This article was published on August 4, 2016

A E S T H E T I C A M is basically Prisma for Vaporwave fans


A E S T H E T I C A M is basically Prisma for Vaporwave fans

It’s hard to explain the Vaporwave subculture to those who aren’t already familiar with it, but I’ll give it a go anyway. It’s essentially a nostalgic mashup of 80s and 90s design, retrofuturism and glitch art (among other things) that draws from a musical genre of the same name that imitates popular stylings of the last two decades of the 20th century.

Got all that? Great. Let me now tell you about A E S T H E T I C A M, which is a camera app for iOS that combines various Vaporwave graphic elements and effects with your photos to create, um, interesting results.

The app is as basic as they come: you can only shoot pictures with the front or rear camera and then share them. There aren’t any options to adjust the randomly-applied filters or effects – but that’s kind of the point.

Given the relative obscurity of Vaporwave in popular media, you’re not likely to get a lot of appreciation for your A E S T H E T I C A M shots. But true fans of the subculture will certainly find worth at least a few minutes of experimentation.

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The app is open source and the code is available in this GitHub repository, so you can contribute your own ideas to improve it, or heck, make it even worse. And if you like oddball stuff like this, you’ll want to check out developer Nick Lee’s other projects, like this iPhone case that lets you run Android.

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