We believe Milton Keynes, a ‘new town’ in the centre of England offers particular opportunities to experience life through the lens of the cultural movement that is Vaporwave.
Vaporwave is an internet-based form of electronic music and art which particularly uses appropriation of 1980s and 1990s mood music styles such as smooth jazz, elevator music, R&B, and lounge music. It also incorporates early Internet imagery, late 1990s web design, glitch art, anime, 3D-rendered objects, and cyberpunk tropes in its cover artwork and music videos.
Vaporwave’s preoccupation with 1980’s-1990’s aesthetics offers a particularly ambivalent take on nostalgia, often with an elusive sense of melancholy or loss. Vaporwave artists often play with ideas around memory as a distorted, unreliable construction of the past.
Vaporwave offers us an opportunity to notice what is designed to be unnoticed- the smooth-jazz and R&B playing in the background of a 1000 shopping malls, the aesthetics of department stores.
Vaporwave puts before us a unique opportunity to re-experience the consumer landscape which we all inhabit. This attentiveness to our environment can link with ideas about mindfulness, the active awareness of ourselves in the world which is proven to have a positive effect on our mental wellbeing.
Milton Keynes has a unique and often derided aesthetic which we believe is particularly conducive to re-experiencing the world through the qualities outlined above. Our aim is to share these experiences we have found and encourage you to seek and share your own.
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