My subject started from vaporwave. I didn’t know that it was very popular in the early 2010s, I have seen and heard the genre's works before but I am guessing that I just didn’t connect the dots of it being part of the vaporwave genre. I really like the aesthetic side and my googling ended up me reading a Thesis by T. Vesalainen long live vaporwave! After reading I continued on reading some articles from the internet such as an article from Esquire How Vaporwave was Created Then Destroyed by the Internet and an article from Eye on Design Vaporwave is Dead, Long Live Vaporwave.
Some examples what vaporwave style is:
What I gathered from my sources the popularity of vaporwave can be explained by retromania aka the power of nostalgia. I got fascinated how vaporwave only lived because of the internet and “died” with it. I am always up for things that try to take from consumerism and materialism and critique the nightmarish situation that we live in. The thing in vaporwave is that it is so absurd and odd and that is what makes it so compelling to me. Vaporwave is made to not succeed because it doesn’t try to be marketable or profitable because it criticizes capitalism but it battles with nostalgia being one of the most successful and easiest selling points, it doesn’t need anything new to happen. Experimenting and reading about vaporwave got me to the point what I did for my project. The reason I dumped vaporwave as my subject was that it has so many themes and the genre is so broad, I switched to a theme that would be more suitable for my project and is more narrow to deal with. The end result of my project turned out to be from advertising and targeted marketing through that
Advertisement and illusion from it all
The ads that we see nowadays are presented in a way that they are almost too much to handle, they are designed in a way that you are sure to click the ad in question. Advertisements are the illusion of our desires, what we want in that product, picked just for the user that they are being presented to. Trying to sell a new, better, dream like life. Clicks are tried to get through sentimentals, beauty or even gender. Digging through even fragile subjects and using the users fragility as selling points.
Social media is as if it's some type of Ghost reality, where you are presented as something better or at least that’s what we are posting, Life's highlights. Social media platforms are a great way to try to sell the highlight to you back. Selling the things that AI has processed, what kind of echochamber you live in and what are the things that are sure to be sold for that group.
We make our lives public to our followers and the time we are on the internet with all of our pictures uploaded and location data, it’s very likely that the information gathered from our behaviours are to be ended up for targeted marketing. Maybe you want to be like your favourite actor: this is their favourite clothing brand or oh I see you were looking up some jewelry: Suddenly, there are millions of more shops that have jewelry just for you, for a special prize! Oh I see that you have been to Lidl, we know you like it cheap so why not even cheaper, try this Lidl app.
I get a lot of advertisements for all the newest body shaper apps and as they say how to get your booty poppin’. It’s super weird and annoying, I know I am fine as it is, shut it, Leave my booty to be. I validate my body, thank you very much, don’t you dare to sell me through insecurities or “beauty standards.". It is hard to balance the feeling of, OK If it sells, it’s great marketing, to how you dare to sell me these through a cheap marketing trick? Sometimes I click on an ad for something stupid that I don’t need like a lawn mower and I think to myself “gotcha”, now you think I have a lawn, stupid AI *pfft*. Then I get lawn mower advertisements and I kinda want my personal advertisements back.
MY ACTUAL PROJECT!
I am not going to lie that it was very hard to decide the path I went to, I felt like my brain was too small and smooth to comprehend anything that I could talk about. I started a project on Unreal and Unity which ended up going to be deleted or they died as my computer crashed, cool. I have long wanted to do a project where I use Blender and a gaming engine and I noticed that I have lost all my knowledge of what to do in Unity. It was really annoying to not have the skills to make the Unity project pretty especially in 3D. I used some ready made assets and code like the mirror at the end where you can see zucky boy and the FPS controller otherwise the assets are made by me.
Let’s get to what my project really is t! What I am trying to convey through the simulation I made is how sensory overload advertisement is. It’s difficult to escape from them. My project can look very meme-like and it is very absurd and too much of everything happening. Social media is a big mess and usually the only thing on the platforms that are really trying to grasp your attention are the advertisements. All the colorfulness and brightness is the mess of our feeds where these ads are there to trick you to buy the illusion and not the actual products. The tactics of advertising are being shoved in your face but at the same time are being sugar coated to be innocent to hide the fact that they are selling ordinary products, nothing special, mass produced that are waiting to be replaced by the new “better” version.
Because these ads are based on Stephens habits and lifestyle and are customised to him. It's very personal, targeting weaknesses but are being brought up to fix that weakness and make you somehow better.
Stephen Thompsons user profile (don’t worry Stephen is AI generated not a real person):
The advertisements for Stephen:
Your project truly took me by surprise, I have no idea how to categorise it and I love that! I wasn't familiar with the term "vaporwave" beforehand but as you said, I've definitely seen it around, just didn't know it had a name. I myself have a very minimal understanding of anything 3D so I was blown away by the space you created! I must say my favourite thing is the Man Coffee. I could've done with a bit of that during the last days of school.
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