Punks

An interesting piece on the "steampunk" design (?) wave that's been a hot commodity of late in the geek world. I too am a little tired of this retro-nuevo trend in it's proliferation of moding and skinning, even though the basic concept, like it's future sister cyberpunk, is worth examining.

“A little reflection will show that humbug is an astonishingly wide-spread phenomenon — in fact almost universal.” — P.T. Barnum’s Humbugs of the World

Humbug is a term infrequently used in design. It is an archaism straight out of the 19th century, meaning hoax or nonsense. The word has strong associations with Dickens’ Scrooge and the ultimate showman and hoaxer himself, P.T. Barnum. In this time of cultural recycling, it is a word perhaps best used to describe Steampunk, a subculture supposedly born out of a mash-up of DIY (do-it-yourself), Victoriana, punk, science fiction, Japanese anime and the urge to re-skin one’s computer as 19th century bric-a-brac. If the number of recent articles in the mainstream press is any reliable barometer (The New York Times, Boston Globe, Paper, and Print all have featured the movement in the past year), Steampunk is the next big thing. This appears to be the result of a fascination with remixing historical and contemporary aesthetics, as if all eras can be collapsed into the present. What is most interesting and disappointing about Steampunk is the odd DIY design culture that it has engendered.

Dissatisfied with their out of the box Dells or Apples, Steampunkers have declared war on mass production. Their solution? Nineteenth-century Victorian England. A strange choice to say the least. Recalling an era that is the ground zero of mass production, the cultural inflection point from the artisan to the manufactured is an odd way to escape the evils of silicon chips, instant obsolescence and homogeneous design, devoid of the human hand. I haven’t figured out whether cracking open your computer, attaching it to an Underwood typewriter, then inserting it into a combination Victorian mantel clock/desk and calling it “The Nagy Magical-Movable-Type Pixello-Dynamotronic Computational Engine” is some sort of daft wit or evidence of a pedantry bordering on the pathological. Steampunkers may have dubious taste, but one cannot accuse them of lacking a sense of humor. However, the jig is up: as a design aesthetic, Steampunk is still nascent, a set of interesting ideas that have been given the spotlight far too soon.

Subculture or not, Steampunk appears to have achieved the level of a cottage industry on the web. From The Steampunk Workshop to the Aether Emporium there seems to be no end of sites showing off these farragoes. Guitars embellished with gears, countless keyboards and LCD monitors embroidered with brass fittings and feet, and objects which merely seem to be fulfilling the formula of: brass + wood grain = Victorian. Conversely, there seems to be a distinct fascination with exposing mechanisms, peering inside the shells of things. This is a popular, almost hackneyed post-modernist trope, an idea about dismantling received structures and conventions that have run rampant through every conceivable medium over the last half century: the turning of buildings inside-out to expose ductwork and utilitarian structures once hidden; the meta-fictional narrative where the conventions of the narrative structure are continually exposed and corrupted; clothing that bares every seam, stitch and piece of fabric, etc., ad nauseam. The Steampunkers seem to take all this a bit more literally. Sean Orlando of the Kinetic Steam Works ingenuously observes, “The wonderful thing about a steam engine is that you can follow the path of power generation and function beginning with the fire box and boiler, follow the plumbing, valves, gauges, gears, d-valves, pistons, eccentric shafts and fly-wheels all the way from the source of power to the final outcome of kinetic potential.” One could easily argue that following the etched surface of a printed circuit board would provide no less a fascinating visual "map" of the processes of a computer or electronic device.

Yet as Peter Berbergal of the Boston Globe notes, “In all of the new Steampunk design there is a strong nostalgia for a time when technology was mysterious and yet had a real mark of the craftsperson burnished into it.” Never mind the fact that the Victorian era was a time of demystification: Darwin’s theory of natural selection upset centuries of received religious knowledge about human origins, and the mechanization of virtually everything meant you could produce objects, designs and books ten or twenty times faster and distribute them to the very ends of the earth. As Philip Meggs, commenting on the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, has succinctly put it: “Handicraft almost completely vanished. The unity of design and production ended." The world had suddenly become smaller. If Steampunkers are looking to the past for some sort of inspired return to a prior era, then they are running in slack parallel with their ancestors. The Victorians were cultural raiders without peer. Rococo, Tudor, Gothic Revival and the umpteenth generation of Neo-Neo-Classicism were not enough. They went abroad to bring back the ill-gotten gains of their imperial aesthetic loot. Moorish ornaments, Ukiyo-e, Chinese porcelain, hieroglyphics all found their way into Victorian eclecticism. Form before concept.

Despite the formal clumsiness of most Steampunk objects, there is a certain conceptual zing to them: the immediate thrill of a counterfactual come to life. What if Charles Babbage’s steam powered difference engines (think of a computer with mechanical gears instead of silicon chips) had been completed and mass produced in the 1820s? Voilà! It would look exactly like this “antiqued” Powerbook, the mutant spawn of a 19th century Sears catalog and the Apple Industrial Design Group. Or perhaps not. If one gets past the patina, the quaintly burnished woodwork, the problem is that Steampunk is far too enamored of the look, the surface skin of an derivatively small chunk of the Victorian era filtered through Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and Jules Verne, whose illustrated “scientific romances” seem to have formed the ur-aesthetic for Steampunk. But the inspiration gets butchered in the process. There is nothing yet in Steampunk that can remotely compare visually to Gilliam’s dystopian epic or the ornamental splendor of the Hetzel edition of Verne. In comparison, Steampunk is humbug design, scrap-booking masquerading as the avant-garde.



There also is the larger issue of what exactly the Victorian influences are doing on the level of meaning. If Terry Gilliam’s Brazil is really a touchstone for Steampunkers, does that not imply that they are substantively misreading Gilliam's use of the Victorian? In Brazil, it is fairly clear that these aesthetic anachronisms are instruments of oppression and surveillance: the omnipresent, naked CRT monitors with magnifying glass attached and typewriter keyboards give a sweatshop aura to every office. Or, the labyrinthine ductwork that emerges from the walls clumsily conceals the infra-structural guts of a society that is cheap, totalitarian, and constantly at war (the lack of finish and recycled nature of most contraptions in the movie seems to indicate war time shortages and rationing). I would even argue that Brazil is less influenced by Victoriana in its aesthetic than say film noir and a funhouse version of Blitz-era London. Was not Brazil once described by Gilliam as “Walter Mitty meets Franz Kafka”? But these nuances seem to be lost on the Steampunkers, who obsessively fixate on a few oddly-styled gadgets from the film.

Steampunking, with its commerce driven, faddish re-skinning of their own history, is closer to Disney than punk or sci-fi. A laptop styled like a Eastlake sideboard is merely a threat of bad taste, not a threatening reaction to massive social and economic disenfranchisement. In its essence Steampunk seems suburban in its attitude: nostalgic for an imagined, non-existent past, politically quietist, and culturally insular hidden behind cul-de-sacs of carefully styled anachronisms that let in no chaos or ferment. The larger, more impossible questions are missing. How would the Victorian imagination conceive and execute a functioning computer? The answer must be more interesting than adding wood veneers to your laptop or turning a mouse into a contraption of gears that looks more like a medieval torture device.

We are being taken for rubes. At worst, the Steampunkers seem to be mediocre hobbyists with great publicists. It seems fine to me that an obscure niche of DIY hobbyists want to create an imaginary Victorian present, no matter how insular or simpleminded it might be. Reality is what you make of it, even if it is apparent that some people prefer reality to look like a discarded sci-fi movie prop. It is entirely another thing for the press, in their endless “style” trolling, to claim Steampunk as some sort of important movement. If the press behaves as a gaggle of inept tastemakers, then the uncritical pimping of Steampunk must serve as a “mission accomplished.” What it boils down to is that instead of inventing something new, the Steampunkers have mastered one of the oldest of arts: that of self-promotion. P.T. Barnum, that 19th century master of theater, hoax and hype, would be proud.