Whiles looking into my chosen essay subject of cyberpunk I happened across a set of images by Liam Wong. His work crosses the boundarys of real and surreal in his late night Japanese street photography. The colour schemes remind me of cyberpunk through its dark mysterious settings lit by overwhelming amounts of neon advertising and sign.
http://www.liamwong.com/
This style of work I feel fits into the current trend of Vaporwave aesthetic - a genre of music and visuals that are a fusion of nostalgia and satire of the 80's and 90's entertainment, tech and advertising. The music genre itself is a collection of muzak 'mood' music a style of music often heard in large retail stores and elevators etc. Common themes of this include neon aesthetic, low poly imagery, glitch art, vhs and early computer OS and other loose early cyberpunk themes. This genre is also a parody reflection on our current consumer culture attitudes. The term vaporwave is a derivative of the word vaporware - a product that is advertised but never released.
It is a genre which rose to popularity through parody, but through the nature of it's spread through internet memes it became a self perpetuating genre and subsequently a style of it's own. Perhaps its the exposure of our numbness to consumption and our glamorisation of nostalgia which is a underlying concern in younger generations shrugged off as a flash in a pan meme.
