Afraid to Dive

What can tell the history of a town or a city in a nutshell? Not people, not local museums, and not even historical areas with its architecture, but something on the surface; literally at the entrance. Of course, I am speaking about welcome signs. Usually, in North America and Europe, cities are limited to simple, road signs, rarely with a some kind of bas-relief, and even more rarely, the real monuments. However, in the post-Soviet countries the welcome signs have been realized as a full part of monumental art. The need to define the boundaries of settlements originated with the advent of the first cities, as there is a plenty of archaeological evidence for this. For example, the widely known Boundary Stelae of Akhenaten, a group of stelae carved in the cliffs around the self-titled ancient Egyptian city. Also, one cannot forget to mention the Mayan king Chan Imix Kʼawiil who set up the stelae around the Copán area. It is noteworthy that those structures served not only as mark...

The Internet is truly an astonishing place. There is an unthinkable variety of subcultures, some of which have migrated from the real life, acquiring new forms and rooting their ideas in the digital environment. However, a plenty of "native" web communities, or "microcultures" have been arising, too. Undoubtedly, every subculture is unique and distinctive, having its personal atmosphere, art, and even ideology. The whole set of subjectively beautiful forms produced by these subcultures is the modern web aesthetics. It can appear in many forms of art: traditional and digital art, pixel art, collages, 3D modeling, photography, music, and even fashion, forming the single and unique image of a subculture. Over the last decade, a big amount of such communities have been spawned, and all of them share common features. Of course, I mean the music subcultures like Outrun (often called Retrowave but that is primarily a music term), Seapunk, Vaporwave, and others. The las...