Page 25 - Vinkler, Jonatan, Ana Beguš and Marcello Potocco. Eds. 2019. Ideology in the 20th Century: Studies of literary and social discourses and practices. Koper: University of Primorska Press
P. 25
Genre in the Technological Remediation of Culture 25
merely exist in themselves but will exist wherever someone with a certain
apparatus happens to be. A work of art will cease to be anything more than
a kind of source or point of origin whose benefit will be available and quite
fully so, wherever we wish. Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into
our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal ef-
fort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will ap-
pear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a
sign. Just as we are accustomed, if not enslaved, to the various forms of en-
ergy that pour into our homes, we shall find it perfectly natural to receive
the ultrarapid variations or oscillations that our sense organs gather in and
integrate to form all we know. I do not know whether a philosopher has
ever dreamed of a company engaged in the home delivery of Sensory Re-
ality (Valéry 1964, 225).
In this process, print genres have been transferred to the new electron-
ic environment as online libraries and archives, following the rearview
mirror metaphor, while many new genres have also been created that are
‘native’ in the sense of naturally growing out of the new text economy as
‘home delivery of sensory reality’. This results in further hyperproduction
that becomes decentralized in terms of its structure (hyperlink environ-
ment) and increasingly globalized in content, i.e. monocultural; it repre-
sents ‘more of the same’. The structure of the new technological-cultur-
al interfaces, typified by social media, requires short forms which must
be instant (they must have immediate effect in internet scrolling, surf-
ing and browsing), ephemeral (they are immediately replaced by others
and forgotten), prosumptive and multimodal. The visual code predom-
inates over the verbal: the basic matrix of new texts is visual or audio-
visual, and the verbal text is subordinated to the visual and reduced to a
minimum—a slogan, a catchphrase, an ‘ideogram’, to use McLuhan’s de-
scription.
An interesting example of such a genre is vaporwave. It is a visual
and musical genre that plays with the iconography of the eighties and ear-
ly nineties; one could describe it semiotically as an individual, ‘isolated’
emotion, expressed by the endless repetition of an audiovisual motif. Al-
though linked to different political movements, usually to acceleration-
ism, or interpreted as a satirical treatment of consumer capitalism and
technoculture, it is more of an aideological mood music created through
continuous visual and musical repetition5 (gifs and loops) which reminds
5 See examples on YouTube such as Internet Club, Time (11newtown) and Nobody
Here (sunsetcorp).
merely exist in themselves but will exist wherever someone with a certain
apparatus happens to be. A work of art will cease to be anything more than
a kind of source or point of origin whose benefit will be available and quite
fully so, wherever we wish. Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into
our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal ef-
fort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will ap-
pear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a
sign. Just as we are accustomed, if not enslaved, to the various forms of en-
ergy that pour into our homes, we shall find it perfectly natural to receive
the ultrarapid variations or oscillations that our sense organs gather in and
integrate to form all we know. I do not know whether a philosopher has
ever dreamed of a company engaged in the home delivery of Sensory Re-
ality (Valéry 1964, 225).
In this process, print genres have been transferred to the new electron-
ic environment as online libraries and archives, following the rearview
mirror metaphor, while many new genres have also been created that are
‘native’ in the sense of naturally growing out of the new text economy as
‘home delivery of sensory reality’. This results in further hyperproduction
that becomes decentralized in terms of its structure (hyperlink environ-
ment) and increasingly globalized in content, i.e. monocultural; it repre-
sents ‘more of the same’. The structure of the new technological-cultur-
al interfaces, typified by social media, requires short forms which must
be instant (they must have immediate effect in internet scrolling, surf-
ing and browsing), ephemeral (they are immediately replaced by others
and forgotten), prosumptive and multimodal. The visual code predom-
inates over the verbal: the basic matrix of new texts is visual or audio-
visual, and the verbal text is subordinated to the visual and reduced to a
minimum—a slogan, a catchphrase, an ‘ideogram’, to use McLuhan’s de-
scription.
An interesting example of such a genre is vaporwave. It is a visual
and musical genre that plays with the iconography of the eighties and ear-
ly nineties; one could describe it semiotically as an individual, ‘isolated’
emotion, expressed by the endless repetition of an audiovisual motif. Al-
though linked to different political movements, usually to acceleration-
ism, or interpreted as a satirical treatment of consumer capitalism and
technoculture, it is more of an aideological mood music created through
continuous visual and musical repetition5 (gifs and loops) which reminds
5 See examples on YouTube such as Internet Club, Time (11newtown) and Nobody
Here (sunsetcorp).
