Rituals for bored generations or a new way of composing reality? The web hypnosis and the Internet aesthetics on our relationship with the real dimension
The Eternal September of Internet Aesthetics – online subcultures as a contemporary cultural center
The Eternal September of art is an era in which the creative impulse has mutated into widespread behavior at all levels. With the Internet, aesthetic production from below becomes a generalized cultural condition, no longer limited to countercultures. Internet aesthetics emerge as the center of contemporary cultural production.
Outsiders emerge who, while not recognizing themselves as either artists or amateurs, produce images, texts, works, opinions on X and musical projects. They are children of the do-it-yourself culture of the 1960s and, even earlier, of the deprofessionalization extolled by the historical avant-gardes.
The Internet and subcultures as we knew them before: the novelty lies in the dissemination of identity
The most immediate suggestion is to associate Internet aesthetics with traditional subcultures, such as punk, for example, which also had the capacity for community creation around visual, sonic, behavioral and, then, consequently, ideological signs.
The Internet is filled with subcultural communities, however, all users call them aesthetic. The web hypnosis
The Internet is filled with subcultural communities that also regenerate as they are captured by a certain system that markets them. The term that the users-the producers and users of the content themselves-use to define them is aesthetic. This fact inevitably places them in a historical, artistic and philosophical tradition concerning the study of images.
Think of the Eastern symbolism of vaporwave, or the Hello Kitty puppets that are the ghostly recurrences of the traumacore aesthetic.
Aesthetics, meaning: recovering Greek etymology – using formal elements to evoke feelings
Users who have grown up online, in contact with that great archive of visual culture, past, present and future that is the Web, have learned to assemble archival materials like bricks to evoke emotions, moods and vibes. This use of images, sounds, fonts, and colors to evoke feelings ends up taking the term aesthetics back to its Greek origins. In ancient Greek, aesthetics means the ability to feel. In Greek, aesthetics is what connects us to the world of perception, of the senses, of states of mind. In an incidental way, the meaning of the original etymology is recovered by Internet aesthetics that have as a common thread the idea of using formal elements to evoke feelings.
Conveying certain vibes as specifically as possible and sharing them with other users becomes the purpose of these sign productions. In the various online aesthetics, the nodal concept lies in the suffix. For example, core means going for the core, recreating the origin of a certain feeling obsessively and precisely. The suffix determines the attitude while the prefix declines the formal elements useful to achieve it. Hence, the branches into traumacore, weirdcore, dreamcore and so on.
Time and the real as non-absolute categories: Internet aesthetics, digital empathy, and nostalgia as useful tools for reshaping the future
In addition to being aesthetics of making oneself sensitive, online subcultures share specific attitudes with respect to the perception of time and the real. These dimensions are reconsidered as customary and not absolute categories and, then, consequently, hyper-personalized and customized by users. Aesthetic production, digital empathy, nostalgia, and memetics can become useful tools for reshaping the future.
The Internet has always been nostalgic, Nostalgia from nostos ‘homecoming’ and algos ‘pain’
The Internet has always been nostalgic. The online world and the world of nostalgia, are both discovered and developed within the military-or rather as a consequence of technologies and attitudes matured for purposes of war. From nostos (‘homecoming’) and algos (‘pain’), the word nostalgia first appears in a medical treatise of 1688 to define the symptomatology of a group of Swiss mercenaries engaged in the campaigns of Louis XIV who missed their motherland.
Nostalgia, in its declinations, is the common denominator of Internet aesthetics. In the cover of the vaporwave album Floral Shoppe, Greek statuary stands out digitally alongside symbols of an analog past, expressed by the New York skyline before the fall of the Twin Towers. In the two cores (weirdcore and dreamcore) followed a nostalgia toward childhood. In traumacore, the therapeutic role in resolving childhood-related trauma is embodied in the ubiquitous Hello Kitty doll. The lack of moments in life that we perceive as simpler and more carefree-or simply full of potential – in these aesthetics merges with the irreversibility of time.
Remembering the future – reflective Internet nostalgia with vaporwave. The web hypnosis
The vaporwave I respond to is like remembering the future. Online nostalgia over the years has come to take the form of augmented nostalgia, a feeling of lack quite different from those of the past, directed toward a life experience that child users were promised – by automation, by the welfare of the 1980s, by the portable computer developers of the 2000s – and that has been betrayed.
Automatically comes the comparison of this nostalgia to Mark Fisher’s hauntology, that is, a desire for nostos (return) to lost futures, never realized, born caused by the impossibility of imagining other models beyond the political and social disintegration of late capitalism. Perhaps the most pointed reference in the text is to the reflexive nostalgia theorized by Svetlana Boym, who wrote in 2001, in unsuspected times, that while restorative nostalgia seeks to reestablish the past as it was, reflexive nostalgia works on distancing itself from that past or even – in some cases – on not having experienced it at all.
In Internet practices, nostalgia is not archaeological – it is a love affair with one’s imagination
In Internet aesthetics and practices, nostalgia is never archaeological. It is never condensed into faithful memories. It is an intense, hyper-mediated reworking of the past through feelings, emotional states and imagination. On the Internet, nostalgia becomes a kind of vehicle that can take you to various places, a tool for time and space travel. For Boym, reflective nostalgia is a love affair with one’s imagination.
Beyond escapism, spiritualistic and magical trends online tell us more about our relationship with the idea of reality
The vast and multifaceted body of relationships with time and the real that we can find online is generally interpreted in an escapist key, as an escape strategy of a bored generation, drowned in the world of interfaces and frightened by the increasingly evident unraveling of the off-screen one.
From the sensory stimulation of ASMR to the projection toward alternative temporalities and planes of reality of reality shifting, the spiritualistic and magical tendencies manifest in the online also tell us something more about the relationship that users-and thus most of us-have with time, with the idea of reality, post-truth and threshold.
There is an escapist propensity in these practices, and it is also an understandable reaction. There is a general disposition-though expressed in different ways and aesthetics-to try two things. The moderate version, the entry point into spiritualistic and magical practices online, proposes alternative models of relationship with reality. It seeks to reflect on perception, how it affects our relationship with the world, stimulates the senses to travel with the mind. On the next step this common need to reconfigure the relationship with reality becomes an attempt to manipulate it, to control it, to guide it.
How you can try to control events – reality shifting in the history of magical practices
Reality shifting is a phenomenon that appeared between 2018 and 2020 on YouTube and TikTok that sees young users engaged in experimenting with meditation, astral projection and lucid dreaming techniques, such as manifesting or quantum jumping, based on the belief that our properly trained minds are able to change just that course of events. The shifter plays by moving from current reality to desired reality, which is usually the magical world of Harry Potter or some Marvel movie about the multiverse.
Meanwhile, so-called tulpamancy with projection practices gives birth to sentient beings independent of the host body, a custom that originated in Tibet and inexplicably landed on Reddit. Emerging is the theme of control.
How can you try to control events? By experimenting with strategies that are contextualized within the history of magical practices, that is, practices that aim to catalyze certain energies to bring about changes in the world. Taken individually they are different practices, part of a single cultural vocation where the theme is to seek new tools to relate to and interpret reality. At a time when this is manifestly kaleidoscopic.
The web hypnosis. The perception of being on the Internet has changed many times but the feeling of a denied threshold has remained in our subconscious
Manipulating, controlling, guiding reality: these are actions that involve a conceptual and perceptual slippage of where the threshold between unreal, real, online and offline lies.
The perception of being on the Internet has changed many times over the years. Initially, there was a firm demarcation between real and virtual, helped by the fact that connection was a kind of ritual: you put yourself in your seat, laboriously connect and slowly access cyberspace. Today, the fact that connection is permanent changes our perception of virtuality and makes it almost counterproductive to separate the two dimensions. Yet, as much as our relationship with online reality has changed, the feeling of crossing a threshold when we connect on the Internet has remained in our subconscious.
This is evidenced by the imagery that developed around early Windows interfaces, remembered as places of infinite possibilities, of choice between different universes. For example, recurring in weirdcore and dreamcore aesthetics is the use of old Windows wallpapers coupled with game prompts asking you whether you want to enter or exit the interface.
Time travel has obsessed us for the past fifteen years – web hypnosis
Time travel has obsessed us for the past fifteen years. Experimenting with mental powers and the existence of an alternate dimension have featured prominently in most of the cultural products – TV series, literature, cinematography – that we have consumed in the West. All this production of utopias and dystopias has generalized both the perception of the existence of one or more thresholds and the feeling that we can sooner or later cross them.
Yet, as a matter of fact, as of today, we do not have teleportation or time travel, virtual reality we have it but it is still not much. It so happens that, on the one hand, the threshold they had described to us is always open; on the other hand, crossing it remains a continually frustrated and unfulfilled desire.
The augmented threshold – backrooms and back rooms – spaces outside the frame but also beyond the interface
The threshold concept is also experiencing its own augmented reality. It is no longer limited to the desire to connect, to traverse the Windows interface and navigate between windows. It goes further: to the discovery of dimensions that lie at the edge of the interfaces themselves, outside computer screens and far from the real world as well. The back rooms are the back rooms, what happens backstage: a tetris of yellow corridors in deserted, demobilized offices that seem to have lingered too long underground.
The modelers and filmmakers on YouTube who have honed its aesthetics produce videos in which they pretend to accidentally fall into this dimension. They insert a certain paste, a not-so-thin layer of grain, from an old handycam or analog camera, that lowers the resolution and allows the fake to proliferate among the hallways.
Behind the back rooms is the increasingly popular idea of some degree of gamification of the real: that there is a backside of the world to which we do not normally have access, an unidentified outside into which we can accidentally fall, as when you accidentally clipped out of a video game. Their equivalent in gaming are precisely the debugging rooms, those used by developers to do gameplay quality testing that players would not normally have access to. They are spaces outside the frame but also beyond the interface.
Web hypnosis. Crossing over to construct narratives and desires – building communities
The history of the Internet has helped us imagine magical thresholds, hauntings, glitches and multiverses. From the interfaces of the first desktop computers to the backrooms, Web users have been searching for liminal spaces: intermediate zones between different stages of reality. Until their crossing – always disregarded – became a new tool for imagining the future and rewriting the past: a forge for the construction of collective narratives and desires.
When we connect to the Internet we undergo a kind of amputation, that is, we are limited by a denied threshold, by not being able to really enter inside the Web with our bodies. Therefore, online aesthetics have always tried to engage corporeality, its expressions and sensations in other ways. The current spread of online aesthetics and subcultures shows that we have become very good at manipulating sounds and images to provoke bodily sensations as well. Yet this is nothing more than a handcrafted solution to the greatest frustration: that of not being able to go to the other side, the sense of the existence of one or more thresholds that cannot be crossed.
