One way to understand HaunTiki is in comparison to the ‘vaporwave’ style of the early c21st – described as a ‘microgenre of electronic music’ by Wikipedia.

Vaporwave focused on cultural changes over the turn of the century including the rise of (rather unsafe) digital storage and delivery. The wireframe images exaggerated a loss of ‘realism’, an unease about the fidelity of new media. While it offers a playful character, at the heart is a disdain for consumer culture and dead malls, a nostalgia for the late 1900’s, ironic posturing, a lurid game palette and appropriation of Japanese console subculture.

The hopes and dreams of the c20th became comical, often embarrassing. The future was nulled in a concept of the ‘paleofuture’ – a putdown of the excitement and ambitions of the past as seen from a privileged now. In the theme parks the submarines and spaceships gave way to a retro-engineered 1800’s steampunk. Doing so cancelled a great deal of curious, exciting ideas.

Like many cultural shifts there was a rush to overwhelming positives which fall flat, a harsh reaction back to the negatives and then finally a truce where the two find some things in common. (As is happening now with “AI”.)

HaunTiki is a truce. It draws from the time before this mechanism – hauntology is a creature of engineers not advocates, while tiki is a magical system of linkages. It’s excited for the multiple loose connections between ideas and feels a bit overwhelmed – but in a good way. If something doesn’t make perfect sense that’s left unresolved in plain sight.

It’s partly about the theme parks and the ‘imagineers’ that built the automatons, coasters, flumes and mountains. It’s the happy uncanny. Rather than dead malls of America it’s the ridiculous range of anko products in the Australian malls – a daft Aladdin’s cave.