James Ferraro
The other name on the founding certificate, and the one most likely to deny signing it. Far Side Virtual is built from ringtones, muzak, ATM beeps and Skype-startup optimism; Tiny Mix Tapes called it "lurid HD postmodernity", and it reads as a Baudrillard-tinted critique of consumer hyperreality dressed as elevator music. Ferraro has not considered himself part of vaporwave's history.
That tracks for an artist who keeps moving: the noise duo The Skaters, then dozens of aliases — Bebetune$, Lamborghini Crystal, Edward Flex — then an opera, Plague, at transmediale 2018, then a 2024 collaboration with Bladee that became a Microsoft-backed virtual-world project in 2025.
His instinct is to make the ambient noise of consumer technology audible rather than to explain it. "I try not to be overly conceptual about what I'm doing," he said in 2012. "You can contrive it to a point where it gets too heady." His studio ECS Software has a dystopian game, Desolation Seed, due in early access on 22 June 2026.