Digital Landscapes of the Internet: Glitch Art, Vaporwave, Spectacular Cyberspace

This text was first published as Chapter 14. of the edited volume The Iconology of Abstraction: Non-figurative images and the modern world (Krešimir Purgar, ed.),  published by Routledge in 2020, p.208-217.

I.

Founded in the organized and complex systems of data aided by contemporary technology, the internet of today represents a total machine of assimilation and dissemination of information through two fundamental paradigms: first, connection and communication as a producer-user unity, and, second, community of networks (or networkers).(1) The two represent the basic ontology of the network. What this ontology creates in its most far reaching consequences—and its further techno-individuation—is a “new form of aesthetic experience and illusion”,(2) namely, the technosphere. As it became a more and more stable element of the contemporary culture, the internet as a cyberspace and a cyberculture had witnessed different stages of reception from academic theory as well as from institutional and noninstitutional art practice.(3) The same can be said of the technology in general, or, to be more precise, the turnover from the technics or technique—more or less sophisticated mechanics and other non-electric technical devices, technical objects being tools for purposes—to technology—electrical, digital, machinery of the code and its consequential visual representation, thus making a subtle shift from tools to means and a broader one from using to being used. Better yet, the internet as well as its method (the network)—closely connected to the basic principles of cybernetics—presents yet another stage in the development of technology itself.

The main thinker of this shift was Max Bense who was the first to systematically incorporate the concept of information and cybernetics to aesthetics as a discipline.(4) If we are to call his era a time of techno-enthusiasm that was preceded by the time of initial discovery of the potentials of new technologies, we are witnessing today a time of radical normalization of technology as it becomes not just the means or a topic of the work of art, culture and theory but rather embedded in the structure of culture and life itself, radically changing the notions of both respectively, far beyond the recent fascination of bio-technical interaction. The easiest way to describe this is the phenomena of the internet of things where connectivity and communication become the principles of social and technological governance over the totality of our lives. We are connected with our machines as they think and inform us artificially, but efficiently, giving us the surplus of control and providing the maximum information on our everyday lives which by that become increasingly programmable. This means, first, that the whole of culture and the everyday becomes increasingly more and more likely to being described and run by code, and, second, that the notion of the internet as a phenomenon separated from life becomes outdated. The essence of the internet is, actually, the essence of contemporary life as we know it. Cultural theory, media studies and anthropology should now be replaced with the study of networks, frameworks, assemblages and figurations. (5) With this development we are entering the stage in our history that we can describe as the post-internet, meaning that the internet itself became fully integrated or, better yet, fully realized in the modern way of life and should no longer be thought of as something separate or distinct from it.

The new digital art of the second decade of the 21st century is predominantly marked with the further exploration of the code and the heritage of the internet/digital enthusiasm of cybercultures of the 1980s, 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century. It is an anthropological experimental art that features research of life practices in a new and radical way considering our internet-of-things way of life. New methodological tools become available, while the old doctrines become inapt to fully integrate and comprehend the changes in the media, art, culture and politics exactly because of digital art’s radical overlapping and transparency, not to mention its gravity—speed, space, time and other seemingly physical factors that become more and more metaphysical conditions of the mere possibility of life as such, giving us the sole appearance of stable and physical space and time. The gravity of data remains to be considered in this remark as a digital/network pull that holds the everyday together in an ironic but consumer-liquid state of the spectacle of disintegration. As we mentioned earlier, digital or post-digital art has its history that follows the basic stages of reception of the possibilities given to us, with the radically new technology of computer and internetbased communication, connectivity and creativity, which stimulated specific sociological research fields such as cyberculture studies. What we experience today, in a time where being-emerged-in-the-internet is a normalized form of life, is the new radical artistic practice that uses this normalized state as a starting point of the critique aimed no longer at the computer, the internet and its phenomena, but at the life itself as being constructed on the basis of the code, giving us the conceptual base for a radically different theoretical consideration of the new phenomena of life. This means that we are discovering the possibilities to use the code to our advantage on the dangerous path of the blurred line between the radical overcoming of the machine and total immersion in it. The first of the movements that exemplifies best the emergence of the gravity of data as well as it reveals the abstract landscape of the internet is the practice of glitch art.

II Beautiful Errors of Glitch Art

The notion of the landscape first and foremost should not be mistaken with the notion of the geographies and topologies of the network; just as if we are talking of artificial intelligence (AI) there seems to be no need to talk of the psychology of AI. In order to understand glitch art we will need the tools given to us by sciences largely outside the conventional notions of art history. This is mainly because, in a philosophical sense, but also in a profoundly radical way, we can no longer speak about art with any certainty, as well as we can no longer communicate historic thoughts over, through and about the internet. Its way of operation is in essence non-linear, and its history cannot be important in the way that we understand the ideas behind glitch art. It is the art of the mistake, error and the sublime (de)visualization of virtual data, discovering the haunting landscapes of cyberspace that was until now just a figment of imagination for many of the greatest science fiction writers of our time. Consider the first sentence of one of the greatest cyberpunk novels ever written, William Gibson’s Neuromancer: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel”.(6) This white noise is the haunting landscape behind every digital visualization imaginable. It is the gravity of data on its basic level. What are we to say of art which has as its canvas a screen that is just a flickering visualization of a vast world of constantly moving bits of data? The (glitch) artist would propose a halt. And this is the principal point of emergence of glitch art. If we could stop the code from interpreting data in the common way of constructing and disseminating information, we would arrive at a point where code can be overtaken and used as a facility for a more immediate expression— the glitch, or the art of errors. We are then soon arriving at the point beyond mere data aesthetics and digital aesthetics. Through a ludic understanding of hacking, or, to say, by using hacking tools and methods as means of artistic expression, glitch art also becomes a virtualization of the practice of hacking as well as the disenchanted image of our everyday experience of the world constructed in the technosphere.

It is important to note that data aesthetics as a conceptual model has been a prominent figure of artistic and cultural expression ever since the first great encyclopedic projects and ever-growing exploration of the distant worlds and cultures, namely, since Enlightenment onward.(7) This is important because since those times we are faced with a shift in the representative role of the image. Beyond the mythological and theological substance of the work of art, image now represents data, and its aim is to inform the viewer. This shift comes about with the coming of what Heidegger calls the age of the world picture. (8) In this manner, data aesthetics can stand as a signifier of the broadest field of modern image production. On another important note, we should distinguish the abovementioned digital art practices from data aesthetics. While data aesthetics is a certain worldview and can be considered an essence of many if not all of today’s visual practices, distinguished from it is the code aesthetics, aesthetics of the code or code-based art as digital aesthetics. Of course, here we are thinking about the digital code. This lively, beautiful or even sublime mutual cancellation through the code can be understood with one-word umbrella term—“design”, or “digital design-ation”. Keeping this in mind, the same model of explanation can be made of every digital rendering program that uses code as means of delivering a visual result. Think of digital picture processors, visualization tools or even some forms of digital photography.

On the other hand, talking of data aesthetics we are limited to data visualization such as digital graphic generators, mapping and such. In that way data aesthetics refers to the process of the artifice of data design. With the artistic intention both can become works of art, but they are not mutually inclusive terms; they precede the computers, and they both are conditions of today’s notion of design. The main difference here is the completion of the post-aesthetic tirade of the everyday. Besides communication and connectivity stands compression, or optimization of data in the form of code. Also, this is the main tool with which glitch art is made, communication and connectivity being the conceptual background of the post-aesthetic being in a much broader sense. Early digital art, such as the art of the Bit International and some Fluxus works, utilized, on the other hand, the perceived technical advantages as means of advancing art into the age of conceptual aesthetics of performance, happening and installation that remains today an institution of multimedia art and new media art. In opposition to glitch art, this is the art of experiment which advances art as history but not as a culture. The locus of the new media art is the museum and the gallery. In the age of suspicion of the possibility of an artwork, the art itself becomes an event, at the same time integrated as the spectacle and disintegrated as the recycled product of art history.

Data aesthetics, digital aesthetics and their art forms belong to the realm of art history, of art proper and visual culture at large. Glitch art goes beyond all of them and forms a movement which, in opposition to art, we can historically call an art praxis, digital art praxis, as it brings into question the solid state and metastability of contemporary art and culture. In a way it disconnects the naturalized form of biotechnological nexus of contemporary art and pushes for a reconceptualization of our relationship to machines. For the mere understanding of the conceptual backdrop of contemporary digital art praxis, we need an overall, or at least a rough, understanding of the cultural shift that shapes our everyday through technology and science. Just one of the sources can be the communicational aspect of the technical image proposed by Vilém Flusser,(9) as it dispenses with the aesthetic notions of images and moves us closer to the ontological and technical description of the conditions of the possibility of images at large. From this stance, we find ourselves in the open trying to understand the subversive notion of the aesthetics of error—“aesthetics” acting here as a stand-in term developed in the circle of the practitioners of the concrete image making method. It is not just about disturbing the code and the image, but also subverting the communication path of the conventional digital image, creating the possibility of erroneous interaction with its surroundings, a new humanism to counteract the iRationality of the machine. An image produced by the error in the code can act, being essentially a corrupted computer file, as a bug or a virus. This is the uncanny gravity of data that transforms the digital art into a reformed, rebellious form of art practice, digital art praxis or, as we will see, the post-digital art proper. Namely, the corruption of data does not erase but disrupts information that is again pulled together by a script of the program interpreting data. This gravity pull then creates a result that is an actual anti-design, a meaningless output, unfunctional and aesthetically disturbing. The mere discharge of this erroneous aesthetic is the subversive value of this praxis. Glitch here acts as a point of indeterminism, uncertainty and unpredictability of the event that is nevertheless absolutely determined. Why is this so important? Because this puts the glitch art back on track of the historical avant-garde criticism of the everyday life.(10)

Glitch art is a new form of digital art, the digital art praxis as a way of dispensing with the total assemblage of digital art to date, of which vaporwave is the end result. Glitch brings to the forefront the structure of the image by developing a series of errors of the machine that expose the “canvas” or look “behind” the image, a landscape that belongs to the aesthetical ineffability of the code. We can identify the same phenomena at the beginning of contemporary artistic tendencies through dispensing with geometry and with the multiplication of perspective in the works of artists from the beginning of the 20th century. As futurism knew that realism lies in the multitude of perspectives and not in mimesis, so the glitch art knows that realism of contemporary everyday is embedded in the digital code as an absolute landscape, pure perspective and gravity of data and not in the space and time of subjective intentionality. Its main novelty comes from the renewed conception of information process in the post-digital age; space is overcome by landscapes, image-landscapes of data, corruption of which reveals the gravity of scripts holding the code together.

III After Cyberspace: The Spectacular Cyberscape

Let’s now turn from glitch art and its technical diversion of art to another phenomenon that revisits in the radical manner the everyday life and its potential of becoming a real and notably first digital avant-garde movement. There are currently very few people writing on vaporwave and predominantly without the art-history background; rather they are artists or media theorists with background in postmodern and poststructuralist theories. But we have to keep in mind that it is not the idea that should overwhelm the world, but, as Heidegger noted, the world in its historicity should be contained in the work of art as an openness to the truth.(11) There is no need for art-historical idealization of vaporwave, but the time seems right for a movement capable of captivating the essence of the specific contemporary moment in time. With this notion we are lifted from the common ground of aesthetics to a position that questions the responsibilities and the roles of the artwork in general in our modern condition. On a more cautious note—that still gives in to the academic research—we should investigate what are the conditions open to us in today’s world for the possibility of an avant-garde. We can surely find part of the answer in the wasteland of the internet and the apparent chaos of information in everyday life. With the advent of contemporary technology and interactive media we are in need of a new term that would successfully grasp the totality of our experience of the everyday—we need the notion of the spectacle.

Apart from the apocalyptic graveyard of modern technology, we are faced with an age where information waste surpasses the actual information gain. Under the horizon of Gibson’s white noise sky lies the wasteland of vaporware,(12) disposed and used up ideas, phenomena, products and designs of our techno-enthusiastic everyday. The art of vaporwave comments on the distinct forms of the contemporary everyday in a direct and contrasting manner. It started as a movement of experimental low-fi remix music genre that has grown way out of proportion as its postmodern aesthetic developed as an overall ludic critique of equally postmodern conditions of the everyday life in late capitalism. As a music genre, vaporwave uses early 1980s’ pop dance music, chops it down and slows it down to simulate the soothing effect of the so-called elevator or airport music that has proliferated during the boom of shopping malls of the 1990s and early 2000s. This music, fueled with (analog) nostalgia and the repetitiveness of the already recycled cultural artifacts, found its supplement in the corporate culture of the 1990s and actually derived its name from an obscure economic model from the turn of the century. A vaporwave product is a product that is advertised, put on display and even offered for pre-order but never actually reaches the market, a product without relations, a body without organs, a schizo-product so to say or a mere registry (13)—the vaporware. It is a specter, and as such it represents all the false promises promoted by the technological enthusiasm of the 1990s and the early 2000s that led to subsequent disappointment by the actual effects of the information age: the hyperreal detachment from the real life, its historicity and naturality, promise of freedom detoured in order to enjoy the full immersion in the cyberspace of the internet. This is the rough principle of vaporwave: to bring forth with a splash of color all the virtual plazas of our hopes in the future that was fueled by our reinvention of history and nature to our own contemporary image. As we have dispensed with everything that pushed us into collective narcissism during the emergence of social networks and interactive internet, all those images now come back to haunt us.

From the art of ancient Greece to the mall aesthetics of the “American Tropicana”, space and time find themselves condensed in the experience of the highly saturated information landscape of pure virtual artifacts. It is the first full readaptation of Dada that follows the disappearance of art and culture as the collateral damage of the ongoing information wars of the present day. In the age of solid-state technologies, vaporwave is the movement not much unlike the child’s play with the old broken radios, VCRs or other equipment that becomes the ludic exploration of the uncanny mechanical apparatus of our desires. This project belongs, of course, to the historical line of the development of the avant-garde artistic practice that draws most of its connections and similarities to the theory of the everyday and the critique of the spectacle proposed by the Situationist international and its main exponents who pushed us into collective narcissism: Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem. Dérive and détournement, drift, deflection and diversion as genuine situationist methods of critique are exposed in their theory as the contingents of the spectacle inside of which they need to become a tactic for a subversive or revolutionary role of the situationist avant-garde. Vaporwave is not the art of the spectacle, as some would surely suggest. Rather, vaporwave is the art of the void which appears between life and the spectacle if we are to consider the now classical definition of the spectacle proposed by Guy Debord in his Society of the Spectacle: “Everything that was directly lived has receded into representation. […] The spectacle […] is a social relation between people that is mediated by images”.(14) This spectacular taboo of disintegration of the immediate experience is encountered in vaporwave imagery as the recreated solitude of artifacts in the image and the sloweddown music remix that is describable only as an ironic anti-aphorism stating “that is aesthetic”, dwelling on the question posed by electro-pop duo AIR through the artificially created computer voice: How does this make you feel?

There’s an image (artifact) inside the image-landscape (cyberscape) of vaporwave. Artifacts ranging from antique busts to palm trees and Coca-Cola cans haunt the surface of the abstract digital landscape, reminiscent of the computer commercials of the 1980s and 1990s. Taken together, they represent something very important, and what philosopher Žarko Paić called “the image without the world”.(15) Namely, image artifacts that pop-up in the landscape of the vaporwave no longer have a reference in time or space; nor do they have nature or history. They represent the haunting freedom of representation in terms of the artificiality of the (virtual) world. As new media are the sole creators of the new world of information science and cyberculture, images are in themselves art-and-facts of life as communication and connection between every aspect of the world. “Art of the new image is, at the same time information-communication, virtual, simulation and collective ‘thing’ of the network actors”.(16) Images of vaporwave no longer describe the world in terms of the world-image, but, on the contrary, they are the postscript on the dismissal of the world itself for the future being of the image as a space of multiple virtual “nows”.

This image thrown in the image-landscape of digital art praxis of vaporwave is an example of what Flusser calls the techno-imagination (17)—a praxis of critique and decoding of the internet as an image of our world-less state. Having much to do with the historical avant-garde, Dadaism and surrealism, it should only be natural to consider vaporwave as a next exit from art history and mediology to a reconception of our relationship to the everyday at large. This is why it is safe to say that the specter is hounting the spectacle—the specter of vaporwave, just so to stay on the critical track of what later became marxistwave or, even more hounting, fashwave subgenre of commodified ironic vapor-fashion. It is our lives imagined as slowed-down, etheric, monolithic and abstract, through objects that make our past seem like a voyage back—to the future.

Grafton Tanner’s book Babbling Corpse shows us how this spectacle works, without the somber tones of a Debord critique exposing the initial and essential features of vaporwave as music genre, but which should stand as tools for the contestation of the spectacle’s whole: anonymity, hountology, defamiliarization, mundanity and, yes—anti-humanism. From the spectacle to the technosphere there is only growth in cultural saturation, commodification and techniques of artificial life (likeness) design. Tanner says: “we live in a time without time when the past ceaselessly haunts the present—a fantasy world in which we can utilize the endless capabilities of digital technology while copping the visual imagery of previous decades”. (18) In this way, the surreal “space” of vaporwave and glitch art invite us into hounting in themselves, for they both stand for impenetrable landscapes of a cultural decline, embedded in the design of the technosphere as an artificial horizon. (19)

IV Landscape without the World?

The idea of the landscape is—in the images of vaporwave movement and its aesthetics— the creation of the “space” of discord, which in return recreates the possibility of political interpretation of the image as the locus of its implicit contents. For the reversal of perspective (20) we need to make the perspective present and realize it in the form of a landscape, landscape as a concept and a plane of the cyberscape. Theory that a philosopher Jacques Rancière proposes—as well as the Situationist project in general—points to a necessity of connection and even transparency between aesthetics and politics, the aesthetical and political regimes which in accord create the common space of human action, its everyday and its future potentials. They allow for the creation of difference that is in essence the finding of a voice, the logos or the reasonable (dis)accord with the present state.

The real problem is though, while vaporwave transforms to the spectacular aesthetic commodity, glitch art fueled by contemporary cynicism rises to the artistic expression in and for itself. There is a lot to keep in mind while trying to navigate through the production of the post-internet art and also while trying to make sense of its radical potentials and dangers of recuperation. The tenuous speed of recuperation of the new artistic forms must be shadowed by the radicality of the questions and motivation we are ready to enrich them with, so the art praxis would not remain contained in the mere spectacle of the everyday. The coming-out of the vaporwave from the confines of the underground avant-garde that happened in the first half of this decade signifies the uncanny powers of the spectacle to recuperate revolutionary or avant-garde potentials of new movements in aesthetic commodities. Vaporwave therefore sprung out numerous subgenres (futurefunk, retrowave, darkwave, distroid, marxistwave, simpsonwave, fashwave, …) and digital aesthetics (seapunk, oceangrunge, VHS pop, …) and developed pop culture at large. Iconology of vaporwave is successfully assimilated by commercial televisions such as MTV and marketing campaigns of youthoriented brands like Coca-Cola by means of the ironic use of commodity-artifacts in collage aimed at meeting the consumer needs and interests. This effect is made possible only by spectacular hyper-aestheticization and deprivation of voice or logos to the totality of the movement, ripping it off from its own concept of the digital landscape and pushing it into the recycle-imperative of the spectacle of disintegration. (21) The idea of virtual plaza, digital beach and neon cityscape is overcome with the concretization of iconography in symbols of consummation that are connected to the general tendency toward ironic consumerism.

The concept of the landscape finds its essence in understanding it as a situationimage, and as in vaporwave and glitch art it is a mélange of the situationist understanding of aesthetics (spectacle of disintegration) and Marxists’ take on economy (commodity fetishism). The necessary method of the vaporwave image is the collage, critical remix and deconstruction of discourse. Landscape as a general theme or as a visual presence is brought up to the limits of representation. It is no longer a theme as an artistic preoccupation, but it is the essence of the post-pictorial critical response of vaporwave. This notion is important. As an idea of the image itself and its use as a method of exposition of the false consciousness of capitalism, the use of landscape brings us close to the unfulfilled or betrayed idea of the virtual beach and life extended through and not compressed to the network. Vaporwave provokes the idea of surreal scapes of empty images reminiscent of Giorgio de Chirico as a ludic contemplation of our own cyberfuture. Grafton Tanner gives a definite momentum to this speculation in Babbling Corpse, saying that “vaporwave is the […] product of a culture plagued by trauma and regression in late capitalism”, (22) as a culture which denies us the possibility of making new memories (23) where “forgetting becomes an adaptive strategy”. (24)

There is an important ontological distinction to make in the final remark on the digital art praxis. Namely, every digital image is a landscape, because the notion of the landscape implies a system, a perspective of the process and the horizon of meaning. If we consider them as signs, they are always signifying in a sense the limits of information and design in its own frame, reminiscent of understanding the concept of enframing (25) [gestell]. We need the concept of the digital landscape to overcome the fictitious fantasy of cyberspace. Over space (as a void or as a vacuum) we need to reach a surface, a perspective and the recreation of the technical network (Simondon) in order to fully grasp the magnitude of the spectacular post-internet era of thinking things. Absolute landscape, digital landscape or the landscape without the world is always present, as long as there is data and as long as the screen is flickering, and the glitch is only its exposition in which the landscape itself is simultaneously concealed by glitch art being also an image in itself, and not just a distortion of an image. In forms of vaporwave and glitch art, it is a tactic of the contestation of digital aesthetics of the technosphere and its total life design, meaning it is a post-aesthetic praxis, insomuch as neo-avant-gardes of the second half of the 20th century certainly were.

There is a certain indignation against the computer becoming a multi-purpose typewriter, machine for developing programs and executing operations demanded by the work process. Because of today, we no longer talk about computers being the main necessity of postmodern life; we no longer compute but rather document and observe, hiding the spectacle in our pocket. It is the “little dark age of smartphones” that leads us to regress as individuals—everybody again having the same mobile ringtone—and, as a collective body, computers became highly specialized for gaming, office and studio. Culture follows, as we no longer dread its uniformity but embrace it as an ironic product of consumption; we choose the same phone and same shoes, and all want to watch Home Alone for Christmas. Vaporwave brings us one step further in explaining the importance of the questions on recycling, repeating and difference from the point of entropy in our culture, questions that arise with the philosophies of Deleuze, Stiegler, Simondon and others, as the question concerning technology is the question that stands embedded in the culture of digital landscapes of the network. As the artistic avant-garde of the technosphere, vaporwave and glitch art are to be considered as an anti-design as well as an ambiguous aesthetics of the ugly and uncanny, in the sense of its total realization in the art-life or the space of thinking things that can only simulate its appearance but never its essential nature. The digital art praxis is the recaptcha test for the upcoming revolution. While spectacle uses it to learn more and more about the way we use signs for motivating the revolutionary action, it is up to us to realize its potentials to hack the system.

Vaporwave is the specter of cyberspace and the hubris of information capitalism that imagines a new space of exchange and the use of data on the internet. The turn needed is exactly to see that on the internet we are not moving through space, but we observe and drift over the haunted landscape of information. Our only possessions are the ambiguous experiences of these observations and not the real conquest of the cyberspace. Because it is everywhere, we do not see it, and we ought to find the landscape and the frame of this transparency. Glitches are happening, always and at random; vaporwave emerges at the compressed horizon of our memories; technoaesthetic (26) that Simondon wished for still awaits for the contestation of the spectacular technosphere. As it is with the most influential theories and philosophies of our times, the aim of the digital art praxis is to ignite the free experimental creativity of all and for all, not just for the commodity of the spectacular success. There would certainly be no point in philosophizing if it just creates a commentary and an answer. As Bergson pointed out, it is about formulating a question, and, as Deleuze concluded, it is about the creation of concepts of the contestation of present answers.

Notes

(1) Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 36–63, 116–137.

(2) Žarko Paić, “Technosphere—A New Digital Aesthetics?”, in K. Purgar and Ž. Paić (eds.), Theorizing Images, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016, p. 123.

(3) David Silver, “Looking Backwards, Looking Forwards: Cyberculture Studies 1990–2000”, in David Gauntlet (ed.), Web.Studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 19-31.

(4) Max Bense, Aesthetica: Einführung in die neue Aesthetik, Baden-Baden: Agis, 1965.

(5) Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp, The Mediated Construction of Reality, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017.

(6) William Gibson, Neuromancer, New York: Ace Books, 2000, p. 4.

(7) Stephen Wright, “How to Do Things with Data”, in Stephen Wright (ed.), Dataesthetics, Zagreb: Arkzin, 2006, p. 9.

(8) Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1977, p. 115.

(9) Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, p. 48.

(10) Aleš Erjavec, “Conclusion. Avant-Gardes, Revolutions, and Aesthetics”, in Aleš Erjavec (ed.), Aesthetic Revolutions and Twentieth Century Avant-Garde Movements, Durham: Duke University Press, 2015, p. 255.

(11) Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 20–21.

(12) “Vapour-ware”, Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, accessed December 31, 2018, https://en cyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Vapour-ware.

(13) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p. 4.

(14) Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle, London: Rebel Press, 2005, p. 7.

(15) Žarko Paić, Slika bez svijeta: ikonoklazam suvremene umjetnosti, Zagreb: Litteris, 2006, pp. 160–165. Also consider: Žarko Paić, White Holes and the Visualisation of the Body, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, p. 187 and on.

(16) Paić, Slika bez svijeta, p. 162.

(17) Vilém Flusser, Schriften, Vol. 4: Kommunikologie, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1998; 2007, p. 209.

(18) Grafton Tanner, Babbling Corpse—Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, Washington: Zero Books, 2016, p. 60.

(19) Paulo Virilio, The Information Bomb, New York: Verso, 2005, p. 14.

(20) Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of the Everyday Life, Oakland: PM Press, 2012, p. 162.

(21) McKenzie Wark, The Spectacle of Disintegration, New York: Verso, 2013, p. 3.

(22) Tanner, Babbling Corpse—Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, p. 9.

(23) Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Washington: Zero Books, 2009, p. 60.

(24) Ibid., p. 56.

(25) Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, pp. 3–35.

(26) Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, Paris: Aubier, 1989, p. 179.