"Classical Vapor sounds haunted, like the rotting corpse of a mall. It's the 80s through blue tinted glasses. It's ads on tv, it's paradise trapped behind a television screen. It's nostalgic sludge, a soup of memories that leaks down your spine to the part of you that still longs for the childish wonder you once had - the future you were once promised, snatched away by modernity. It's the Reagan administration in a nutshell, a plastic imitation of progress and luxury. It's the luxury only the rich could enjoy while the working people were fed their scraps - the manicured footage of them living the life you wish you had. It's not too different from the modern epidemic that is social media Influencers, whose sole goal is to achieve stardom by flaunting the wealth they plundered from the very people they wish to placate"
reminiscing of something seen on tumblr about some game - mentioning Hauntology, vaporwave and Mark Fisher
*oh i see, my bad, Music for dead Malls been mentioned(?)...
frankiekrutsch
Jan 16, 2022
Music for Dead Malls: Vaporwave as Hauntology and Hegemony
Cowritten with Dylan Reid Miller, doctoral student at Bowling Green State University / Originally presented at the 2021 Popular Culture Association National Conference, 5 June 2021
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Vaporwave, an aesthetic subgenre of art, music, and Internet trends, developed in the early 2010's in niche digital communities. Typically characterized by remixed and sampled music, nostalgia and popular culture, and consumer capitalism of the 1980s and 1990s, the vaporwave subgenre gained a somewhat mainstream following in virtual spaces during the mid-2010s, and has been recognized and satirized to this day. Vaporwave can be described as an aesthetic "uncanny valley," thanks to its recall of specific sociocultural trends in non-specific temporal settings connected back to the era of Reganomics and before the onset of the war on terror. The presenters of this paper seek to analyze and explore the vaporwave movement through Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds's applications of Derrida's hauntological theory, and to argue the presence of vaporwave as a postmodern response to current American trends, late-stage capitalism, and the failed promises that the 1980s and 1990s gave us for the future.
owenbroadcast
Feb 13, 2021
someone requested a print of this comic to give as a gift so, i listed it in the shop here. its a 12x18 print. added the gradient in the background because thats obviously just how i roll sometimes
https://owen-cyclops.myshopify.com/products/vaporwave-theory-print-12x18?_pos=1&_sid=5f1c27686&_ss=r
#vaporwave#hauntology#mark fisher#deleuze#liquid modernity#aesthetics
nurvuss
Jul 16, 2021
The Slow Cancellation of Island Time: Paradise Killer and its Hauntological Roots
Paradise Killer is an immediately familiar experience: every bit of it can be recognised from elsewhere. It is a collage in video game form, borrowing liberally from Grasshopper's
Kill the Past series (cheekily commodified in-game as the refreshing beer "Kill the Thirst") and psychopop murder mystery
DanganRonpa, stylised in pastel vaporwave aesthetics: a genre wholly dependent on duplication. Barry "Epoch" Topping's city pop/yacht jazz-inspired soundtrack immediately echoes the YouTube algorithms of those of us ruined by Mariya Takeuchi and Toshiki Kadomatsu, though it is original and sample-free.
One might see these numerous references, homages, and borrowings and accuse
Paradise Killer of unoriginality, but the borrowings are the point:
Paradise Killer is the Ur-hauntological adventure game, with each of its disparate parts key to its whole.
Beyond the limits of reality exists the Island Sequence: a pocket dimension ruled over by a cadre of immortal narcissists called The Syndicate. Ostensibly created as worship to the Syndicates' many eldritch Gods, it's essentially an eternal vacation home. Beachfront living and luxurious cocktails for the immortals, while the Citizens—regular humans who've been trafficked across dimensions—are forced into gruelling slave labour to keep the Islands running. It's always a temporary arrangement; every thousand or so years, the Island falls prey to demon invasion, requiring the creation of a new Island, the migration of the Syndicate, and the slaughter of the Citizens to appease the Gods' wrath.
Paradise Killer opens on Sequence 24 as it begins to wind down, as all Sequences do. Preparations are being made for Perfect 25, an idealised "Forever Island" supposedly immune to demonic influence. Just as migration begins, tragedy strikes Paradise: the High Council have been slaughtered in cold blood, throwing 24 into lockdown and disarray. Investigator Lady Love Dies, previously exiled for 8000 years after falling prey to demonic seduction, is brought out of retirement by the Syndicate's judicial body to solve the case. The player, as Lady Love Dies, scours Sequence 24 for clues, meeting the larger-than-life Syndicate members, and looking for holes to poke in their testimonies when it's time to hold court.
Sequence 24 is a dreamlike hodgepodge of spatial design: a tropical beach resort punctuated by realistic Japanese
danchi-style public housing, as well as surreal pyramids, temples, and ziggurats. The landscape is bathed in different shades of neon, as modern architecture combines with Doric pillars and ancient sculpture. Any screenshot is a potential vaporwave album cover. It's also a profoundly lonely experience; each of its characters are spread far apart from each other, occupying their own luxurious "Generation Me" living quarters. Lady Love Dies wanders across the island alone, music fading in and out the closer the player is to a radio tower. What results is an empty shell of a city, a hyper-stylized monument to hedonistic ambition and hubris.
The vaporwave influence is far more than a stylistic choice: a simultaneous celebration of a mythologised recent past, and a critique of the continued failures of capitalism,
Paradise Killer's style is key to its themes. It is no coincidence that vaporwave is preoccupied with 1980s Japan, the height of the bubble economy before it burst in 1991, resulting in the economic downturn of Lost Decade—which, as of 2021, has continued as The Lost 30 Years. Like a wistful snapshot of an 80s metropolis, Sequence 24 is a wonderpark; a collection of non-places. As the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher would write in his 2012 essay "What is Hauntology?", "[non-places'] resemble one another more than they resemble the particular spaces in which they are located, and [their] ominous proliferation is the most visible sign of the implacable spread of capitalist globalization. The disappearance of space goes alongside the disappearance of time: there are non-times as well as non-places."
Paradise Killer, similarly, is wholly unstuck from time: the Syndicate have successfully dragged out their late 20th century summer vacation for thousands of years, but it is not enough: perfection must be endless.
Echoing any economic bubble, every Island Sequence has been a profound failure, setting up Perfect 25 to be a fiction within the game's own fiction. The Syndicate gaze foolishly to a past that never existed, believing they're looking to a bright future. Paradise's late capitalism has lasted thousands of years, and it's set to continue brutally and unabated—always somebody else's fault, the self-absorbed death drive of the Syndicate will march on.
Paradise Killer is a visually enticing adventure; the surface-level beauty of Sequence 24 eroded with each new allusion to the utter bleakness that is the prerequisite to its existence. A world of multicoloured plastic shit, the vacation spot that's a """nice place""" but you wouldn't want to live there—unfortunately, thanks to neoliberalism, we already do.
Hey, at least you can pick your favourite product.
#Paradise Killer#hauntology#vaporwave#capitalism#adventure games
*found the game i think^^^*
Question 10: The concept of hauntology (see online required reading for Week 11) was first coined by Jacques Derrida as a philosophical concept. However, it has been subsequently used to describe a s...
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Mark Fisher har i sitt författarskap satt fingret på ett närmast existentiellt tillstånd som präglar stora delar av modern musik och som i alla fall jag känner igen mig själv i då jag lyssnar på den....
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(1968.08.11 – 2017.01.13) Nehéz olyan íróról írni, aki meghal a kezeid között. Mark Fisher gondolatai lerúgtak a dombról, aztán futhattál utánuk - kritikai érzéke és éleslátása páratlan volt a földö...
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Hauntology is a concept named by philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1993 book Spectres of Marx.[1] Hauntology is the idea of "something that gives us nostalgia for a past that never truly existed".[2...
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iridecent-anicca
Nov 13, 2022
Collective Ideas:
The existential dread of the world being destroyed, corruption from external forces, internal forces, digital forces, and outer forces, and the perseverance & Volition of the Unique Individual throughout
The "Unique"/"Creative Nothing": the infinite wellspring from which you are always becoming anew
Buddhist 3 truths of existence:
DUKKHA life is suffering
ANICCA nothing is permanent
ANATTA the self is an illusion
Eldritch beings like Death, Society, Unknown, Other, the "Ideal world", the "Idea world", Loss.
Philosophers:
Diogenes, Max Stirner, Karl Marx & Fredrick Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, Fredrick Nietzhe, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard, Albert Camus, Guy Debord, Mark Fisher
Aesthetics:
Iridescence, Transparency, Glitchcore, Voidcore, Goblincore, Holosexual, Y2K, Vaporwave, darkerrorcore, Military horror, individualism, egoism, communism, post-modern, absurdism
