Subject: seapunk
Culture: American youth culture
Setting: urban club scene
Context (Event Photos, Primary Sources, Secondary Sources, Field Notes)
"On June 1, 2011 seapunk was immortalized on the internet via a Twitter hashtag, and a small band of web artists and electronic musicians began developing a look, sound, and ideology that they believed encapsulated the seapunk aesthetic. Inspired by the colors and sounds of the ocean and computer graphics of the late 1980s and '90s, seapunk took shape. Ultrademon ... was one of the lead artists propagating the style.
"By 2012, seapunk had amassed an unprecedented amount of buzz for the relatively small size of the subculture, with write-ups in everything from small fashion magazines and local newspapers to the New York Times. It wasn't until November of 2012, nearly a year and half later, that seapunk hit TV sets across the country with a Rihanna performance on Saturday Night Live."
"Sprouting from the digital petri dish of social networking, seapunk is a whimsical style that mashes together cartoonish aquatic themes, rave culture and a nostalgia for ’90s Internet imagery. The iconography, which exists almost entirely online, includes clip art of dolphins jumping through pyramids, aquamarine-haired mermaids with SpongeBob T-shirts, and psychedelic orbs flying over computer-generated waves."
Costume
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