Signal — Vapourwave Cartoon Abstract Character, Media Plaza, Amsterdam

The company makes software that most people encounter as an interface. They wanted a sculpture about that, which is a difficult thing to commission, and they were clear that they did not want anything resembling a screen.

The brief

A character, about 3 m, no identity, no screen, and a surface that would say something about the era in which their industry grew up. Their suggestion, delivered with some embarrassment: vapourwave.

Taking a joke seriously

Vapourwave is a specific and quite precise aesthetic: pastel gradients, a neon wireframe grid, a low half-sun disc cut by a horizon, and a pervasive sense of smooth, faintly melancholy early computer graphics. It is also, mostly, a joke.

It stops being a joke here for one reason: the grid is mapped properly. The wireframe wraps the body the way a real 3D wireframe would, which means the lines converge at the shoulders and the crown of the head, and it means the character’s form is described by the grid rather than hidden by it. A pattern stuck on a sculpture would have been a joke; a pattern that behaves like the geometry it is drawn on is a piece of work.

Gradient and grid

The gradient runs from mint at the feet through lilac at the waist to pale pink at the head, laid wet and blended with a wide airbrush across nine bands. The grid is drawn over it in a neon pink, and the sun is a low half-disc spanning the lower back and one hip.

The face is the one area held back: the two simple eyes and the plane of the head carry only the pastel gradient. No grid, no sun, nothing. It is where the character reads, and putting decoration there would have cost us the piece.

On the plaza

It stands at 3.0 m on a low dark plinth, angled towards the canal so that it is seen first from the water side. The company’s own lighting designer specified uplighting and has since offered us photographs of it at four in the afternoon in February, which is when the gradient does the most work.