Victor Arce’s nostalgic works celebrate the early internet age

During university, he sought out digital experimentation, robotics and, as he aptly summarizes, general “weird stuff.” Having enrolled at the notoriously traditional University of Barcelona where the classical three pathways of painting, sculpture and drawing reigned supreme, Arce found an authentic sense of expression through music, not fine art. Experimenting with sound collages, ambient music and noise, he found solace in playing with combinations that didn’t make sense at first, but with time, felt “not that crazy.”

As he started to release music, Arce also created the album artwork and increasingly enjoyed it more than making music. For him, the appeal of pixel art, Vaporwave, 8-bit music and Chiptune are all similar; their expression is defined by limitation. As a teenager dabbling in Chiptune—a style of electronic music using programmable sound generators, such as vintage arcade machines and synthesizers (or in Arce’s case, video game consoles)—he discovered a small Spanish community who shared the same niche interest, together basking in the nostalgia of the medium. 

“The nostalgic element is huge, but my main interest was the limitation,” says Arce, such as, “using four different small sounds from a Gameboy to make a rave.” Through this community, he was exposed to a new underground, online world. He met hackers (both the digital and hardware types), coders, noise artists, pixel art creators and more. He experimented with the glitches and errors caused by retro computing software and video game consoles, celebrating the imperfect bursts of spontaneity rather than viewing them as malfunctions.