Vaporwave and Hardvapour: Alternative temporalities, territorialities and identities after our holiday from history

Abstract

Vaporwave provides a hauntological reflection on the capitalist excesses of the 1980–1990s, a moment that Francis Fukuyama declared as The End of History. To this task, Vaporwave replays the most memorable hooks of pop songs, commercial jingles and elevator Muzak, within visual scenographies of abandoned malls and virtual realities, dotted by Miami palms and Tokyo neon. However, these decades hold another significance for Eastern Europeans, who remained haunted by their own ghosts, not of ideology, but of identity. This article contrasts Vaporwave to Hardvapour, a violent mutation that does not avoid Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, but accelerates towards it. To this task, Hardvapour collectively identifies as having Eastern European origins, and fixates on the political volatility of the region, including the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, inviting comparisons with Baudrillard's theories about the unreality of the media-military complex. Despite their different agendas and aesthetics, both Vaporwave and Hardvapour are haunted by ghosts of time, and a disappearing territoriality, architectural and geographic.