The Post-Cyberpunk Aesthetic, Captured

I hate to repost from Memepool, but motion graphics/audio collective Pleix elegantly captures in their works what I’ve long pictured to be a post-cyberpunk aesthetic.

Their video for Plaid’s “Itsu,” for example, has all the simultaneous lust and fear for technology and the future of classic cyberpunk, but conducts itself less like an angry mosh-pit kid and more like a subversively slick made-it-through-the-Dot-Bomb’er. The post-cyberpunk aesthetic leaves behind the “corporate apocolypse” images of early Gibson for, well, the corporate fetishism of present Gibson. Let me put it typographically: if distressed, pixelated fonts were old cyberpunk, Pleix’s commanding, clean sans-serif type somehow carries all the implications of the old while looking gorgeous.

It’s scary, it’s seductive, and it’s supposed to be.