Vaporwave Art
- Theme Challenge Thursday (8/3, #1): Woodgrain Shopping Malls
I have a new idea, and it's pretty simple: every Thursday, I'll post a new theme and give everyone until the following Wednesday to submit their posts to this community. On that day, I'll pull the one with the most upvotes and crown it that week's Theme Champion.
For this week, let's revisit the early-80s with almighty woodgrain and shopping malls. Do what you will with these themes, but you have a week to come up with something. I'll post a submission as well. Hope you all have fun! If you have ideas for future themes, post them on the comments.
- Essentially Vaporwave
Since I was revisiting some of my attempts to use AI in my work, here's perhaps my very first attempt at combining vaporware with text-to-image generation. It's super messy and not really all that spectacular, but it's pretty cool to think that we've come this far in only two years. I mean, this (VQGAN+CLIP) was already impressive back in 2021, and it looks absolutely weird and incoherent next to even the first official public release of Stable Diffusion (from August 2022). This piece is one of those that I tend to ignore in my portfolio, as it's not all that great on its own, bit in with context, it helps to highlight the march of technological progress and changes to how I approach art in general.
- Abandoned
I believe I posted the revised version of this piece a while ago, but this is the original version.I checked, and it doesn't look like I directly posted this anywhere. There's another version I made using img2img with my dreambooth model that is marginally better. I'm always trying to combine ideas in new ways, and this one was more of a visual metaphor of how the appreciated aesthetics of vaporwave have changed over time. It feels like the indie photobased charm has largely gone away, save for a few places like our Reddit counterpart, r/vaporwaveart. The larger subreddit, r/vaporwaveaesthetics, has an affinity for glossy renders that are often a bit too clean and polished for my taste. I appreciate it when people try new things, and aren't afraid to stick with an art style they like, even if it isn't the most popular thing in the world. Still, vaporware has been around for long enough now that the true beginnings of our visual aesthetics are essentially long forgotten. - The Entry
Similar to The Gaze, this is a parody of Caleb Worcester's once-steadfast affinity with his formulaic art style that was designed to maximize revenue. Somewhat ironically, it seems that this art style is driving some traffic to this community here on Lemmy. I'm not saying I hate this art style, but I do think it's funny that even the first major public release of Stable Diffusion could nail it without much trouble. I think it goes to show you how unoriginal Caleb's stuff used to be. Heck, I even made a post ages ago on Reddit detailing how he had even failed to properly credit people when he used their CC-BY 3D assets. From what I can tell, though, he's straightened up his act and is really starting to produce some unique stuff, all in Blender.
In any case, this piece was one of a few initial tests I did with Stable Diffusion, even before the weights were made publicly available. I've since grown to love how it integrated tightly with my existing Photoshop workflow, and it's allowed me to amplify the kinds of public-domain-licensed artwork I'm able to create.
- At Sunset
My goal is to share basically the entirety of my public-facing art portfolio; I think we might be close to the halfway mark. This is another experiment in minimalism from a few years ago; I believe this was from the summer of 2021. Nothing too crazy here, but I do revisit variations on the theme of flat colors and bold lines now and again.
- Statue Garden
I believe this is my most recent piece (as of 7/13/23). A classic mismash of vaporware tropes into a basic composition.
- HugeWave
A piece inspired by the cover of Tatsuro Yamashita's Big Wave album. A fairly low-effort thing I did ages ago to try and add a film effect on top of an image, which itself isn't all that amazing.
- Stuff from the Other Angle
The Other Angle was one of the first video art pieces I made.
I made a background from The Other Angle, a view-from-cockpit video, by translating this background around behind an image of a cockpit to make it look a bit like a flight simulator. You can see the full video in my portfolio, which is fully CC0. Obviously, the inspiration for this piece was from Hiroshi Nagai. He has a few paintings of planes passing over cities at dusk/dawn, and I thought it would be fun to try and do a first-person adaptation. Even on its own, though, I think the background is fairly eye-catching.
Here's the cockpit image I used for that video. It's stylized and tweaked but based on an actual image from Wikimedia Commons.
- Internet Exploration
Not much to say about this one other than it was one of my only attempts to create depth and shading using gradients. Mostly, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.
- Intelline
A bit of a sequel to Friendless Friends. This is one of the few posts I've received significant attention from on r/fakealbumcovers. All of the images I used to create it are obviously in the public domain if you're familiar with my stuff, and the whole piece is as well. This one and everything else can be downloaded for free at the link above.
- Navigation
A piece from June of 2022. Loosely based on the album art of Navigator by Omega Tribe. From the pre-Stable Diffusion era of my AI-assisted work, where I was experimenting with stylizing photobashed images from Creative Commons. I used this tool, although Stable Diffusion's img2img feature and ControlNet have arguably made it obsolete. It is pretty fast to run on CPU, though, which might make it a fun filter for people with more modest hardware.
I made a few other pieces in this style outside of vaporware for art requests on r/drawforme, although any AI tool usage has been banned for some time there. The sheer irony of moderators dictating how people should be able to spend their own time to fulfill free requests is hard to state. I ended up creating r/generateforme (and now !generateforme@normalcity.life) for people who want to fulfill art requests without restrictions about using AI tools. Anyway, this era of my art is still one of my favorites. It was when I was starting to see some promise with AI tools, and it allowed me to hide some of my lazy photobashing behind layers of stylization. I still bounce between using AI and doing things totally from scratch, but a lot of my best art has come from mixing the two in roughly equal quantities. As always, this is public domain, like all of my work. My art portfolio link is linked above if you'd like to check out and download my stuff.
- Cinco DRK
Let me tell you a story about a company. A company that shined as bright as the sun... Taiyou. Taiyou made cars for the international market, much like the other Japanese car brands you know. Taiyou is romaji for "sun," which is reflected in their slogan, "Taiyou no shita, subete ga kita!" In English, that means "Everything under the sun has come!" Taiyou wished to expand its market share, presence, and reach. It wanted to produce cars that were versatile and could handle anything. Unfortunately for them, the end of Japan's bubble economy meant investment money dried up quickly. As they were pouring money into R&D for a new car model, they had little money to spend on keeping the base model Cinco relevant. The company shuttered in early 1994, just two years after it had launched the Cinco DRK.
Taiyou Corporation was formed on the outskirts of Chiba, Japan, in 1988. The sole founder, Takahiro Nakamura, was a renowned car mechanic enthralled with the tuning culture there at the time. After receiving investment money from an anonymous angel investor, Takahiro promptly started on his first design, the Cinco. The car was to be an affordable five-door design with a modest engine and a modest price tag. Only 100 1989 model-year Cincos were ever produced. Each one was hand-built by Nakamura and his small team of technicians. They sold well for such a small company, which led to more investment and growth.
By 1991, the company had tripled in size, now employing well over 100 people and narrowing its focus on budget-friendly rally cars for up-and-coming amateur teams. They still kept producing base model Cinco cars, but they became less relevant in the market as time went on. This was primarily because Nakamura, now CEO of Taiyou, bet the company on R&D for rally-focused models instead of the budget-friendly base model. Every model of Cinco produced from the model years 1989 to 1993 is virtually identical. No climate control, no radio or cassette player, no power windows, and no option for an automatic transmission. The company essentially made the cars as cheaply as they could, which meant utilizing overstock and discarded parts from other manufacturers, forgoing any creature comforts from the era, and essentially focusing on providing affordable transportation. Many experts think the lack of focus on cheaper cars, especially to differentiate smaller companies from large competitors already providing better features on similarly-priced models, led Taiyou and many other smaller companies to file for bankruptcy in the early 90s.
In any case, the R&D team, led by Nakamura himself, set out in early 1991 to design a car for amateur rally teams with little money to spare. They intended to create a set of parts that could be affixed to a base-model Cinco by the end-users, which would effectively make the cheap city car into something usable for off-road terrain. In the end, though, they decided that it would be easier to market the car if it was assembled from the factory with the upgrades installed. They called it the Cinco DRK, or Dynamic Rally Kit. This "kit" of parts helped to increase the engine performance to 240 HP, added more robust suspension, and removed excess weight from the interior. They also had a Race Day Ready version, which included factory-installed roll cages, racing seats, additional air intakes, and RF equipment. It was also tuned to make slightly more horsepower, although the difference in power was offset by the added weight.
The DRK was made available to international customers in late-1992 for USD $14,999, although import and shipping costs increased the cost significantly. The cracks in Taiyou's misaligned focus were beginning to show, as sales were slow and the company was sinking into debt. Investors pointed out their significant losses on the DRK, which led to its discontinuation only 10 months after its launch in August 1993.
The collapse of the company followed quickly. Out of money and unable to attract new investment, the company laid off its entire workforce in November 1993 and filed for bankruptcy in the early part of 1994. The company was eventually liquidated, and the remaining stock of 1993 Cincos was consequently sold off. Penniless and humiliated, Nakamura sadly passed away in his Funabashi apartment in September 1995. The cause of death was determined to be a heart attack, partly due to Nakamura's drug and alcohol abuse and also likely due in part to issues with chronic stress.
In reality, none of this is true. There was no company named Taiyou; this was an attempt at writing some fiction to go along with this piece.
In all seriousness, though, this is another attempt by me to create something realistic using Stable Diffusion. It's still one of my favorite pieces and was inspired by my previous effort with Love Taste. I thought these pieces went well with some light historical fiction, although my writing chops probably aren't as good as I've convinced myself they are. It took several hours to make the base image for this one as well, although the graphic design was pretty easy to slap on. I was inspired by the cover art for Splendor, a Casiopea single. Like all my work, this one is licensed into the public domain via CC0. You can find it and my other work at the portfolio link above.
- Data Facilities
Floppy disks may seem like ancient relics to some, but they're something I put to use when I'm shooting with my Mavicas. I also like the quirky geometric motifs of the 80s, and I absolutely fell in love with the cover of PC DOS 3.30. Like with many of my pieces, I always try to do something original with a borrowed idea.
In this case, the fundamental shape of the floppy disk was laid out using a public domain image of a floppy disk I found on Wikimedia Commons. I wanted to do something a bit more fun with the composition, and I landed on what you see after some experimentation. I also played with the colors a bit to give it a different personality. This is definitely one of the more unique pieces in my minimalist folder, although I still have a sizable collection of vaporware art in general that I have not yet shared here. You can still see the rest of my CC0-licensed work at the portfolio link above.
- The Gaze
This was one of the first pieces I created with Stable Diffusion in August of 2022. I was trying to create something resembling many of the repetitive and overused 3D art tropes on r/vaporwaveaesthetics. The "person wearing a hooded robe looking at big thing away from the viewer" thing was something Caleb Worcester was churning out without fail for months. In a way, my use of AI in this piece was merely to satirize many karma-farming assembly-line pieces people like Caleb were creating at the time. Caleb was clearly only creating these pieces to prop up sales on his print shop and to sell NFTs, which is something diametrically opposed to my public domain licensing and open-source distribution.
Of course, as I used Stable Diffusion more, I realized that it was an invaluable addition to my toolbox. I ended up building a PC to house a 3090 so I could experiment further with machine learning. I've since created a lot of cool things with it, including Love Taste. All of my work is open-source and licensed into the public domain. The link to my art portfolio is essentially a single-click download to grab all of my art at once.
Oh, and more recently, I did try and train a quick Dreambooth model based on some examples of 3D art that I thought represented the bulk of the popular stuff on Reddit. It's a bit weak, but you can sometimes get some interesting results.
- Love Taste
A newer piece of mine utilizing Stable Diffusion and a ton of the excellent tools surrounding it. With the newer AI image generation tools, I quickly realized that creating realistic things that don't exist is pretty easy. Overall, though, this piece took something like seven hours: most of it was inpainting and getting the base image to look passable. I did spend a fair bit of time adding cool little elements to the graphic design, though, including the Cyclist Records logo, which is a bit of a parody of the Moon Records logo from that time.
While not as much of a community favorite, I still think this is a cool showcase of how AI can help create believable artifacts from a bygone era that are total fabrications. If anything, the irony of that simple fact is something I find fits in well with many of the ironic undertones of vaporware.
- Digital Palm
A neat little piece that leaned heavily into u/neovapor's style at the time: his art style is still one of the more unique ones I've seen anyone utilize in the Reddit vaporware art scene. I was inspired by it, but I wanted to take it in my own direction, which I think I accomplished through several different means. From the unique interpretation of sand, palms, and the sun peaking over the water: it's all the necessary elements of a rad beach day. The leaves of the palm tree are still something I've always thought was this piece's weak point, but the overall execution and clever-enough symbolism make it one of my favorite pieces.
- Cyberkart
Based on SNES game box art, this was a piece I built around a pretty cool method of doing the 80s metal text effect in Photoshop. If I remember correctly, you can directly copy and reuse it in your own project (since the project file is in the portfolio).
- Friendless Friends
A mashup of several styles I had come across on Reddit at the time, it's a fake album cover about parasocial relationships and is a photo bash of Daybreak by Mayfield Parrish. Perhaps my most popular piece on r/vaporwaveart, it has been printed into a poster by someone who enjoyed it and also graced the cover of the recent r/vaporwave jubilee compilation album, courtesy of u/nuvpr.
- Welcome to the Lemmy VaporwaveArt!
Rules are on the sidebar. Feel free to post your vaporware art here. Have fun!
