Post by Steam Girl on Nov 14, 2008 7:35:51 GMT -5
The Prolepsis Project
Steampunk is a rapidly growing sub-culture that is hitting the media harder and faster than a steam train. There have been interviews with Steampunk bands like Abney Park broadcasted on MTV, articles in the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle, and the internet is booming with blogs and forums. The film industry certainly knows a good thing when they see it; using Steampunk in major pictures like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Stardust, Wild Wild West and The Golden Compass. With all the hype, a need to go back and examine the subculture at it’s beginnings arises as well as a need to understand why it began.
Ruth Ferla, of the New York Times, states that Steampunk is “ a subculture that is the aesthetic expression of a time-traveling fantasy world” that first appeared in the late 1980’s to early 1990’s and has since picked up momentum, transitioning from “a literary taste to a Web-propagated way of life.” Damon Poeter, of the San Francisco Chronicle, says that Steampunk “kickstarted” as a social music in the mid-1990’s through a group of science fiction writers who were board with the cyberpunk sub-genre.
William Scheuerle depicts the Victorian era as a time of leisure with the middle class relaxing at table top games like backgammon, chess, and cards (17-19). This time of leisure is reflected in today’s middle class with computer solitaire and World of Warcraft. The internet, with it’s vast accessibility to new inventions, finds from across the world, and art uploaded in seconds is a 24 hour modern version of the Great Exhibition of 1851 with it’s machinery, manufactures, raw materials, and fine arts (276-278).
The Victorian era (1837-1901), known as a time of Industrial Revolution, gentlemanliness, and a beginning of inventions like electricity. The Victorian era saw a rise in professional and non-professional antiquarians and historians.
Laura Novo comments on the rise and split amongst antiquarians, referring to local antiquarian societies and their conservation efforts, in her article in the Victorian Britain (encyclopedia). These local societies were made up of self-made members of the middle class (some of which were women). Their work reflected a trend that became common among Victorians, and is now common among Steampunks, of “interpreting society and modern culture with reference to ideas of the past.” (29)
Gentlemanliness, the Victorian version of chivalry, is another point in the era. Gail Savage states that the gentleman stood at the foremost ideal of manliness. With it’s roots in the medieval chivalric ideal the Victorians added courtesy, wit and education to the attributes of loyalty, warrior prowess, and bravery. Character, in the 19th century, was now a factor in status and birth alone could not guarantee a person’s stature in society (325-326).
Steampunks, like the antiquarians of the 19th century, pull form the past in their wardrobe, literature, movies, etc. Jess Nevins, author of the introduction to Steampunk Magazine, believes that the emphasis on aristocratic thinkers and gentlemen adventurers is historically laughable. He states, “the image of the Victorians and their culture passed on to us by popular culture is incredibly misleading…the male inventor, in his comfortable lab, is outnumbered by the prostitutes…and the coal miners dying of black lung.” However, the sub-culture does seem to reject a few things from the centuries that they draw from. Author G.D. Falksen defends the Steampunk sub-culture by stating, “While Steampunk is very strongly informed by history, it approaches that history form a set of modern sensibilities.” Even though the Steam Age was “plagues by racism, sexism…and witnessed horrors colonialism, slavery, and murder of native peoples, along with terrible pollution and dreadful class tension,” this age of Steampunk “approaches these historical realities on their own terms and deals with them with a mixture of realism and idealism.”
The reasons why Steampunks created their subculture vary by individuals but an underlying, yet strong, theme of Do-It-Yourself and reconnecting is evident. One of the most well known Steampunk contraptionists, Heironymous Isambard “Jake” von Slatt a.k.a Sean Slattery say that to him Steampunk is “essentially the intersection of technology and romance.” Ferla reiterates this idea by saying it is a “desire to return to ritual and formality.” As Rosemary Jann explains the rise of historians in the Victorian era by their need to return to the past to find “explanations, guidance, and authority,” Steampunks to today are reacting to their own Industrial Revolution, the Age of Technology, by seeking guidance form the Victorians.
Today people are segregated and isolated by technology, communicating through the digital and the wireless rather than face to face. Ferla explains that “if Steampunk has a mission, it is, in part, to restore a sense of wonder to a technology-jaded world.” She goes on to call Steampunk a “metaphoric coping devise.” In today’s world everything is mainstream, immediate, and passed through an assembly line. Steampunk reconnects people to their crafts.
An art form as simple as traditional photography has become digitized and the art demolished by three-second internet uploads. Renown Steampunk photographer, Nicu Ilfoveanu, in an interview with EgoPhobia, says he uses traditional photography as a reaction to the “stampede of glossy commercial imagery we were flooded with.” In response to the EgoPhobia interviewer’s question about over industrialization and the Steampunk view of it Ilfoveanu responded that his reaction was to digitalization; “On the other hand, I use digital techniques to implement my analogical works.” This is a very Steampunk theme, in not only reconnecting ot the artwork but also creating a connection between the old and the new. Ilfoveanu went on to say that a “change in lifestyle affects the social structure of our society.” Steampunk could in this way bring social focus back on the individual and reconnect people to the world around them and to each other in this technologically advanced society.
In this reconnection, a DIY mentality penetrates the sub-culture not only with it’s Contraptionists like Jake von Slatt, Doktor A, and Vladislaus Dantes but also in it’s music, such as the Clockwork Cabaret, and fashion.
Contraptionists create weapons (usually fake), ways to disguise modern appliances, and costume accessories such as goggles. Contraptionists are modern day creative civil engineers, reconnecting with the Victorian era’s heroic age of Engineering. In the 18th century the engineering profession emerged in Britain and developed rapidly in the industrial revolution until engineers became anonymous workers. Today the engineer becomes the hero of Steampunk. Jake von Slatt is famous throughout the web, conventions, magazines and newspapers. His re-vamping of modern technologies such as iPods and laptops started of a trend of brass etching and recovering among Steampunks.
Colin Campbell, of Coborror Commons, interviewed Steampunk radio station hosts, Kara O’Dor and Emma Cabrera of Clockwork Caberet on WCOM-FM 103.5. O’Dor and Cabrera created Clockwork Cabaret in response to Steampunk as it moved form a literary movement to a sub-culture. Campbell characterizes Steampunk with a definistion for neo-Victorianism: “affinity for the fashion and literature of the Victorian era as well as modern and futuristic technologies.” O’Dor confides that Steampunk appeals ot her lifetime interests such as collecting rare books and vintage clothes. Both O’Dor and Cabrera create their Steampunk outfits in DIY fashion using garments they fine at vintage clothing stores.
Steampunk fashion is compelling, Ferla says, calling it “quaint to some eyes, or outright bizarre.” She explains that the draw to the subcultures fashion is due to the fact tha Steampunk designers offer a “genteel and disciplined alternative” to the “slack look of hip-hop” and the dark and “menacing” look of goth. Designer and Steampunk project promoter, Evelyn Kriete, has another opinion.:
A major reason for the interest in Steampunk and Victorian fashion is that it looks good on anyone, male or female, regardless of build or body type. The same can’t be said about most 20th century fashions, which heavily favor tall and thing women and very muscular men.
Poeter sets the beginnings of Steampunk fashion in the rise of Punk with it’s “make-it-yourself ethos.” Steampunk fashion, unlike the destroyed and grungy look of Punk, varies from Victorian formal wear to retro-vampire hunters and gentlemanly airship pirates. Kriete believes that the media focuses mainly on Contraptionists and leaves the fashion area unnoticed. However, Steampunk fashion, with it’s mechanized accouterments like brass goggles, is very closely connection to Steampunk contraptions.
Ferla asserts that Steampunk is growing out of it’s “niche status.” “Hollywood caught the Steampunk bug,” says Poeter, referring to films like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Wild Wild West, as the gadgetry used in films by Guillermo Del Toro (director of Pans Labyrint and The Orphanage), Marco Caro, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and animes like Steamboy. However, Steampunk has been in the movies since before 1999. Movies like Return to Oz (the sequel to Wizard of Oz) and City of Lost Children contained Steampunk gadgetry and the distressed themes found in Steampunk literature.
Like film, music of the Steampunk subculture is getting a lot of attention. Abney Park recently did an interview with MTV and is staring at conventions like DragonCon and the San Francisco Steampunk convention. The band’s back story is based on the pirate crew of the airship, H.M.S. Ophelia. Their online market is filled with militarian Steampunk products like vintage-like air force hats, dog-tags, and leather corsets printed with a fictional map of Ophelia’s travels. Steampunk musician’s have back stories and larger than life characters, drawing their fans in with their art, contractions, and music.
The question is, where is Steampunk going and how mainstream is it becoming? Poeter believes that those who live the Steampunk lifestyle, like Jake von Slatt and Robert Brown of Abney Park, will always remain few. However, “old timey” fashions can be seen in clothing stores and Ralph-Lauren fashion magazines as well as on VH1 top bands. Poeter explains that the movement has evolved enough to cause a backlash, with YouTube and MySpace videos mocking contraptionists and their work. Jake von Slatt laughs at the backlash, believing that it proves that they (Steampunks) must be doing something right.