Steampunk: Why I’m so charmed by it
I’ve been seeing a lot of steampunk pics and references in my web trolling lately. Despite being a fan of the aesthetic, the not the fiction so much, I was stumped to see this one at Steampunk Workshop:
It’s a Mac Mini inside an old-fashioned (circa: steampunk) tin. The picture below of modded headphones also comes from the Steampunk Workshop. But they strike me as pre-atomic-era SF, sitting more comfortably next to an oscilloscope than a brass input device.
Why are designers are getting such a kick out of steampunk mods of Apple stuff? The ultimate design objects being modded and retrofied to the place where there original design is not only lost, but are pushed in a distinctly mechanical direction?
The charm of steampunk for me is that it hearkens to the last great age of the renaissance person: late 19th century Europe, especially England. It’s a time when people could still dabble in many fields and make contributions in them: astronomy, electricity, biology, studies of the ether, psychology were all still open enough that, dare I say it, amateurs could still make discoveries or meaningful contributions in those fields while writing lame poems and playing the pianoforte after dinner for guests.
Or maybe it’s the time of the literary engineer — someone out of a Jules Verne novel who knew the classics, might quote Shakespeare, and still be able to improve on a thermal combustion engine and then house it in a mahogany case with brass fixtures. Sherlock Holmes is the quintessence of the literary scientist. Despite some embarassing gaps of ignorance, Holmes was a chemist, a historian, and a supremely gifted violinist who lived surrounded by those same brass-handled cabinets filled with news clippings, biological samples, ashes from cigars, shag tobacco, and sheet music.
This is the appeal of many adventure games, particularly Myst (all about the brass and amateur science), Jules Verne, the emerging adventure game sensibility in Dan Brown and other ‘manuscript’ genre novels. Even Bioshock with its emphasis on an aether-like technology and art deco setting, hearkens back to something more steampunk than cyberspace.
My enjoyment of steampunk is probably due to the demise of the literary engineer. There’s just too much to try and know and lifehackery has us focused on efficiency. I regularly see people on Facebook proclaiming that they don’t read, or don’t read fiction. I have friends who find literature inefficient and while they care about aesthetics, it feels like an efficient post-Swiss design nod to the finer things. The Mac Mini setup above has flourishes and embellishments — its charm is in its non-cleanness. Its celebration of artifice makes it tactile, places it in the realm of the craftsmen, implies the odors of wood and metal polishes, even celebrates its intricacy. By inviting us in to the mechanical intricacies of an object, steampunk acknowledges that we understand it and turns that understanding into something aesthetic.