In the beginning, Daniel Lopatin recorded Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1. Each eccojam begins with a sample of a pop song, typically from the 1980s, slowed down, ran through waves of effects, and looped. Familiar songs, such as Toto’s “Africa” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Only Over You,” become hypnagogic hallucinations. One drifts off as the song repeats and repeats as one would turn over a vague memory. But the effect is not mere rain gentling the window but a storm breaking into peels of thunder, sudden lurches, ugly dissonance. Should sleep come, it will not be a restful one.
With this album, Lopatin not only invented a musical genre vaporwave — which builds on his use of slowed, repeated, and manipulated pop music of the 70s, 80s and 90s — but partly defined the visual style and motifs associated with the genre. In his associated project, Memory Vague, Lopatin paired his eccojams with looped and edited footage, mostly old commercials. This visual form has a similar effect: this time, falling asleep to late-night infomercials. Vaporwave, as a genre of music and a visual style, is both appealing and easy to make. One can, without any prior musical ability, find a song of the right type — eighties pop, City Pop, soft rock, Muzak, commercial jingles, video game tracks — download it, load it into a free bit of audio editing software, cut out a section, slow it down, apply effects, repeat it, and have yourself a genuine vaporwave bop. Of course, it will take more craft than that, usually, to produce something worth listening to, but the barrier of entry to a modern internet-user is virtually nothing. The vaporwave visual style is similarly open to all: with basic image-editing-software, you can take some combination of stock elements — abandoned malls, Windows 95, palm trees, statues, company logos — and layer them over a pink-and-teal void and, hey presto, you’ve got yourself some vaporwave art.
Vaporwave is an early example of an internet aesthetic. In the online argot, use of the term “aesthetic” has broadened — or, for the aesthetic conservative, degenerated — to describe not the beautiful but the agreeable. A poster will comment that an image is “so aesthetic” to express that they like it. Online, an individual’s aesthetic is just their (visual) taste. An internet aesthetic, then, describes at a minimum a set of artworks — typically visual, mostly created by internet users as opposed to professional artists — sharing a common elements and sensibility. The expression can extend beyond this to describe a community or a set of shared values.
We can trace online aesthetics developing from their incipient phase in the early 2010s — Eccojams Vol. 1 released in 2010 — to an explosion both in number and popularity around the end of that decade, when the pandemic launched cottagecore to the center of collective attention. While such aesthetics may not dominate the internet, neither are they mere curiosities, as further examination will show.
The Sublime and the Stuplime
In 2016, Drake released “Hotline Bling.” Given that the song’s music video has near enough two billion views, it is perhaps unnecessary to describe it. To venture briefly into the superfluous, in the song, Drake raps over a beat somewhere in the vicinity of tropical house and dances in pastel voids. His dancing captured more attention than the song itself, a Midwest dad trying to fit in at his middle schooler’s party. Like your dad’s dancing, the affair is too self-conscious to be embarrassing and comes off as endearingly dorky. The video thus lent itself to appropriation online — clips became memes, social media users filmed themselves recreating dances — and so became the sensation it was.
“Hotline Bling” then is an example of Drake’s canny sense of internet-era marketing. His albums have become longer and longer to take advantage of the demands and allowances of streaming services: revenue is calculated based on playtime; and streamers are quite happy to put on an hour-plus album in the background and just vibe. Drake’s music, often low-key and moody, is especially well suited for such passive listening. His presentation and his persona, similarly, seem laboratory designed to achieve virality. The main strategy, as with “Hotline Bling” is to play the part of the fool: act dumb but do it on purpose.
Take, for instance, the cover of Drake’s latest album, Certified Lover Boy. The cover, assembled by Damien Hirst, consists of a four-by-three grid of pregnant woman emojis (you know, this one, 🤰). The collaboration between the two artists reveals a common modus operandi: an easy replicability coupled with a courting of and capitalizing on controversy. The cover certainly spawned both controversy and imitation. It is painfully easy to meme: the pregnant women can be swapped out while the basic form and reference remain recognizable. And it is controversial: ugly, ridiculous, and tacky to the point of being offensive. In that it evinces the essential double-game of the provocateur: he needs the audience to understand and commit to the norms that he transgresses — they, after all, need to be provoked — and at the same time must achieve not censure but complicity. You are supposed to look at the cover and think this is terrible, but I kind of like it.
Hirst’s work has incurred popular revulsion, alongside immense financial success, for its failure to be beautiful or artful. Works such as The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991) — a shark preserved in formaldehyde within a clean glass tank — certainly show a disregard for the traditional aesthetic category of beauty, especially when the shark starts decaying and cacking up the tank. But Hirst is not entirely disconnected from old-fashioned aesthetics. Such canonical thinkers as Kant and Burke were interested not just in the beautiful but also the sublime. The traditional example of the sublime is a dramatic storm observed from behind a window. Confronting such a scene, we appreciate the fearfulness of nature without being afraid, indeed while feeling a certain superiority over nature. Hirst’s shark is sublime in this sense. It is a doubly fearful object — a deadly predator and a reminder of death — but one we are doubly defended from — by the glass and by the shark’s own death. We are thus supposed to be moved from an initial disquiet or discomfort to a self-conscious and self-satisfied serenity.
Of course, the cover of Certified Lover Boy is not sublime, nor does it attempt sublimity. We need another category for it: the stuplime. Sianne Ngai in Ugly Feelings invented the category to describe the effect of stultefying, repetitive pieces of experimental literature. Such works, e.g. the poetry of Gertrude Stein, combine astonishment, provocation, or irritation with boredom. Stuplimity is the compresence of some initial active feeling with a stultefying boredom its constant recurrence provokes. Hirst’s cover has that initial provocation. The repetition of the figure suggests that boredom, but does not by itself convey it. The image is too slight. However, its grid suggests and, via the internet, has received indefinite extension.
Certified Lover Boy’s pregnant array achieves what we might call mathematical stuplimity. Kant thought our understanding of mathematical infinity could feel sublime in the same way as our safety from the immensity of nature. Think of a fractal. We know that we can zoom in on a fractal forever, that we will never, in experience or in imagination, encounter all of its infinite detail. And yet we can comprehend that detail, understand the rule underlying the figure, and so achieve the satisfied serenity that is the pleasant half of the sublime. That feeling Kant called the mathematical sublime. The mathematical stuplime reverses this order: we comprehend the rule underlying the figure and so are lead to imagine the infinite boredom of its being carried out forever. Twelve pregnant emoji are bad enough, but aleph-zero?
The stuplimity of such indefinite extensibility is intensified the further the repetitions are actually carried out. Witness Hirst’s Spot Paintings, hundreds of paintings of different arrangements of colored circles painted over the course of three decades. These paintings are easy enough to comprehend: see one, see them all. But it is the cumulative effect of a number of paintings that really conveys the intended stultefying effect. This effect is underscored by the titles of the paintings, which reference various pharmacological agents. The stuplimity of such paintings, then, is identified with that of the chemical life: the initial thrill of a high dulled by an addict’s repetition. Indeed such an effect is also characteristic of the endless hedonism of Drake’s music, which, in its excessive length, threatens us with too much of a good thing.
This reading assumes that the Spot Paintings do something for you in the first place, spark some joy or at least interest. Just as easily, one might find them meaningless, annoying, kitsch. As Will Brand put it, “we hate this shit.” Such hatred extends beyond the canvas to the creation and consumption of the artwork itself. Bad enough that a famous artist created this crap, but that they’re being displayed, and this in globe-spanning coordinated exhibitions, and bought. It’s an awful gimmick, but worse a gimmick you cannot stop yourself falling for. Obviously, no sensible person is going to buy one of these paintings, but even being angry with them seems to play into Hirst’s hands. He just wants the attention.
This reaction too modulates into stuplimity. The paintings provoke an initial energizing emotion, anger. We hate this shit. But we cannot do anything about it — Brand laments that “nobody knows how to stop” this shit — and so that anger fades into resignation. But anger does not completely disappear. This resignation itself is something awful, something we should be angry about. But, since we are no more able to solve this derivative anger, it only provokes a derivative resignation. And so on, until the feelings burn themselves out. This combined effect, which we might call the stuplimity of the provocateur, is something Hirst shares with Drake, and Spot Paintings is not the first or last Hirst piece to play such games.
Hirst’s twin aesthetic concerns — the sublime and the stuplime — appear conjoined in his most infamous work For the Love of God (2007). This sculpture, a titanium cast of a human skull covered in diamonds, drew attention more for its cost of production, twelve million pounds, and alleged price it commanded, fifty million pounds, than its aesthetic qualities. But to give the skull its due, it is a traditional symbol, a memento mori. Such an image is by now a hackneyed attempt at the sublime: we are disquieted, reminded of the inevitability of death, but at a remove we can regain our serenity. Yet, by blinging out the skull, it evokes not so much the viewer’s intellectual superiority over nature, but the artist’s material superiority over the viewer.
It is unsurprising, for example, that the skull is the center of rapper 50 Cent’s video game 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. Using a skull as ornament is the province of the warchief, and so a diamond-encrusted skull combines extreme conspicuous consumption with displays of toughness. These are of course major parts of 50 Cent’s persona, as they are also lesser part of Drake’s. The aesthetic achievement of such music is a kind of joyful humiliation. The listener recognizes their inferiority to the artist and yet is to find this inferiority secure and proper, as one is secure beneath a tyrant’s domination. And of course the existence of domination is a precondition for the possibility of our doing the dominating.
Are we meant to grovel before Hirst’s skull, or to take pleasure in identifying with those who command groveling? Perhaps, though there is something too hollow, too gaudy about the skull to permit such a sincere reaction. Rather, we are, I think, to recognize that Hirst’s real dominance (reminder, the diamonds cost twelve million pounds) is itself something absurd. We get back to the provocateur’s double game. We are to recognize and affirm a norm — no one should have so much money, no one should buy such an object — and yet not only pardon but enjoy its being broken. It is in this connection aesthetically essential that the skull actually sold, and so the murky circumstances surrounding the sale raise aesthetic as well as ethical questions. A man who wastes twelve million pounds on an ugly, stupid skull is just an idiot.
Here is where the skull becomes stuplime. Given its absurd sale price, the skull becomes a metonym of the art market in general. It’s all like that, isn’t it? Rich people parking their money in tat made by utter hacks, playing financial games that have basically nothing to do with aesthetic value or any real appreciation. Worse, there is no reason that any of this should stop; “nobody knows how to stop” this shit. Here For the Love of God (the phrase itself connoting exasperated resignation) turns from an initial provocation to the lingering boredom of the stuplime. He’s not going to stop is he? Any smooth surface can be covered in diamonds.
Aesthetics and Anaesthetics
We might distinguish different versions of the stuplime, or, sliced another way, a family of related aesthetic emotions, by the exact quality of deadening affect that they feature. For Drake and Hirst, this is boredom or resignation. Vaporwave inspires something like stuplimity: starting with the sharp pang of familiar longing, but anesthetizing that by distortion and repetition into an hypnagogic nostalgia. It is worth underscoring the common function of repetition and repeatability in both cases. It is not merely that vaporwave and Hirst’s artwork involve repeated element, but that they achieve their characteristic depressed aftertaste through being essentially repeatable.
All internet aesthetics are characterized by a version of a stuplime affect similarly effected by indefinite extensibility. Before arguing for this general claim, let’s see a particular example. Cottagecore is an aesthetic defined by romantic depictions of living in proximity to and in harmony with nature. A typical cottagecore image might feature picturesque woods, a neat cabin by the woods, a well-kept garden, earth-toned, kint clothing, or pretty, handcrafted objects. The cottagecore community, then, is defined not only by those who create and consume such images, but more centrally those who fantasize about living in a way depicted by such images.
Is there, as I claim there should be, a cottagecore stuplimity? The obvious affective feature of cottagecore is its charm and comfort. But there is also, beneath the surface, something sharp and negative. Take the popular cottagecore video game Stardew Valley. The game begins with the protagonist quitting his office job and starting a farm out in a small, rural village, on land inherited from his grandfather. The core loop of the game has the player farming, foraging, fishing, exploring, and befriending and romancing the townsfolk so that he can become wealthier and more popular and do all of these things better. Stardew Valley depicts an idealized pastoral vision: your potatos never get blight, your cattle never get anthrax, rural folks are charming and not at all suspicious of outsiders. Correspondingly, playing the game, with its appealing graphics and easy progression, provides all of the comfort of scrolling through a cottagecore forum.
But there is a dark underside to the story. After all, the character comes to Pelican Town to escape from their soulcrushing job, and they arrive there only to discover that their old employer has set up shop even in this tiny, rural town. Now, as per the game’s idealization, although the presence of the Joja Corporation is not exactly dangerous to the player — they can pretty much be ignored throughout one’s playthrough — their presence is a disquieting reminder of the modernity from which the game imagines an escape. After all, at a time where agriculture has shifted primarily to industrial farming, the self-sufficient and largely self-contained life of the noble farmer is more and more a figment of a cultural imagination. In general, since cottagecore defines itself as a form of respite from an urban worklife, it cannot be appreciated without feeling at the same time anxieties about such a condition.
This is one important affective tension — reprieve is always haunted by what one needs reprieve from — that appears across many internet aesthetics. For instance, nostalgic aesthetics like vaporwave, as with nostalgia in general, conjure not just the comforts of the past but their painful absence. Vaporwave, though, integrates this tension more fully and explicitly, as the distortion of past material brings out its distance. Such tension is not the only one we can identify in Stardew Valley.
Stardew Valley is a game built on repetitions. The game is built on repeated units of days. The player follows a familiar but permissive routine: wake, tend to one’s farm, interact with the townsfolk, work, sleep. Days are organized into weeks, weeks are organized into seasons, and seasons into years. Linear progressions are overlayed against these cycles: the farm grows, friendships deepen, more of the world is discovered. However, while the cycles are endless, the linear progression comes to an end. Eventually, the farm occupies all the space available to it, everything has been discovered, and one is married. The game does not end, however, when any or all of its built-in objectives have been reached. The cycles continue after progress has plateaued.
This has two effects. The first is one I discussed in “ELIZA Is In”: the uncanny unveiling of the procedural workings of the program. Of course, players of a video game know that what they are playing has been produced by programmers, artists, and designers. They may well even know specifically that in the case of Stardew Valley all of these roles were filled by one enterprising individual. But in playing, we do not concern ourselves with such things. We act, more or less, as if we were the avatar in the game really interacting with the game. This at least is the normal way of playing, what we are supposed to do.
Ordinarily, a well-constructed game will minimize impediments to the player’s make-believe. The player will simply use their knowledge of the conventions of games to pretend to be a farmer, and all is well. Bugs in the programming or other problems in artwork or design will impede this play: it’s hard to pretend to be a farmer when your land crashes. Usually, these impediments are felt as janky and irritating. However, this can have an uncanny edge most obvious in dialogue. When a character in a game repeats themselves unnaturally, glitches in their speech, they fail the player as prop in a crucial moment.
Though Stardew Valley has objectives, it does not have an end state. One may progress as far as it is possible to progress — befriend the whole town and marry one person, discover all of the game’s secrets, fill every hectare with vegetables — and the game at no point throws up a victory screen or forces the player to stop. In most cases, content running out in this way merely inspires boredom, pushing the player into finding something else to do with her time. When what runs out and has to repeat itself is dialogue, however, the results can take on an eerie note. When Abigail says, “The dark... the rain... it gets me excited,” for the dozenth time, one struggles to pretend that you are married to someone excited by the rain, but are confronted with what is and always has been a talking doll.1
Let’s cycle back to the boredom, for it’s here where we see a clear connection to internet aesthetics as a whole. We have identified three key affective moments in Stardew Valley. First, there is the discomfort, the exhaustion and stress of industrial life, which is not produced but presupposed by the work. Next, comfort is offered in the form of a charming idyll. Crucially, this comfort does not completely replace the previous discomfort — serenity is not achieved — but the two mingle with one another. After all, the idyll is not yet perfectly idyllic, there are weeds to clear out, monsters to slay. As the game progresses, this uneasy complex is joined by another element: the uncanny tedium of repetition.
This affective element had always been present as a potential. We have always known, though we might have pushed it from consciousness, the game could only support so many succors; it would have to start repeating itself. This repetition does not supplant but instead absorbs the previous two elements. The comforts of the game’s routines take on a nostalgic and compulsive aspect: we tend our farm not so much because it in fact offers relief, but because we recall it once relieving us. In this compulsive, mechanical behavior, the initial discomfort and comfort merge into a dysphoric whole, the fully-automated farm resembling in its operations nothing so much as a factory floor.
To find such a heady brew in cottagecore in general, we must recall that one does not simply consume a single cottagecore image. Instead, cottagecore images — and this is true of all internet aesthetics — always occur in the context of other bits of cottagecore. Internet aesthetics are tied to internet fora — subreddits, Facebook pages, Instagram groups — or are linked together by social media algorithms so that one need only scroll down to see more like this.
Like a day in Stardew Valley, each image in such a feed is a unit, more or less complete in itself, but a unit whose context implies an indefinite sequence of subsequent units. Internet aesthetics coalesce because they are easy to contribute to. The key elements are readily identifiable from just a few examples and it is within the capacity of a typical internet user to create their own example. Recall that vaporwave took off in large part because of these features. Anyone can take an old song, sample it and repeat that sample for three minutes. Anyone can take an image of some woods, a garden, a leaf-green dress, and upload it to r/cottagecore.
But it is just this replicability which ensures the aesthetic will have enough content to stick around that causes the tediousness essential to their stuplimity. Start with an initial artwork, something affecting, something people will want more of. Then replicate it, or rather take what is essential to its feeling, its vibe, and recreate that. Keep replicating it. So the medium of internet aesthetics — the internet part — is exactly tuned to produce the mathematically stuplime.
Such a technical explanation, while valuable, only sketches the background conditions that make possible the supply of internet aesthetics. It does not yet explain their demand. To see this, we have to turn to a broader context.
To be continued.
Such uncanny effects occur in character interactions rather than environmental interactions because, I suspect, in our relationships with characters pretense runs thin. We have parasocial relationships with fictional characters that are quite similar to social relationships with real people.