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All of these kinds of subcategories like weirdcore and dreamcore and in particular Old Web are really just talking about facets of what I'm pretty sure is the same thing. Things like weirdcore edits, Old Internet collages, liminal space blogs, and even original work like ENA share similar origins in the aloof irony poisoned abstract surrealism of late vaporwave. Thematically, they're all looking to achieve the same thing - some kind of blend of the surreal and the nostalgic, and often go about this with similar techniques. Incoherent mashups or collages, static filters, date stamps and similar techniques to mimic film grain on consumer grade or disposable cameras, imagery of eyes, televisions, flowers, butterflies, "glitch" edits. What these subcategories are is ultimately just using the same collection of motifs and swapping out some of the specific visual elements to appeal to a particular audience or evoke a specific kind of nostalgia.

I do think there is genuinely a broad aesthetic category that exists that is a modern, grassroots surrealist (for lack of a better term) movement that uses digital ephemera as its subject matter and reference point [...] The aesthetic distance between the photo of The Backrooms is not that far off from say, a scan of a photograph of a 2000s bathroom with an eyeball photoshopped on it.

[...]

star: Well the umbrella here is hauntology, it's a mix of nostalgia, cosiness, eerieness, some political implications, old recording technologies and crackle. They all seek to evoke the same mood in a viewer, which is dissociative and uncanny.

Jeri Chi: Ah yes! Great point. [...] I think that's probably why I associated it with vaporwave - hauntology is at the core of what vaporwave is. Compare the Backrooms to (Mark Fisher's articulation of) the Overlook Hotel for example. [...]

star: Tho having said its not surreal, I do think a lot of these hauntological movements have something to do with childhood. That combination of feeling safe and scared. I suspect for all these people they are making hauntology about their parents, about what was in the air when they were barely conscious of it. [...] I think cus when you are a kid you are experiencing real things as abstract, and so you can get fixated on and afraid of everyday things like what the animated logo of a VHS company might Mean if it happens to frighten you.

Jeri Chi: Hmmmmm yeah this is all good insight. I'm reminded of something I stumbled upon recently. I forget exactly what it was but it was something like the uh, Scary Logos Wiki? It was a really interesting project that felt uniquely within this space of like, nostalgia but fear. Which is exactly the kind of thing you were talking about. All the pages documented various media logos that had strange animations or unsettling imagery or loud, jarring sounds. Like, studio ids and the like. [...] It was all very subjective despite being also extremely comprehensive in its effort to document the variants and even parodies or unofficial depictions in other media. They had like, scariness ratings alongside each version of said idents.

star: I don't feel a lot of nostalgia for the 80s or 90s really, I was a little child, but I do get triggered(?) by the Playrooms backroom subgenre, because I can't get excited into buying Transformers movie tickets but I have a very visceral memory of encountering sticky, broken transformers toys in the box at medical waiting rooms, you know? The detritus. It's not actual nostalgia, exactly. It's a very creepy feeling.
I get my hauntological rocks off to the 1970s - my parents childhood - and again, it's about detritus. I don't get hauntology triggered or interested in any way for this media created about the 00s or 10s, 'my own' era in which I have memories. 'triggered' is the wrong word, but there is a definite sensation when it gets you which is the appeal, and it's very striking. Quite unpleasant.

Jeri Chi: I'm sure it's similar to the appeal of a horror movie.

This is all very interesting though, as admittedly someone who is only on the border of the kinds of groups that produce these as a Milennial-Gen Z cusper I don't entirely relate to this kind of thing, but I also see where it's coming from and can relate to being attracted to vaporwave and its aesthetics for the same reason.

star: I genuinely think it's like my dog. If you do gesture he doesn't recognise he gets very scared, because what does it Mean. And when you are child, how do you know a tv ident isn't scary? You've never seen them before. You are encountering the whole world in this unfiltered, raw state (which is interesting to contrast with the woozy, dissociative, referentiality of vaporwave et al). Plus also, idents and logos frequently do precede things that are scary. It's classical conditioning!

Jeri Chi: I can also totally relate to it myself. I was deathly afraid of the THX logo as a kid lol. I just never felt the need to document it on the Internet, which is where I find this all to be interesting.

star: It's scary! Do you know anything else in the world which sounds like the THX logo?

[...]

Jeri Chi: Well all of this is a lot to chew on, [...] Thanks again for bringing [hauntology] into the discussion, this really feels like a eureka moment on something I've been trying to articulate about these styles for a long time.

star: Brian Eno:

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

[...] So, I started reading this essay, which so far has been adequately summarizing Mark Fisher’s thoughts and analysis of Hauntology, and it got me thinking about how a loss of childhood, or never getting to experience the concept of what we are presented as what childhood should be is a recurring motif or source of inspiration for a couple of these online aesthetics and subcultures.

[...] I don’t think that specifically weirdcore necessarily engages in the concept I initially presented. I don’t have a developed understanding of its intent, but as far as I can tell weirdcore imagery generally tries to evoke a late 90s early 2000s suburban childhood. You could interpret this as a longing for that kind of life, but I think it's more related to the intent of making you feel unsettled.

However, I do think subgenres of weirdcore interact with my initial concept. Specifically kidcore and traumacore.

The concepts behind kidcore definitely exist outside of this named core-aesthetic, like it's basically preschool-pop for zoomers on tumblr. Aesthetics wiki cites Decora as a point of inspiration which I think is accurate because I’ve definitely seen japanese fashion doing this before. Anyways, I’m sure that many people engaging in it have some kind of relationship with a loss of childhood. For example, EDM artist 4Lung (who I primarily know from this mixtape that introduced me to a lot of new concepts) was exposed as a cub (furry age regression community) and heavily engages in this aesthetic.

Traumacore explicitly engages in this concept. I don’t really want to analyze traumacore, it’s fairly controversial, but it is a direct line to this concept of childhood loss. aesthetic wiki link that summarizes it and surprisingly active reddit community

This is a bit out of scope of the initial concept of online surrealism, but it could be informative context when looking at some of these communities. Inflatable and plush furries are a subcommunity of furries that I don’t feel fully equipped to describe or analyze, but this documentary was my introduction to the concept and I think it does an alright job discussing what it is and why. [...] I can’t remember if it’s discussed in this video, but based on my understanding an aspect of this kind of thing is returning to childhood. I would say that this is adjacent to kidcore in its intent.

What i'm really thinking about with all this is that these imagined realities created through these aesthetics are kind of like an ideal fantasy version of childhood. Like with kidcore and the playrooms(?) it's this fantasy of living in a pure distillation of all the fun and joy of being a kid in a mcdonalds playplace. Like what if that experience wasn't just a blip in your memory, but your entire life going forward! Almost like fantasizing of finally reaching traditional christian heaven (not the clouds and angels, but the one where you float eternally in bliss).

But also it could be a way for people to try and live their perception of what childhood should have been, either because they had something specific that they feel tore away their opportunity, or because their childhood just couldn't live up to this imagined standard that is portrayed in movies and commercials. [...]

[...] Empty, 2000s-built homes are common, pulling from the broader "liminal spaces" movement, but I think sparsely decorated kids rooms or homes are also common in "weirdcore" content, and you can connect this back to kids who had less (materially) wealthy childhoods due to their parents braving the financial crisis; swap out Disneyland for local waterparks and McDonald's playplaces that are cheaper and easier to go to without massive expense or extra time off work.

This can also be where the "weird" creeps in, you generally see local indoor water parks and playplaces in "weirdcore" more than you see the high end outdoor amusement & water parks. The places that might get a little run down because the maintenance budget isn't as big, easier for a kid to open the wrong door and go into the (literal not the spooky kind) back rooms, and that's where the odd-ness begins to set in.

Empty homes because you're suddenly moving back in with your parents parents because their suburban tract "forever home" was foreclosed on, a sparsely decorated kids room because your parents don't have as much money as they expected for toys and decorating.

This could feed into why weirdcore (and adjacent) focuses so much on idealized childhoods, but a very specifically kinda middle class idealized childhood.

Even moving on from this, into the mid-late 2010s, there's a common feeling expressed in left-leaning spaces of the "emptiness" of modern suburbs. Spread out, repeating, identical houses on identical lots. All built at the same time, not even weathered yet. You get in a car and wait for your mom to take you somewhere.

M/I Homes thought it could stand to be updated
Forced it all into a grid 'til it looked like the funny pages

With every trace of life, it seems, confined within a frame
The faces move from day to day, but the strips all look the same
And the punchlines are resoundingly unfunny
For those trapped in this architecture of easy money

And I feel like this could all come to no good
The kids who populate these cul-de-sacs will never know what stood
Beneath their cookie-cutter houses, fields and streams and woods
They'll sit in cars and wait for mom to drive them out of this boring neighborhood"

• Oh, Susquehanna by Defiance, Ohio (from an album literally called "The Great Depression")

[...]

smorzando~: really interesting and elucidating perspective! I found weirdcore's focus on middleclass suburbia odd and couldn't picture how exactly it culminated, but looking at it from a socioeconomic perspective makes a lot of sense.

I recently starting following this tumblr blog that posts empty real estate interiors and I think it's inspired by exactly what you are talking about. Neoliberal capitalist real estate dystopia hellscape

Pokemonprime: its been kinda forgotten but for the people making weirdcore edits, statistically some of their first memories are of a major financial crisis. Them being early memories helps too, because you remember stuff in bits and pieces.

My parents had a townhouse that ultimately went down in the housing crisis (I think, I was realllll young and my parents don't talk about it a ton). And I only remember bits and pieces of that place; a vague, shaky image of the front. A sandbox on the rear patio where I lost a toy excavator. A half empty, oversized "entertainment center".

[...]

star: & of course the abandoned mall as a liminal space, that's the first of this kind of thing I remember seeing. [...] The empty real estate also ties into what you are saying about trauma, as the domestic home as a haunted space is a regular image in ghost stories as a stand in for the trauma of/in the nuclear family.

Pokemonprime: yep, the mall that was already starting to decline and then finally gave out by the 2010s. I attribute my interest in dead malls to the fact the drive to Toys R Us as a kid took me past the abandoned Frederick Towne Mall.

I would describe them as...emo, gothic, and romantic (often with curly fonts, with lots of grungy photoshop stamps).

They didn't have this 'dissociative'/liminal mood. That's new.

[...] young people have always wanted to express their feelings and experiences through artwork online, but the way they do it has changed over the past 2 decades.

it's the phones but i am by instinct, internet-negative - i do think living partially online gives life this sort of, insubstantial quality, which reinforces/reflects dissociation, as well as living in a world of images and references instead of in physicality, which lends itself fairly naturally (IMO) to processing your experiences and feelings of numbness

no longer by listening to Numb by Linkin Park, a work which describes feeling numb and broken

to identifying with the sensory qualities of glitch or a stuttering VHS, like these are extremely evocative metaphors for what it feels like.

[...] we did have exactly the same worried-conversations about whether this kind of thing/emo music/emo subcultures 'romanticised' mental illness and made young people more ill, exactly like that traumacore post, same conversation.

I'm fascinated to work out when this changed and why!

smorzando~: I'm really happy that you brought this up, I'm familiar with the kind of graphics you are talking about, but completely forgot about them until now.

In regards to the shift in ethos and style, I don't think there will necessarily be a direct through-line between emo-graphics and traumacore. There were over 10 years between their heights of usage (based on my understanding), and I think during that gap there were a lot of different outlets for this kind of self expression. I know that fandom spaces have always been a place for people to explore these concepts, through fanart and writing. [...]

star: Oooh yes, good thought. I'm not sure what came between either...

[...]

A: [...] As a very online non-American in the 2010s, I’d point to the 2010s edgy/macabre “aesthetic” niches on tumblr (like “sad grunge”) as the missing link between 2000s emo and traumacore.

Granted, tumblr aesthetics usually align more with hipsterdom, indie-sleaze and general alt subculture, but their edgier niches are also marked by a romanticization (or at least a conflicted embrace) of depression, self-harm, and the dark corners of the psyche in general.

But the aesthetics of sad grunge, etc. catered mostly to teens. The subsequent childlike bent of weirdcore, etc. goes from this romanticization of the macabre to the detached, anhedonic, and/or ironic memetics of nostalgia, which I agree is an indicator of hauntology.

While I’m not knowledgeable on these newer -cores, I see them as hauntological symbolism that point to symptoms of self-fragmentation (in line with the dissolution of conventional social roles and spaces), and alienation (from Post-Fordism’s demolition of linear career paths in lieu of “flexibility” and “adaptability”). Add to that the digital infomania on economic, societal, and ecological crises, and childhood nostalgia can look like the last vestige of authenticity from a bygone era.

From Byung Chul Han’s “Psychopolitics”:

Consumer capitalism operates through the selling and consumption of meanings and emotions. It is not use value but emotive or cultic value that plays a constitutive role in the economy of consumption.

I don’t see these weird -cores reaching mass appeal like emo and “sad grunge” etc. which fashion brands were able to sanitize and commodify, but I guess we never know. I do see childhood nostalgia generally being as cathartic as it is marketable.

[...]

smorzando~: I really appreciate your insight, I wasn't familiar with these tumblr grunges. I think that this is a really accurate direction to point to as a through-line between the 2000s and 2020s, I would agree that there are a lot of shared intents through all of these aesthetics.

[...] Your analysis of the cores is really interesting, particularly linking their dissociative aspects to the loss of stability/guidance that came with the dissolution of multiple social structures (including career paths). Based on my understanding this dissociative aspect was introduced in the 2020s, and can be seen in multiple places. It's found in almost all internet-cores attached to weirdcore, including anything related to liminality. And, this is something that I'm not fully tuned into yet, but I think that you can find a specific kind of nihilism related to this dissociation in stuff like drain gang and yabujin inspired soundcloud drill and hardstyle. You can see an intersection between all of these aesthetics on this tumblr blog [CW: gore, nudity, self-harm] It's dispersed mostly through 2021-2022.

[...]

A: Draingang’s visual signifiers remind me of the Symbolist/Decadent art movements from the 19th century, which generally had this attitude of cynicism and disgust towards the modern world, while longing for an escape into fantasy/transcendent realms.

So, pardon me if I’m painting with a broad brush here, but the weird, dissociative, and nostalgic -cores can be characterized by the use of nostalgic/childlike (easily consumable) imagery to make sense of a confusing, othering zeitgeist. A need to commodify every part of yourself to affirm your existence. These -cores make me think of Mark Fisher’s references to the film Office Space, and how their employees are required “‘seven pieces of flair’…to express their ‘individuality and creativity’”.

But niches like drain gang evoke another facet of world-weariness, where what matters isn’t the constant affirmation, but the dissolution of oneself. Maybe it’s why transhumanist/post-humanist ideas are becoming popular again, for better or worse.

[...]

star: oh thank you, that's really interesting! I didn't know sad grunge at all, but looking for images you're absolutely right, it DOES look like the midpoint (although it's hard to know if what i'm seeing are true vintage examples) [...]

"Hundreds of millions of individuals precipitously began spending many hours every day and night sitting, more or less stationary, in close proximity to flickering, light-emitting objects. The study [on television] bypassed the notion that television is something one watches in some attentive manner, and instead provisionally treated it as a source of light and sound to which one is exposed",

Thinking of the frequency of 'flicker', the glowing symbols in hexatron, the neon in synthwave and others

Television posed the unusual phenomenon of an addictiveness to something that failed to deliver the most basic reward of a habit-forming substance: that is, it provides not even a temporary heightened sense of wellbeing or pleasure, or a gratifying if brief fall into insensate numbness. Moments after turning on a television, there is no detectable rush or change of sensation of any kind. Rather, there is a slow shift into vacancy from which one finds it difficult to disengage. This is a decisive trait of the era of technological addictiveness: that one can return again and again to a neutral void that has little affective intensity of any kind. In the widely noted study by Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi, the majority of their subjects reported that extended TV viewing made them feel worse than when they did not watch, yet they felt compelled to continue their behaviours.

[Televisions] are part of larger strategies of power in which the aim is not mass deception but rather states of neutralisation and inactivation in which one is disposessed of time. But even within habitual repetitions there remains a thread of hope - a knowingly false hope - that one more click or touch might open onto something to redeem the overwhelmng monotony in which one is immersed.

One of the forms of disempowerment within 24/7 environments is the incapacitation of daydream or of any mode of absent-minded introspection that would otherwise occur in intervals of slow or vacant time. Now one of the attractions of current systems and products is their operating speed: it has become intolerable for there to be waiting time when something loads or connects. When there are delays or breaks of empty time, they are rarely openings for the drift of consciousness in which ome becomes unmoored from the constraints and demands of the immediate present. There is a profound incompatibility of anything resembling reverie with the priorities of efficiency, functionality and speed

This second set of quotes, reminding me of the affect in weirdcore & some of these other 'dissociative' aesthetic artforms, they are mirroring this sense of

a slow shift into vacancy from which one finds it difficult to disengage

a neutral void that has little affective intensity of any kind

the overwhelming monotony in which one is immersed

in other words, is weirdcore specifically of the now because this is the life-texture that art explores when you are spending half your life online [...]

A: Still very salient points! It’s been argued that platforms like TikTok and Instagram/Facebook (i.e. their reels) are “turning into TV”, in the sense that 1) both “watching whatever’s on TV” and binging videos on autoplay/infinite scrolling put viewers into a state of vacancy/passivity, and 2) establishing systems where only a small, consolidated pool of people are creating content, while everyone else is pushed to consume.

Your point about the flickers speaks to me – there is a hypnotic quality to it. Relevant Marshall McLuhan quotes from Violence as a Quest for Identity:

At this moment, we are on the air, and we do not have a physical body. When you're on the telephone, or on radio, or on TV, you're just an image on the air. When... you are a discarnate being. You have a very different relation to the world around you. And this, I think, has been one of the big effects of the electric age. It has deprived people, really, of their private identity.

Like being swallowed by the light.

Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being “mass man.” One of the big marks of the loss of identity is nostalgia. And so revivals of all hands in every phase of life today, revivals of clothing, of dances, of music, of shows, of everything, we live by the revival. It tells us who we are. Or were.

I wonder if these concepts will have counterparts in today’s popular philosophy.