Visions of Retro-future
From Narrative Machines.
We have a need to recreate a sense of connection with the past, it is to the past that many seek to find identity. Yet this fantasy exists within the imaginal field of the future. Without really anything but media images of that past to envision it in, we invent new aesthetic mythologies, encapsulating identity in a “look” or a “sound”. One of the more absurd examples of this can be found in the ketamine retro-futurist visions of vapor wave, a genre which plays into a form of nostalgia for manufactured memory snippets, a virtualized fever dream glimpsed from elevator music and obscure songs from popular artist―the sounds of generations past merely half-remembered and elaborated on. Trapped within big brother’s Windows 95 in a terminal k-hole, we enter a liminal space.
