I feel like there should be a word to describe the feeling you get when discovering something is immensely popular and yet you have never heard of it. This is one of the feelings I got when reading Valentina Tanni’s latest book, Exit Reality: Vaporwave, Backrooms, Weirdcore and Other Landscapes Beyond the Threshold.
There are the hallucinatory liminal spaces of Dreamcore; digitally created underground tunnels overgrown with soft-focus tulips created by artist Drake Cappi and rose-tinted renderings of pastel-painted US suburban streets. There is Poolcore, from artists like Gabrielle Salonga and Jared Pike, with its motifs of infinite swimming pools, sometimes leading onto endless oceans, imagining spaces you might fall into and never escape. Another new immensely popular online movement I had never come across was #measababy, where people take videos of puppets, figurines and dolls – especially ones with a tall cone-shaped hat and white billowing cape – and claim that it shows them as a child.
Then there is the torturous nightmare of Traumacore that deepens its disturbing effects with love hearts, glittering clouds and childhood memorabilia, a Baudrillardian conclusion of the constant switching between war and frivolity started by the 24-hour televised news media almost half a century ago.  Chaosedits, perhaps on the spectrum of ASMR videos, are lightening fast supercuts of people screaming, sobbing, enraged or distraught. They might recount traumatic experiences to access these states of emotional intensity. And people watch these to feel something, or is it to see another human processing pain?

Prior to the near-global circulatory quality of networked media, perhaps aesthetic preferences like these would have remained obscure niches. However, TikTok and Instagram profiles like Cappi’s, KiddGorgeous’ and Pike’s which garner anywhere up to 9.9 million views for such posts could hardly be argued to be pertaining to a niche appeal. Their depictions of desolate post-consumerist architectures – rewilded officescapes, submerged theme parks and enclosed chambers with no natural light – seem to resonate broadly with people. As do ASMR videos of constant gunshots, apparently (and incredulously!) geared towards helping bring on sleep and relaxation.
This is a cornerstone of Tanni’s latest research. Her recurring underlying questions seem to be, what do these digital aesthetics communicate about social realities and how people feel in the current moment of surveillance capitalism? Does their apparent popularity indicate certain desires or needs to seek out such digital audiovisual experiences as a part of emotional regulation? What type of society creates a community that seeks out gunshots to sleep to?
There is a sense of apocalyptic reckoning in the images and videos that she studies, scenes marked by the absence of human presence. But despite the terror of enforced aloneness, there is a subtle acceptance and tranquillity in these visions. A fatalistic submission to the collapse of civilisation perhaps spearheaded by the conditions that first gave rise to contemporary social isolation. She writes,

The underlying theme in many of these videos, which is there for all to see but never explicitly referred to, is the impending catastrophe, the feeling that the end is nigh. The apocalypse is fast approaching, and the only thing we can do is try to connect a bit more, share our emotions and embrace any kind of togetherness that can help us face the turbulent future that awaits.’

A strength of Tanni’s research is a commitment to challenging the citational canon in art history and cultural theory. The voices that are most important to her arguments are those from pseudonymous profiles found in comments sections and forums. They are those that click on the virtual speech bubble to transmit a brief snapshot of their emotional response. Most likely, no one will reply to them being one comment in ten thousand. Tanni isn’t concerned with the authenticity of these accounts, although she acknowledges that bots create 64% of online activity as well as discusses the Dead Internet theory. Instead, her approach interprets these online comments in a similar vein to what algorithms scholar Tarleston Gillespie might call ‘calculated publics’. In a sense, their authenticity isn’t relevant. The comments that we see reflect a community’s response back to ourselves and in the process, we get a certain impression about how that community feels. That impression can shape our perception in the future. Reading social media is a numbers game; the number of views, likes, comments, shares create a kind of legibility, a short-hand for popularity and public resonance. We are influenced by others regardless of whether they are ‘real’ or not.
Exit Reality doesn’t suppose that these digital aesthetics emerged in vacuum. Artists including Genesis P-orridge, Mark Leckey, Sherrie Rabinowitz, and Kit Galloway are mentioned as well as the broader movement of Surrealism. Perhaps most closely drawing upon surrealist sensibilities are Weirdcore and Dreamcore, with their unlikely juxtapositions, aspects of collage and their striving for dreamlike states. But Tanni makes the observation that both of these diverge from the surrealist framing of dreams as having a liberatory potential, with juxtapositions being used to break free from routine and connect with hidden truths. Instead, Weirdcore and Dreamcore are the shamans of subconsious realms that offer nostalgia and a sense of familiarity, albeit an unnerving one. A moment where unease and relief create a seamless refuge. It’s all about how people feel towards images, rather than what they look like, Tanni argues. I’m reminded here of Claire Bishop’s seminal text Artificial Hells in which she critiques a similar point made about the aesthetics of participatory art. With a culture obsessed with the visual, can we ever escape the immediate visual sensations and resulting associations of anything, even if it’s deemed unimportant to certain artforms?

Can we ever escape…? I pause on this phrase as it bears so much weight in the aesthetics that Tanni maps out.  She doesn’t seem to be studying these images because of aesthetic admiration. Instead, her interest lies in how they are symptomatic of a collective sense of feeling trapped. And then to varying degrees mixed with loss, loneliness, disappointment, unmet expectations and the desire to transcend material conditions. To return to a childhood that was so simple, except it never was. Or to float into space away from a world of rent increases, social pressures and post-industrial societies that present busyness as an indicator of moral character. Through liminal aesthetics, people are dreaming of floating through walls, glitching through barriers, and breaking free from material constraints.
Arguing that Vaporwave has been a key influence of many contemporary internet aesthetics, Tanni focuses on its ruminations on escape and it critique of corporatism: ‘The genre remains relevant because in a sense we are still stuck in the same loop: trapped in a giant shopping mall surrounded by infinite forms of entertainment, disillusioned by politics, melded to technology, obsessed with sensory stimulation, and nostalgic to the core.’ I’m surprised the word phantasmagoria never crops up in the book but perhaps that is explained by Tanni’s preference to avoid the usual canon of voices cited in art history and theory.
She explains that a recurring motif in Dreamcore is the eyes and wings combination, perhaps to ‘give us the unsettling sensation that we are never alone: someone, or something, is watching us.’  Is this our reckoning with the emotional affects of surveillance capitalism? I feel a slight sense of optimism from wondering whether this indicates a growing disconcertedness, and class consciousness, about how we are treated as data points to be manipulated and exploited. It’s this tension between a simmering frustration with a lack of control combined with the mirage of freedom created by seemingly infinite digitally rendered spaces that makes Exit Reality a fascinating read.
With all of its focus on mood and feeling, it would be tempting to read Exit Reality from a cerebral perspective but Tanni keeps pulling the argument back to the effects of digital technology on the body. This links back to her theory that the obsession with liminality in digital media aesthetics – the feeling of being neither here nor there – emerges from the initial digital divide. The majority of contemporary computing, as accessed by the public, still takes place through screens with our bodies in one location and our eyes and ears leading our minds into another. It’s a sense of being torn between two places that erupts as a disquieting anxiety channelled through images of abyss-like swimming pools, concrete corridors and subterranean parking lots with an unreachable exit, and eerily quiet shopping malls.
It begs the question, will this liminality always be part of digital media aesthetics if we consider future advances in wearable and under-the-skin technologies, AR, haptics, brain-computer interfaces and various neurotechnologies? If brain-computer interfaces enter the mainstream, what new aesthetics will emerge? Tanni hones in on the nostalgic element of many digital aesthetics; nostalgia being similar to a memory but a memory of something that didn’t exist in exactly that way. A ‘memory of a memory’. What will people feel nostalgia for in the future? An image of a plant on a minimalist Instagram-aesthetic desk emblematic of a tech savvy, successful entrepreneur, except the education system is in ruins and they could never afford to move out of their childhood bedroom? Or perhaps it’ll be images of their youth when they were using various filters and editing tools, except they never looked that way?

Although she proposes that screen-based digital media has wrought this split between our minds and bodies, she doesn’t fall into a simple mind-body dualism. ‘Battlestations’ are explored in the final section of the book, a term that gamers have used to describe their home computer set-up and which has a subreddit of 4 million readers. But don’t confuse this for a fantastical synonym for a mere workplace. She explains,

Unlike the more mundane workstation, these battlestations are both portals and altars: their function is both practical, namely to keep the player’s body and mind as comfortable as possible while “astrally” projected into the world of the game, and symbolic, because their look and feel are an expression of the user’s identity.

These battlestations can range from high-end displays of luxury and technological gadgetry to nests of piled up junk food cartons, pizza boxes and filth with a computer at the heart.  A lone symbol of freedom, or of worship, in the face of deteriorating material living conditions. ‘These rooms are hellholes, cockpits, teleporting capsules, and prison cells, all rolled into one.’ It’s a reminder that our bodies are affected by the cultural ways in which we use digital media. There’s a balancing act going on, which could be a key takeaway from this book: it would be ridiculous to consider digital technology without considering its effects on the body. And of course, bodies are not the same, they are not at all subject to the same social, material, nor geographic conditions.
Another compelling feature of Tanni’s latest book is her treatment of images and videos made for YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and the like as being worthy of serious consideration as artistic artefacts. They appear to emerge organically then develop a community of committed creators and fans around them – through their consumption and circulation, they form part of people’s identities – and that means they are important. She compounds this approach by noting that new digital media aesthetics and subgenres – like Battlestation imagery – are being drawn upon by artists more established in the contemporary art sphere, like Jon Rafman and Nick Vyssotsky.
I started this review pondering on the perhaps archaic language of niches. Prior to the use of the word to describe a specific segment of the market, niche described an arched indentation in a stone wall for a statue or decorative feature. Incidentally, an early genre of internet aesthetics that Tanni discusses is Vaporwave with its fondness of Ancient Greek statues displaced against trashy neon sunsets, chequerboard floors and early Nineties software icons. But in internet aesthetics, walls are not solid. Like apparitions, we float through edges and boundaries, trapped in liminal space. We seek glitches that confirm our suspicions, that the world that is visible to us is not as it seems.
That is the core appeal of Exit Reality, a now mainstream concern with questioning the real and deciphering fact from fiction.  Is this the death of niche? And if so, perhaps a crack in the over-hyped – and deceitful – social and economic optimism that consumer capitalism sold to us? The works described might offer a form of escapism akin to peering into a broken mirror. They reflect the fears and anxieties of our fractured realities back at us in eerie ways. And whilst you can always escape the dystopic worlds they build by swiping to the next, or clicking that little top-right cross, they offer no means to exit the very real dystopia of late capitalism.

Author bio:
Woods (aka Kin, cell_less) is a PhD artist-researcher at the University of Newcastle with a focus on Digital Fatalism and how algorithmic technologies can limit agency and the ability to shape our futures. Her work has featured at the Wrong Biennale, Peckham Creative Computing festival, Sonic Bites with Cryptic, videoclub’s Vital Capacities digital residency programme, Model Village curated by Hotdesque in London, Strangelove Time-Based Media Festival, Radiophrenia, Kelvingrove Museum, and the 10th international conference on digital and interactive arts Artech. She has curated and presented discussion events like ‘Social Marginalisation and Machine Learning: defying the labels of the machinic gaze’ for Autograph Gallery (London) and in 2020 was a ‘Sound Pioneer’ supported by Yorkshire Womens Sound Network and HCMF. She has written for Corridor8, AI & Society journal, Moving Image Artist journal, Disability Arts Online, Byline Times, Autograph ABP, Musicology Research Journal, Novel magazine, This is Tomorrow, Hypocrite Reader, Garageland, Artlyst, and Arts Industry. https://cell-less.com/
Woods wrote this review after undertaking a month-long placement hosted by Aksioma and supported by Northern Bridge Consortium.’