Valentina Tanni's 'Exit Reality' Maps Internet Aesthetics from Vaporwave to Backrooms
Valentina Tanni has released 'Exit reality. Vaporwave, backrooms, weirdcore e altri paesaggi oltre la soglia' (Nero, 2023, €22, ISBN 9788880562092), following her earlier work 'Memestetica. Il settembre eterno dell’arte' (Nero, 2020; second edition 2023). This latest publication delves into internet aesthetics, beginning with vaporwave, a genre that emerged between 2009 and 2011, which evokes nostalgia and childhood reminiscences. Tanni explores themes such as loneliness, temporal dislocation, and nostalgia, while also discussing trends like reality shifting and gamer battlestations. The overarching concept is liminality, which resonates with current sentiments regarding the climate crisis and the divide between the physical and virtual worlds. Tanni posits that internet aesthetics play a crucial role in modern art rather than being marginal. The book is published by Nero Editions in Rome.
Key facts
- Valentina Tanni authored 'Exit reality. Vaporwave, backrooms, weirdcore e altri paesaggi oltre la soglia' published by Nero in 2023.
- The book follows Tanni's earlier work 'Memestetica. Il settembre eterno dell’arte' (Nero, 2020, second edition 2023).
- Internet aesthetics are defined as sets of images, colors, objects, music, and texts that create emotion, serve a purpose, and aggregate communities.
- Vaporwave originated as a musical genre between 2009 and 2011, evoking childhood memories of the first internet generation.
- Common elements across internet aesthetics include loneliness, temporal displacement, nostalgia, infinity, and memory-sensation intertwining.
- The book covers reality shifting and the battlestation cult as internet phenomena.
- Liminality is the central theme: internet aesthetics represent thresholds, reality shifting manipulates boundaries, and battlestations are portals.
- Tanni connects the aesthetics to contemporary anxieties about climate apocalypse and the physical-virtual threshold.
- The reviewer identifies implicit references to the Situationist International (Guy Debord's derive, psychogeography) and Piranesi's 'Carceri d’invenzione'.
- Tanni calls for art criticism to treat web-native art as central, not peripheral, to contemporary art.
Entities
Artists
- Valentina Tanni
- Guy Debord
- Giovanni Battista Piranesi
- Matteo Lupetti
Institutions
- Nero
- Nero Editions
- The Aesthetics Wiki
- Artribune
- Scuola Internazionale di Comics di Firenze
- FISAR
- Gravure
Locations
- Roma
- Rome
- Italy
- Firenze
- Florence