Research project
Philip Leverhulme Prize
- Start date: 1 October 2025
- End date: 30 September 2027
- Funder: The Leverhulme Trust
- Primary investigator: musrco@leeds.ac.uk
Value
£100,000
Description
Immersed in the writing of my book The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (University of California Press, 2021), I began noticing a number of unexpected connections with internet subculture, specifically vaporwave. This term emerged during the early 2010s to describe a wraithlike nexus of remediated videos, memes, and music transgressing digital and material realms. Folk music and vaporwave might appear, at first glance, to be unrelated, but I found they share fundamental commonalities revolving around the utopian dimensions of nostalgia. In particular, they develop forms of imaginative play displaying what Svetlana Boym has called the ‘off-modern’. In 2020 I published a now widely-read article on vaporwave’s deeply ambivalent aesthetics in ASAP/Journal as well as an interview with a vaporwave producer by the name of Strawberry Illuminati.
With the research time generously afforded by a Philip Leverhulme Prize, I plan to extend this work on the ‘off-modern’ qualities of online critique into a second book, tentatively entitled Vaporwave, or, A Requiem for the Future. Although much has been written about internet subculture over the past decade or so, relatively little attention has been paid to the affective, visionary, and spatio-temporal imaginaries that have emerged with global trends such as vaporwave and its offshoots (including ‘Trumpwave’ and ‘fashwave’, a signature of far-right extremism and a vector of radicalisation). This project will expand upon work by Boym, Marc Augé, Lauren Berlant, Sherry Turkle, Fredric Jameson, Sianne Ngai, and others to examine vaporwave across intersecting planes from architecture and melancholia to surveillance capitalism, gimmickry, and utopian thought.
The vaporwave nexus is symptomatic of widespread generational disaffections engendered by the smartphone and ubiquitous online connectivity, especially those relating to loneliness, mental health, political polarisation, and what Mark Fisher has characterised as ‘horizons of the thinkable’. This project aims to understand why the 1980s and ’90s have come to hold such a central place in online creative practice—an era coextensive with the triumph of neoliberalism and the so-called ‘end of history’. Ultimately, this work suggests that we need new frameworks for understanding the convoluted ways in which cultural production on the internet engages in critique.
Publications and outputs
- https://asapjournal.com/feature/turning-trash-into-mantras-an-interview-with-vaporwave-producer-strawberry-illuminati-ross-cole/
- https://muse.jhu.edu/article/760297/summary
- https://musicalretrofuturism.wordpress.com/