Digital nostalgia: Vaporwave as a multimedia musical fiction

  • Igor Vujčić PhD candidate, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21301/eap.v13i4.6
Keywords:
Vaporwave, music culture, cultural communication, popular culture, meaning and emotion

Abstract

Vaporwave as a musical genre with a limited number of mostly anonymous performers, but also with a very limited duration of only a few years, is inseparably linked to the phenomenon of the Internet that functions not only as a place where musicians and their audience meet, but as the primary cultural framework of this genre. Relying on the techniques of processing already existing musical expressions, as well as on visual representations and references to the popular culture of nineties, marked in the context of the genre as "aesthetics", vaporwave tends to show and awake with his listeners nostalgia during the early beginnings of the Internet, shaping his expression, both musical and visual, with the goal of acting "as if" comes from another time. The phenomenon of vaporwave will be addressed through several central and interrelated questions - how techniques of sound processing, visual representations and elements of popular culture are brought into interconnection within the musical genre contributing to its multimedia nature, how these elements are separated from their primary interpretations in the processes of retextualization and the creation of a specific bricolage, and on which cultural knowledge the competence for participation in such forms of cultural communication is based.

References

Angé, Olivia and David Berliner. 2016. Introduction to Anthropology and Nostalgia. Anthropology as Nostalgia. eds. Olivia Angé and David Berliner, 1-15. New York: Berghahn Books.
Antonijević, Dragana. 2009. „Povodom Levi-Strosovog koncepta ’motiva zaborava’. Struktura poremećene komunikacije i stilovi mišljenja u tranzicijskoj Srbiji“. U Strukturalna antropologija danas: tematski zbornik u čast Kloda Levi-Strosa, ur. Dragana Antonijević, 244-295. Beograd: Srpski genealoški centar i Odeljenje za etnologiju i antropologiju Filozofskog fakulteta.
Bakardjieva, Maria. 2005. Internet Society: The Internet in Everyday Life. Lodnon: Sage Publications.
Bartholeyns, Gil. 2014. „The Instant Past: Nostalgia and Digital Retro Photography”. In Media and Nostalgia, Katharina Niemeyer ed., 51-69. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Becker, Judith. 2004. Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion and Trancing. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Berger, Harris M. 2009. Stance: Ideas about Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive Culture. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Budd, Malcolm. 1992. Music and Emotions: The Philosophical Theories. London: Routledge.
Christensen, Justin. 2018. Sound and the Aesthetics of Play: A Musical Onthology of Constructed Emotions. Aalborg: Palgrave Macmillan.
Coleman, Gabriella. 2010. Ethnographic Approaches to Digital Media. Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (1): 487-509.
Csordas, Thomas J. 1990. Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology. Ethos 18 (1): 5-47.
de Munck, Victor C. 2013. A Theory Explaining the Functional Linkage between the Self, Identity and Cultural Models. Journal of Cognition and Culture 13 (1): 179-200.
Finnegan, Ruth. 2003. „Music, Experience and Anthropology of Emotions“. In The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, eds. Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton, 185-196. London: Routledge.
Fisher, Mark. 2014. Ghosts of my Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Winchester: Zero Books.
Gerc, Kliford. 1998. Tumačenje kultura. Beograd: XX vek.
Leavitt, John. 1996. Meaning and Feeling in the Anthropology of Emotions. American Ethnologist 23 (3): 514-539
Levi-Stros, Klod. 2009. Mit i značenje. Beograd: Službeni glasnik.
Lič, Edmund. 2002. Kultura i komunikacija. Beograd: XX vek.
Lysloff, Rene T. A. 2003. „Musical Life in Softcity: An Internet Etnography“. In Music and Technoculture, eds. R. Lysloff i L. Gay, 23-63. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Merriam, Allan P. 1964. The Anthropology of Music. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Niemeyer, Katharina. 2014. Introduction to Media and Nostalgia. In Media and Nostalgia, ed. Katharina Niemeyer, 11-23. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Oltețeanu, Ion. 2010. Understanding Music Theory: Meaning, Self-Consciousness, and Emotional Expressiveness. New York: Addleton Academic Publishers.
Ože, Mark. 2005. Nemesta. Beograd: XX vek.
Perlman, Marc. 2003. „Consuming Audio: An Introduction to Tweak Theory“. In Music and Technoculture, eds. R. Lysloff i L. Gay, 346-357. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Pickering, Michael and Emily Keightley. 2006. The Modalities of Nostalgia. Current Sociology 54: 919–41.
Robinson, Jenefer. 2005. Deeper than Reason: Emotion and its Role in Literature, Music and Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Ristivojević, Marija. 2012. Proučavanje muzike u antropologiji. Etnoantropološki problemi 7 (2): 471-486.
Ristivojević, Marija. 2013. Muzika kao kulturni fenomen. Etnoantropološki problemi 8 (2): 441-451.
Schrey, Dominik. 2014. „Analogue Nostalgia and the Aesthetics of Digital Remediation“. In Media and Nostalgia, ed. Katharina Niemeyer, 27-38. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Spracklen, Karl. 2015. Digital Leisure: The Internet and the Popular Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Strauss, Claudia and Quinn, Naomi. 1997. A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tarner, Viktor. 1989. Od rituala do teatra: ozbiljnost ljudske igre. Zagreb: August Cesarec.
Žakula, Sonja. 2012. Da li kiborzi sanjaju biomehaničke ovce? Telo i hiperrealnosti. Antropologija 12 (2): 43-61.
Žikić, Bojan. 2009. „Za šta su dobri žanrovi? Deljenje, razgraničavanje i razvrstavanje u strukturalnoj i kognitivnoj antropologiji na primeru muzičke kulture“. U Strukturalna antropologija danas: tematski zbornik u čast Kloda Levi-Strosa, ur. Dragana Antonijević, 326-361. Beograd: Srpski genealoški centar i Odeljenje za etnologiju i antropologiju Filozofskog fakulteta.
Žikić, Bojan. 2010. Antropologija i žanr: naučna fantastika – komunikacija identiteta, Etnoantropološki problemi 5 (1): 17-34.
Žikić, Bojan. 2012. Popularna kultura, nadkulturna komunikacija, Etnoantropološki problemi 7 (2): 315-341.
Published
2018-12-29
How to Cite
Vujčić, I. (2018). Digital nostalgia: Vaporwave as a multimedia musical fiction. Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology, 13(4), 1007–1029. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.21301/eap.v13i4.6
Issue
Vol 13 No 4 (2018): Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology: Anthropology of Music II
Section
Thematic Issue

All articles in Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology are published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License which allows authors and users to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the article under the same conditions as in the licence.

The CC BY SA license permits non-commercial and commercial re-use of an open access article, as long as the author is properly attributed.

Copyright on any research article published by Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology is retained by the author(s).

Authors grant to the Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology the right to publish the article, to be cited as its original publisher in case of reuse, and to distribute it in all forms and media. Copyright and source must be acknowledged and a link must be made to the article's DOI.