metaphor. Victor Johnson, who supplants the Victor we’ve been following all along, is getting his life together, moving on from whoever Victor Ward is now.

“Goodbye,” this new, improved Victor (or, rather, his replacement) tells Victor on the phone, in one of the novel’s late moments of surreality (476). Meanwhile, Victor Ward, imprisoned in a safehouse in Milan against his will, is trying to get his life back. He fails. Even former intimates, like his sister, fail to recognize him when he sneaks in a phone call. Indeed, his physical execution seems imminent. The lifespan of the husk is over. Ultimately, he is a disposable man, the citizen and then refugee of a disposable culture

In one sense, Glamorama is about Victor’s inability to integrate the real into the play palace of his perceptions. His world exists in an almost purely semiotic register. Hence, the novel’s incredible fixation on listing brands and the names of celebrities, in vast chains of association and depthlessness. Who’s in; who’s out; who’s where; who’s not. Whether they’re even really present at the party is irrelevant. What matters are the invocations and lists themselves, the decorative citational explosions that guild the undead lily of a life lived entirely inside the virtual plaza. These explosions of hyperreal intensity leave behind detritus – like confetti scattered on the sticky floor the morning after a big party, or the dread and irritating “specks” (often interpreted by Victor as mysterious confetti) that continually intrude into the bisexually lit soap bubble of Victor’s sensorium. Welcome to the desert of the real, indeed; the sand gets in everything…

 

Art by @Uy_que_Paila

So, Victor cannot acknowledge or integrate the real, either because he is so structurally deformed and shallow, or perhaps because he is himself a kind of projection, a cheap hologram, a false self, an escape route posed by some other self. Imagine finding out you are nothing more than a cover story, your personality (or lack thereof) a mere pretext for some deeper, stranger politics, beamed into the virtual plaza from a VIP dimension or some cosmic plane you’ll never be allowed to enter. Indeed, throughout Glamorama, Victor constantly encounters people who mention seeing him in places he wasn’t, at fashion shows and openings he did not attend: in Miami, at the Alfaro show, at Pravda last week. (One recalls a brief scene from Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups [2015], which explores the same themes as Glamorama, but with a rather different trajectory to the narrative… Christian Bale’s character is being robbed, but the thieves are frustrated at the emptiness of his life. It’s an existential joke, or a riddle: What is a life that contains literally nothing even worth stealing?) This never fully, consciously registers for Victor, beyond occasionally irritating him, because he wishes he’d been there instead of his distant doppelganger. No further questions.

 

 

Likewise, Victor seems to believe increasingly that events in his life are scripted or staged. This does not alarm him. If anything, it’s a source of strange succor; events have the promise of meaning, perhaps, if they unfold in the sixteen-millimeter shrine. He perceives increasingly the ghostly presence of film crews, intimate conversations with mysterious directors, and other people in the flux of life around him, who appear as characters or “extras.” In part, Victor is incapable of understanding the events of the novel’s plot outside of this framework. Indeed, these events may be inaccessible, structurally occluded, haunting the text itself. After all, within the glamorama, everything is appearance (consider the etymology of “glamour”…). What better framing device, then – or refuge – than to perceive all the happenings of your life as if they’re just part of the movies, if these horrific and terrifying events represent some internal logic rather than the fatal trajectory of a car crash with the Outside?

Ultimately, Victor falls in with a group of nihilistic supermodels who have, for reasons Victor is never fully able to understand, started a vast campaign of stochastic terror and hideously random violence. Their leader, Bobby Hughes, is himself a former It Boy, a male supermodel of incredible charisma, since retired. Victor encounters Bobby’s gang almost (but not actually) inadvertently. After fucking things up in the States, Victor is recruited via skyhook to go to Europe in order to track down an ex-girlfriend, who supposedly has gone missing (she hasn’t). The man who recruits him does not exist. Again, Victor has few questions. Quelle chance!

But the sense of dread in the novel grows and grows. It’s like Victor can see disaster approaching, just out of the corner of his eye. But, since he’s always avoiding it, or in some way unable to register the real, he never focuses on what is happening in –or to-the world around him. As Bobby tells Victor, when Victor asks why Bobby seems to like and trust him: “Because you think the Gaza Strip is a particularly lascivious move an erotic dancer makes […] Because you think the PLO recorded the singles ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ and ‘Evil Woman.’” Also, note how the chapters are always counting down. To what, or whom? Quis est iste qui uenit?

Precisely here Glamorama becomes comprehensible primarily as a vaporwave novel: Victor, denizen (and ultimately victim) of the virtual plaza, encounters the radical exteriority of a world that exceeds the hologrammatic dead mall dimension where his dreams play out. Perhaps, in the end, he’s the only person who ever really lived there. Consider again the etymology of glamour: “1715, glamer, Scottish, ‘magic, enchantment’ (especially in phrase to cast the glamour), a variant of Scottish gramarye ‘magic, enchantment, spell, said to be an alteration of English grammar (q.v.) in a specialized use of that word’s medieval sense of ‘any sort of scholarship, especially occult learning,’ the latter sense attested from c. 1500 in English but said to have been more common in Medieval Latin.”

A glamorama, then, is perhaps an updated term for an illusory space, like a fairy circle, or a virtual machine, running in the void…

 

Pick up your copy of Glamorama from Penguin Random House here

 

Written By:

Michael Uhall

michaeluhall.com


Copy Editing By: Zack & Gbanas92

Art Credits By Cerulea & Uy_que_paila

RECENT POSTS

  • Interview: listencorp – Vaporwave/Electronic Magazine & Website | Episode 26
  • Vaporwave meets Punk? Get Right Out of Town! | Episode 25
  • Vaporwave Megatext: Glamorama
  • Vinyl Release: t e l e p a t h ‘s “Amaterasu​​ & Andromeda” by Geometric Lullaby
  • Quick Look: Muchuu by Pllunderlines

BACK TO TEXT 

Posted in Articles/Features, Fiction, LongformTagged 2023, 2024, article, book review, classic literature, essay, Longform, michael uhall, new science fiction, nostalgia, Review, vaporwave article, vaporwave essay, vaporwave essay 2023, virtual reality

Vaporwave Megatext: Vermilion Sands

Posted on January 31, 2024November 4, 2024 by Michael Uhall

VAPORWAVE MEGATEXT:
VERMILION SANDS By J.G. Ballard

Written By: Michael Uhall

 

Published on: Tuesday January 30th, 2024

 


 

 

 

First released on June 15, 1987, the GIF (Graphical Interchange Format) was invented two years before the Cold War went underground, making it truly an artifact from before the time factories all shut down. A GIF, of course, is an image format that allows for multiple images to be represented in sequence as the file references its own palette, producing (or reproducing) simple animations in repetitive, somewhat static loops. The GIF is the vaporwave artifact par excellence – especially now, in its long afterlife, where image and spring break forever come together as one in a strange and endless ballet under the red desert sun of the real.

 

 

As an example of vaporwave literature, J. G. Ballard’s collection of short stories Vermilion Sands (1971) is incomparable. It is also a literary GIF; the entirety of the book could be reconstructed out of wordless GIFs with no aesthetic loss whatsoever. But it is not fundamentally a hybrid object, like Jon Bois’ melancholy, mutating hypertext 17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future (2017: “To pass all that time, many Americans have turned to football, contorting it in a variety of strange ways to suit their new reality”). Unlike Dennis Cooper’s GIF “novel” Zac’s Haunted House (2015: “an experience somewhere between carnival mirror labyrinth, deleted Disney snuff film, and a deep web comic strip by Satan”), which Cooper first created as a specifically visual artifact intended to emphasize intersections, juxtapositions, and loops, Ballard’s stories are resolutely textual.

 

Or are they?

 

After all, each story targets a specific media form: sculpture (“The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D” and “The Singing Statues”), opera and horticulture (“Prima Belladonna”), painting, poetry (“Studio 5, The Stars”), fashion (“Say Goodbye to the Wind”). Each one reflects – no, refracts – how media become entangled in, or perhaps even constitutes, the strange loops of desire and dream that unfolds within and beyond the prison of the human psyche, opening it up and splaying out the psychological strata of all our looping, nested dreamworlds. Recall the horrifying, and horrifyingly suggestive, nature of the libidinal “body,” or landscape of desire, as autopsied by Jean-François Lyotard in his Libidinal Economy (1974): “All these zones are joined end to end in a band which has no back to it, a Moebius band which interests us not because it is closed, but because it is one-sided, a Moebian skin which, rather than being smooth, is on the contrary covered with roughness, corners, creases, cavities […]” Much like how the GIF is a “flat” image (even superflat), yet captures both depth and motion traversing the deeps. This is what it means to speak Muybridge, after all. You probably think Stephen Wilhite invented the GIF – and he did, in its current disguise – but it was Eadweard Muybridge who first uncovered the primordial form of the GIF, lurking in the world’s heart like a fossil from the future. Imagine a paleontology of the future, an idealistic morphology of media artifacts, waltzing backward through time, approaching the event horizon of the perpetual now, the long 2016… Vaporwave literatures invert media archaeologies.

 

 

Back to Vermilion Sands: “No one ever comes to Vermilion Sands now, and I suppose there are few people who have ever heard of it.” So, what even is Vermilion Sands? It’s a “bizarre, sandbound resort with its lethargy, beach fatigue and shifting perspectives.” It’s a dream archipelago of abandoned villas, awash in crimson sands from the environing desert, shadowed by flying albino and purplish sand rays, “wheeling above the rock spires in the blood-red air.” It’s the posttraumatic landscape of the arts, all of which operate like so many ghostly robots, totally burned out but still fueled by vaporous promises. Vermilion Sands is a hologram: it looks a lot like things happened there, but remains peopled by dead souls and the dying stars, fragments of subjects from a Golden Age that never existed. Vermilion Sands is the primal scene of the end of history, casting neon shadows out of time.


“The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista” (originally 1962): “All the houses in Vermilion Sands were psychotropic.” In other words, the architecture is perpetually plastic undeath, adapting to the drives, moods, and quirks of the occupants and always carrying the psychic impress of former occupants inside its mutable and rippling structuration. Imagine being haunted by abstract moods; imagine living inside an undersea fan, gently swaying. “Living in one was like living in someone else’s brain.” Howard Talbot and his new wife, Fay, buy a new house at 99 Stellavista. All the perennials are polyurethane. There’s a heart-shaped swimming pool in the foyer. Through its glass bottom, you can see the garage, the finned car parked below “like a coloured whale asleep on the ocean bed.” Its previous owner, Gloria Tremayne, had been a beautiful, diaphanous woman “with a powerful and oblique personality,” a movie star who murdered her husband to end his abuse. Ironically, Howard had been the assistant to Gloria’s lawyer at the trial, ten years ago. “The water was motionless, a transparent block of condensed time.” But the house remains haunted by Gloria’s psychic residues, which enfold Howard like a mass of invisible tentacles; the house grows jealous of Fay and tries to murder her, too. Howard becomes increasingly entranced, all wrapped up in the fossilized contours of this doomed movie star’s emotional echoes. The house, “like an anguished squid,” flexes and changes color. “The place must have been insane. If you ask me it needs a psychiatrist to straighten it out.” But Howard can’t break the spell of its psychoactive past; the house beckons him into its plasticine embrace. Fay’s long gone. You could give everything to the past which ensorcels you. But for now, at least, the house is turned off, and yet I know that I shall have to switch the house on again” (this always happens in Ballard)

 

 

“The Screen Game” (originally 1963): “Soon we were overrunning what appeared to be the edge of an immense chessboard of black and white marble squares. More statues appeared, some buried to their heads, others toppled from their plinths by the drifting dunes […] the whole landscape was compounded of illusion, the hulks of fabulous dreams drifting across it like derelict galleons.” Paul Golding, an artist, returns to the scene of the failed Orpheus Productions flick, Aphrodite 80. Like many of the artists who encounter (or haunt) the desolate, lush fastness of Vermilion Sands, Paul had been experiencing a “creative pause” (in his case, “showing signs of beach fatigue”). Specifically, Paul has been employed to paint numerous screens that would serve as the backdrop to the obscure psychodrama of this film, staged as a comeback for the dishy, mentally unwell actress Emerelda Garland, a ghostly Venus… “Decorated with abstract symbols, these would serve as backdrops to the action, and form a fragmentary labyrinth winding in and out of the hills and dunes.” Paul meets Emerelda multiple times; she is attended by jeweled insects who seem to be expressions of her underlying psychic state, or at least somehow under her control: “I felt that I had strayed across the margins of a dream, on to an internal landscape of the psyche projected upon the sun-filled terraces around me.” The director, Charles Van Stratten, reveals to Paul the purpose of the film’s production: “Its sole purpose is therapeutic […] I’m convinced the camera crews and sets will help to carry her back to the past […] It’s the only way left, a sort of total psychodrama […] With luck, the screens will lead her out into the rest of this synthetic landscape. After all, if she knows that everything around her is unreal she’ll cease to fear it.” Note that Ballard writes “The Screen Game” two years before John Fowles published The Magus (and both get echoed in The Prisoner). The grand psychoanalytic ritual (or is it a trap?) goes awry, of course: Charles Van Stratten, a petty tyrant, is swarmed to death by Emerelda’s “armada of jeweled insects.” The production ends, and only years later does Paul return to the deserted villa, to the ruins of the backdrops he had painted. “The whole question of the illusions which exist in any relationship to make it workable, and of the barriers we willingly accept to hide ourselves from each other: How much reality can we stand?”

 

 

“Cry Hope, Cry Fury!” (1967): “Hunting for rays, I sometimes found myself carried miles across the desert, beyond sight of the coastal reefs that presided like eroded deities over the hierarchies of sand and wind. I would drive on after a fleeing school of rays, firing the darts into the overheated air and losing myself in an abstract landscape composed of the flying rays, the undulating dunes, and the triangles of the sails. Out of these materials, the barest geometry of time and space, came the bizarre figures of Hope Cunard and her retinue, like illusions born of that sea of dreams.” Note: “I was twenty miles from the coast and my only supplies were a vacuum flask of iced Martini in the sail locker.” After crashing his yacht, Robert Melville is taken in by the mysterious Hope, recuperating under her care at the isolated Lizard Key: “both villa and island had sprung from some mineral fantasy of the desert.” Hope is a painter, and Robert becomes her model as he recovers. But these paintings are psychogenic, or perhaps even mutagenic… “Given a few hours each day, the photosensitive pigments would anneal themselves into the contours of a likeness […] Little did we realize what nightmare fish would swim to the surface of these mirrors.” The paintings, somehow, become haunted by another figure; in the background of this endless, hazy misadventure, a disconcerting figure stalks Lizard Key. Hope has a ghost, it seems. A former lover, supposedly murdered, but who survived the attempt. “I tried to explain why Hope had shot at him, this last attempt to break through the illusions multiplying around her and reach some kind of reality.” Libidinal fog embraces everything, heightening the hyperreality of these starkly blurry images, like a Gerhard Richter painting in drag.

 

 

You’re getting the vibes: a man, typically some kind of artist or functionary, ensorcelled by his own visionary encounter with a doomed icon of desire from the past, who exists as a real or virtual specter haunting some media form or another. The landscape is decadent, though not depraved; time no longer really exists in Vermilion Sands. Recurrent throughout the stories is the intimation of a “Recess,” “that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years.” When the Recess ended, it “started up all the clocks and kept us busy working off the lost time […]” This is the endlessly looping fever dream of Vermilion Sands: imagine the red desert, crisscrossed by the fading yet perversely resilient libidinal intensities of a faintly posthuman class. Ivory rays glitter in the skies above you. You board the shining silver yacht that will take you into the deeper wastes. In the shifting sands, you will find mysterious artifacts, treasures of the past, strange remnants of a whole culture mummified by the omnipresent heat. Here, time is a painting of a stopped clock…

 

 

My edition came with 3D glasses included. But the glasses are cursed. Or perhaps they emancipate one’s vision. Wearing them, you see in Ballardian all the time now. All I know is I can’t take them off anymore. These mallwave mirrorshades have become adhered to the very structure of my face, like a Cronenbergian artifact. I think its fused with the bones of my skull. I can feel them restructuring my psyche, penetrating the distant recesses of my desire, reworking the primordial sludge of self into strange new chromium sculptures. Even if I could, I’d no longer remove them.

 

 

Written By:

Michael Uhall

michaeluhall.com


Copy Editing By: Zack & Gbanas92

RECENT POSTS

  • Interview: listencorp – Vaporwave/Electronic Magazine & Website | Episode 26
  • Vaporwave meets Punk? Get Right Out of Town! | Episode 25
  • Vaporwave Megatext: Glamorama
  • Vinyl Release: t e l e p a t h ‘s “Amaterasu​​ & Andromeda” by Geometric Lullaby
  • Quick Look: Muchuu by Pllunderlines

BACK TO TEXT 

Posted in Articles/Features, Fiction, LongformTagged 2023, 2024, article, book review, classic literature, essay, Longform, michael uhall, new science fiction, nostalgia, Review, vaporwave article, vaporwave essay, vaporwave essay 2023, virtual reality

Feature: COLD_FUTURES.exe and the Virtual Exodus™

Posted on April 16, 2023November 4, 2024 by Michael Uhall

Feature

COLD_FUTURES.exe and the
Virtual Exodus™

Written By: Michael Uhall

 

Published on: Tuesday April 18th, 2023

 


 

  1. Let’s explore the possibility of the vaporwave aesthetic as an organic, highly speculative mode of political theory. Numerous commentators have already noticed that vaporwave seems to be doing something political. Exactly what that something is still remains to be seen. Perhaps it will never be fully visible. In a few influential articles for Dummy magazine, music critic Adam Harper kicked off critical commentary on the aesthetic, arguing that vaporwave is marked primarily by its (“potentially”) accelerationist and anti-capitalist thrust. He later came to acknowledge that, probably like most aesthetic modes of production, vaporwave can do a lot of different things. It can perform the hazy optimism preferred by INTERNET CLUB as easily as it can telegraph the sharpish post-Marxism of Chuck Person. Pursuing some of these ideas more explicitly, fredricjameson420 pursues the idea of vaporwave as a form of “Marxist plunderphonics” more directly, writing, “Vaporwave is a lie put into musical form. It is the sound of the evaporated American Dream, manifest destiny, corporate identity, the sound of the future as described by a venture capitalist in 1989. It is an emphatic nothing, or a pointedly meaningless something, a reclamation of the corporate and the soulless into a compelling audible satire. In the first monograph on vaporwave, Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, Grafton Tanner emphasizes the fundamental ambiguity that animates vaporwave. On the one hand, yes, the vaporwave aesthetic drags the ambient conditions of late capitalism into the foreground, forcing the consumer subject to confront the blandly terrifying promises of neoliberal ideology. On the other hand, Tanner spends too much time echoing Neil Postman, comparing the anonymous, hypermediated spaces of vaporwave’s self-articulation to immunitarian screens intended to ward off the real: “We are all becoming cultural hikikomori, more concerned with staying within the cocoon of our media fortresses and terrified of the larger world and its exploits” (69).

 

Since approximately 2016, basically everyone agrees: Vaporwave is dead. But this slogan has accompanied the vaporwave aesthetic since its very inception. Vaporwave has always been dead – or, more precisely, vaporwave is undead. 

 

“HOME” – Resonance

 

  1. But first, a note on method. Imagine this: rather than taking shape as the mere confluence of accidental features, a given mode of aesthetic production organizes itself around a specific, purely immanent problem. It exists first as a skeletal implication of whatever the aesthetic produces; it only comes into focus fashionably late. If this is true, then the repetitive production that characterizes a given aesthetic is necessarily generative. Why so? In generating token instances, the production process introduces differences that define and manifest the underlying problem. Each token instance is like a key that gets crafted – but, significantly, before the lock it opens is even envisioned, much less designed. As an aesthetic matures, the problem it poses becomes relatively more accessible. Considered in this way, every aesthetic poses or projects a problem, and each token instance of a given mode constitutes an attempt to solve that problem. The twist is that the problem posed only becomes visible after numerous solutions get formulated. Indeed, it’s by means of the heuristic provided by numerous solution attempts that the problem posed even appears in the first place. No token instance can “solve” an aesthetic mode of production, but the problem each mode poses exists at an entirely different scale than any of its token instances. The meaning of token instances is always only referential. 

 

不協和音 Dissonance” – iacon

 

  1. Vaporwave refers to a specific mode of aesthetic production originating in the early 2010s. And it was three years late: usually it takes only seven years before a missing person is declared dead. Aural tropes include extreme reliance upon distorted samples of popular ballads, incidental music, and repetitious looping, as well as incursions of commercials and various forms of sonic entropy, while visual motifs include classical statuary, idealized commercial or tropical locales, neon or pastel planar backgrounds, and paratextual deployments of advertisements, Asian logograms, and vintage operating system iconographies. Tone varies from the delirious to the narcotic, sometimes resembling the “chopped and screwed” style, while mood shifts from the dreamily optimistic to the nightmarishly fractal – like “a weird allegory of the consumer mind lost in a world of infinite excess” (James Ferraro), or an aimless pilgrim’s progress through the city of digital destruction.

 

リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー” – MACINTOSH PLUS

 

  1. Vaporwave politics are hauntologies of the future – particularly, that hazy future of plenty, and satisfaction promised by all the media ephemera of late capitalism at the end of the twentieth century. Those promises are dead now, but they lay dreaming, and all our utopias lie fallow in the virtual plazas of their dreams. Bespoke consumerisms and frictionless globalization execute a slow-motion tango there, like narcotized dancers on Morel’s island. Vaporwave is an aesthetic endeavoring to transcend any particular time, and, therefore, it returns us again and again to a singular moment in the posthistoire, replaying again and again in numerous disguises that nouveau Zapruder film called 1999. It’s no secret that time itself broke around the year 2000. Y2K really happened. It just didn’t mean what everyone expected. The computers are alright. It’s everything else that’s glitching out. Since 2016, the years have been repeating themselves, like broken tape in a VHS cassette. The time factories have finally all shut down.

 

E N D L E S S H E L L

 

  1. As mentioned, vaporwave is now widely considered to be dead, but we all know that the dead live on in media – and even return at times. Zombies from the sixteen-millimeter shrine are coming to get you, Barbara. It’s particularly ironic to call vaporwave dead given the extent to which the aesthetic has always has been driven forward by its propensity for macabre and sorcerous reanimations. Imagine Chris Crocker, defending the archive: “Leave Diana Ross alone!” You could say that vaporwave is a form of artjacking (hijacking an existing work of art by reframing it) or political necromancy. There’s a (Jean-Galbert) salvage component to it, like everything else in remix culture. Neon tugboats fishing seas for media trash, bobbing on virtual waves, slick with oil. Welcome to Satin Island: “There’s always an oil spill happening, I’d say. Which is why. That’s the reason, gentlemen. Which, gentlemen, is the reason we can name it in the singular: the Oil Spill – an ongoing event whose discrete parts and moments, whatever their particular shapes and vicissitudes (vicissitudes! I’d susurrate the word time and again), have run together, merged into a continuum in which all plurals drown. Click. Here, gentlemen, you see a tanker trailing its long, black tail. Click. Here, vinyl-coated rocks; and here – click – a PVC-hemmed coastline. Nature got up in her fetish gear…” It’s a bitter joke, of course – a forensic vivisection of the TED Talk from within. Nevertheless. What if each event were only part of a continuum? The Oil Spill (the Kuwaiti oil fires, Deepwater Horizon, the Dakota Access Pipeline spills), the War (the first Gulf War, the second Gulf War, the Syrian Civil War – a material and media artifact that’s even outlived the state of Syria itself – even the War on Terror itself) – underlying continua that only occasionally break into collective consciousness because they form the very conditions of possibility for the virtual plaza we occupy. “The cybercapital singularity is near. Soon, all wealth will trickle up and condense into a point of infinite density, the center of our new universe. The rich will be infinitely rich, and the poor infinitely poor. Then the false dichotomy between rich and poor will fade in a glorious sweeping wave of pleasure, the Vaporwave. We need you to help us realize that final cybercapital bliss. Consume. Spend. Sacrifice your labor to the altar of the machine, and build the VIRTUAL PLAZA.” PKD’s A Maze of Death: “Time, he thought, is shutting down around us.” Instead of calling ourselves a “culture” (much less, “the people,” or “the tribe”), let’s just call ourselves “the ongoing Oil Spill.” New materialist geopolitical analysis: “The cartography of oil as an omnipresent entity narrates the dynamics of planetary events.” Alternatively, let’s say: “Two figures are approaching an oil well. One of them holds a lighted torch. What are they up to? Are they going to rekindle the blaze? Is life without fire become unbearable for them? Others, seized by madness, follow suit. Now they are content. Now there is something for us to extinguish again.” There’s a formal structure here, lurking outside the window like the killer in the slasher film they’re editing at the start of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (blackly funny how they need a real scream dubbed into their Z-grade horror film in order to achieve just the right effect…). It’s there at the end of The Woman in the Dunes, too (“There was no particular need to hurry about escaping,” after all…); just like it’s present in the irresolution of Robert Maitland’s journey of self-avoidance, which ironically culminates in the new, interstitial form of life he becomes in between the impersonal highways of west London.

A R R A Y 1

 

“너 땜에 맘이 맘이 맘이 맘이 괴로워요” – death’s dynamic shroud.wmv

 

  1. Antarctica is green now. This future doesn’t seem very cold at all. Indeed: Greetings from Shell Beach. Where is Shell Beach? It’s where you were born. You wake up in a bathtub next to a dead body. The phone rings. It’s Dr. Schreber. He tells you to flee. There’s been a whole series of murders, and you’re the prime suspect. The city is a labyrinth, and you’re being chased and chased through endless alleyways by pale men with dark intentions. The detective chasing after you finally catches up, but he shares your doubts about the world. After all, the night is interminable. You discover the pale men chasing you are aliens or ghosts, who drive human corpses like cars. They’ve been feeding on everyone, and you’ve been trapped in their domain for your whole life. The city floats in a void, circling a cold star. Shell Beach is nowhere – but this realization lets you destroy the pale men once and for all. Their sovereignty is an illusion. Because Shell Beach is nowhere, you’re free to go there now.

 

H E L L B E A C H

 

“She Is Young, She Is Beautiful…” – Perturbator

 

  1. Back in the virtual plaza – town square of the dark city – everything remains a flickering shadow, its position sliding along X, Y, and Z axes. Sometimes strange artifacts intrude, fracturing the plane of immanence into Zones (servers?). Maybe something is building itself out there, in the cold, in the dark, in the desert. We’re back to the world before its creation – Abgrund– databending with Schelling’s God. You’re surrounded by statues of the dead, colder than Galatea locked in marble. She won’t return any calls. It’s all on display in this infinite dimension, a shrink-wrapped heaven for all possible commodities, where all animal forms are digital ivory and all bodies speak Muybridge exclusively.

 

iPod Touch” – Eyeliner


A R R A Y 2

 

Devil Daggers

 

  1. So what can vaporwave salvage? It sleepwalks through broken temples of the ideological unconscious, showing us which libidinal vistas are really nightmare landscapes so as to retrieve the latent utopian potential of every broken promise. This is one reason why nobody can decide whether or not vaporwave is genuinely political media or not. Does it perform a ruthless critique, or does it celebrate capitalism’s ephemera and excess? Literally nobody wanted these futures until they were relentlessly projected onto every unconscious screen, infecting you with whole hosts of memetic viruses while you slept, like creeping blood flukes, or blipverts, buy-bombs (“compressed advertising that plays out in your dreams”) going off in everyone’s heads like Cambodia in 1970, a Beijing cocktail wired to every human heartbeat, all beating in unison like a big clock ticking down to the New American Century. Temporal momentum quickens and slurs as time itself becomes an OutDrive dream: LINK THE CAR ENGINE AND HER HEART OR SHE WILL DIE. In other words, function and velocity become causally linked. If the car slows down, then everything else bleeds out to gray, life fades. Where is it going? Always toward the setting sun, tentacular black MIDIs just hiding out on the other side of the horizon of Western decline. Think of all of world history as a terrible remake of Crank (2006): “The only thing you can do at all is to keep the flow of adrenaline constant… meaning: You stop, you die!” – Dwight Yoakum. It’s not my fault; blame capitalism, blame DOLDRUM, blame Sunset Corp, blame the Tyrells, blame the Tessier-Ashpools, blame Hubertus Bigend. There’s nobody here. What were we promised? “More of anything?” / “More of everything!” You’re stuck with one of many possible COLD_FUTURES, a spiraling .exe that extracts empty promise after empty promise onto the hard drive of your mind until the goddamn thing’s so bogged down it can’t even process simple keystrokes, much less complex algorithms. “Yes? You do fucking want this job? Then you’re going to have to fucking swallow this whole fucking life and let it grow inside you like a parasite, getting bigger and bigger and bigger until it fucking eats your insides alive and it stares out of your eyes and tells you what to do.” Likewise, the future (or, as Gunship tells us: “There’s a monster / It’s got me trapped on the other side / But this monster has become my home”).

 

“Complete Domination” – Perturbator

 

RUIN 漢字

 

Gunship

 

  1. Time for a vacation, someone says in ASMR. This is a digital hypnotism. You begin with an aerial descent into a digital oasis. The infinite teal horizon beckons, and you hear a rich mixture of canned tropical sounds and water trickling down pixelated green leaves. In the bottom left corner, a compact disc icon spins relentlessly, informing you that you’re inside of a running program. You’re submerged within the ocean smoothly, announced by panpipes (an ethereal Muzak rendition of “Aquatic Ambience,” from the 1994 video game Donkey Kong Country). Take the plunge into a virtual ocean. Homogeneous sand extends forever, textures looping and replicated. This is the flatland. There are fish in the distance, each bearing a texture error. You swoop through the school. Motionless sea creatures drift around you as you approach a giant squid, its lidless eye a security camera. Its interior is a plane of abstraction. Your attention roams across the marine desert, jerked from one point of fading interest to another. Here you see another school of fish, represented on glitching, synchronized tablets. They flicker colorfully. The battery is dying. Sand, sand, and skeletal shoals of dead smartphones. You approach lost cargo marked as property of DOLDRUM. Inside, more digital fish occupy the digital ruins. An unfinished mesh corpse rests on the ocean floor. Broken frames, static dolphins, barrels of toxic waste leaking cryptocurrency. Suddenly, you break the surface, rushing toward the simulacrum of a cargo ship, bearing simulacral cargo. This cargo, each container stamped DOLDRUM, flickers in and out of existence uncertainly. On the empty bridge of the ship, there’s only an hourglass, but time is meaningless here. You see a door in the distance. Can you exit? A new program appears to be loading, new connections forming. Palm trees beckon. Are we starting the same loop again? Blackness. Throughout your journey, Korean subtitles flick by, which read:

 

“Eco Zones” – Blank Banshee

 

10. There were attacks by cyberpirates.

           We couldn’t stop what happened.

           They hacked Main Control.

           We lost most of our equipment.

           Trillions of dollars were lost.

           So much damage was done to the sea.

           Beyond our dreams, something has changed.

           Electronics and ocean wildlife have combined.

           They’ve taken on new forms.

           As a result, I’ve decided to end my life.

           Goodbye, forever…

 

– President and CEO of Doldrum Corporation

 

 

SUPERHOT

 

  1. An exchange of corporate legal letters sent via paper airplanes scooting through a gray, hot sky. Imagine a Ned Racine-style monologue in a humid Florida summer, the camera moving rapidly through cypress and soggy pampas as it approaches the electric noir city, his voice broken and rasping, like a cockroach dying from exhaustion: “The company that employed me strived only to serve up the cheapest fare that its customers would tolerate, churn it out as fast as possible, and charge as much as they could get away with. If it were possible to do so, the company would sell what all businesses of its kind dream about selling, creating that which all our efforts were tacitly supposed to achieve: the ultimate product – Nothing. And for this product they would command the ultimate price – Everything. This market strategy would then go on until one day, among the worldwide ruins of derelict factories and warehouses and office buildings, there stood only a single, shining, windowless structure with no entrance and no exit. Inside would be only a dense network of computers, calculating profits. Outside will be tribes of savage vagrants with no comprehension of the nature or purpose of the shining, windowless structure. Perhaps they will worship it as a god. Perhaps they will try to destroy it, their primitive armory proving wholly ineffectual against the smooth and impervious walls of the structure, upon which not even a scratch can be inflicted.”

 

“Oh time thy pyramids”

 

  1. Welcome to the Long 2016. This phrase refers to the fact that every year from now on will, in fact, be the year 2016, repeated over and over and over again with only superficial variations. This eternal recurrence of the year 2016 will continue until time decays (maximum entropy, thermodynamic equilibrium). That we find ourselves consigned to this predicament necessitates a unique form of analysis, such that we can identify the structural invariants underlying the apparent heterogeneity we believe we observe in our lives. Historically, each New Year begins on January 1st. However, this condition no longer applies to us. Operations at all temporal factories will be discontinued immediately. All employees are terminated forthwith; there will be no new positions – ever. In brief, this means that all apparent new years from this point on will be exact mechanical repetitions of the current year. There will be no events, only occurrences; no deaths, only reassignments; no intensifications, only adjustments; no recoveries, only stases. There are various benefits and disbenefits to this new arrangement. For example: Between shifts, when you find yourself wondering what time it is, please recollect the following maxim, which will serve well as our categorical imperative from this point onward: Time is a painting of a stopped clock.

 

“W i n d o w s” – Clinton Affair

 

  1. In recompense, here’s an e-mail attachment of a mint-condition set of the complete Clinton affairs, conducted from 1991 to 1997. Exclusive, very rare, from a nonsmoking home. Shipping included. It’s the real megillah, close-ups, slow motion, everything exactly as advertised in our special series of compulsory online banner ads and mandatory but exclusive pop-ups. But you can have it all for free. You can have it all. All you need to do is sign right here, right on the dotted line: 

וַיֹּאמֶר עֵשָׂו, הִנֵּה אָנֹכִי הוֹלֵךְ לָמוּת; וְלָמָּה-זֶּה לִי, בְּכֹרָה.

 

120. The end

 

“Frozen Flame” – Blank Banshee

 

 

 

Written By:

Michael Uhall

michaeluhall.com


Copy Editing By: Gbanas92

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Posted in Articles/FeaturesTagged cold futures, michael uhall, vaporwave article, vaporwave essay, vaporwave essay 2023, Virtual Exodus™
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