Steampunk Subculture A movement based from science fiction, steampunk is a subculture that antiques technology in forms of aesthetic art, fashion, music, and literature. Steampunk gives hidden meaning behind the handcrafted materials to place a common value amongst the individuals who participate within the subculture. It is important to study steampunk in order to see the validity of this movement as a true subculture and to learn more about how it stays fairly understudied while still being very popular in modern society. Furthermore researching steampunk subculture reveals the principles through its counterculture practices and how those associated perceive the world through this movement. It is the ideas behind steampunk which fascinate me along with the handcrafted artwork and do-it-yourself items that are produced. By researching into the art and the do-it-yourself movement, steampunk will illustrate how it is a subculture that has its own values and ideas on the world and how those values are similar to that of punk culture. Steampunk is an aesthetic movement and burgeoning subculture that arose from science fiction. The art was initially founded in fiction, but has since been crafted into art, music, graphic novels, film, and home décor. Steampunk as a genre descended from Cyberpunk, which questions scientific optimism prevalent in mainstream science fiction and instead offers a gritty, grimly realistic world in which corporations rule the earth, empowered by the development of communications technology (Steampunkmagazine). “Cyberpunk protagonists were hackers and subcultural street fighters who navigated endless metropolises and uncovered corporate conspiracies. Steampunk authors realized the same sorts of values could be used to re-imagine the Victorian era, with the empire serving a similar role as corporations” (Steampunkmagazine). Steampunk has been around since the 1980’s with the regularly recognized author, Paul Di Filippo, who coined the term in his short stories (Yaszek 189). Authors who have contributed to
the notion of steampunk would be Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Both authors are argued to be the two historical antecedents to current steampunk genre and the subculture (Onion 140). Since then and roughly starting around 2006-07, steampunk has “become an art and craft movement as well as a subculture with its own fashion and music” (Steampunkmagazine). Steampunk imagines the world as it was during the early Victorian era, when steam powered and fuelled machines. Steampunk takes the technology of today and antiques it to make objects and clothing look like it came from the industrial Victorian era. “The overall aesthetic sense of steampunk is one that rejects the sleek minimalism of the modern world … and replaces it instead with a more ornate design, one filled with a certain gravity (Swerlick). It idolizes prizes of brass, copper, wood, and leather to combine with cogs, springs, sprockets, wheels, and hydraulic motion. Every type of steampunk item is unique in its own way while sticking to its Victorian and Edwardian roots. Steampunk isn’t strictly centered in one location. It has spread to other countries in forms of films such as the French film City of Lost Children (1995) and Japanese anime Steamboy (2004). Mainstreaming of the aesthetics of steampunk has occurred with mixed reviews from both inside and outside the subculture. In the U.S., Will Smith appeared in a summer blockbuster Wild Wild West (1999) which featured an elaborate steampunk scenario set to 1869 (imdb). Two cowboys had to “stop a rogue Confederate general, Dr. Loveliss from holding the U.S. government hostage with his superior hydraulic and mechanical technology” (Onion 141). The attempt of the mass media to incorporate steampunk, didn’t go over very well as the movie bombed box offices. However it shows that mainstream society is aware of the subculture’s presence, even if it wasn’t ready.
Steampunk fashion is that of corsets and bodices embroidered with leather work details. The colors are usually that of an industrial look, browns, silver, copper, and gold. The look comes straight out of the early 1900s, yet has a unique flair of its own. “Steampunk fashion has no set guidelines but tends to synthesize modern styles influenced by the Victorian era” (Range 7). Furthermore, women in the past era would not have worn pants, “Steampunks are not limited by gender prejudices, and the outfits can be all too revealing” (7). Most steampunks wear or have welding style goggles and those with hats have usually embellished them with gears or cogs. Think Victorian style meets welder meets explorer and you have steampunk fashion1. There are different takes on the fashion as well, mainly pirate themed and aviator or airship captain. These styles are based on the swashbucklers of the past and the old aviators in the U.S.2 All steampunk clothing is either hand-made or a combination of modern clothing revamped. Steampunk items are made from scratch, either by hand building the item itself or taking something that is mass produced, stripping it down, and rebuilding it to recreate the Victorian style. For example in the “The Steampunk Workshop,” you can find pictures of projects people have done to make steampunk articles. Jake Von Slatt, the website’s owner and proprietor, has an entry on making a steampunk flat-panel LCD screen which he illustrates step by step and in his video. In fact he has a whole computer that he has made into the steampunk fashion up for view.3 Much of the culture revolves around do-it-yourself projects and is widely spread amongst others on tips and guides of how to recreate a desired project. In fact many steampunks do not offer to recreate their products for sale, thus making each item one of a kind.4 Many websites, such as the “The Steampunk Workshop” and “Steampunk Magazine” have dedicated their sites
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to recreation of steampunk projects and do-it-yourself material. Yet there are some out there who will sell their work. Sites such as Etsy.com have everything from home décor to jewelry for sale, made by hand from artists. There are also items which mix the organic with the machine. A website called “Insect Lab” creates artwork out of dead insects, combing their bodies with cogs, wheels, and intricate detailed parts.5 The most notable detail about steampunk crafts is they’re rarely mass produced, if at all. Mostly costumes are constructed in this category, but items such as clocks, art, and furniture, to name a few, are not for sale by corporations. Almost all items that are sold are directly from an artist who hand makes their items and will allow for customers to give specific instructions on customizing their wanted products. It is the handmade crafts that push steampunk into a subculture because steampunks believe that their items should be individualized and not mass produced. Thus the artwork from the subculture pushes the influences of it truly being a subculture. It is precisely the art and the influences from the people practicing steampunk that makes it a true subculture. The genre and its base roots create the influence for the movement to transform into a subculture. On the surface it would seem the aesthetics are the reason people go to such creative lengths to stay devoted to such an art form. Perhaps it is the “quirky 'newness' of Steampunk which draws people in, the combination of new and old, of the idea of the present existing in a more ideal realm- the imagination of the past- frees us from the dichotomies which constrain us and our thinking” (Burk 2010). Yet it really is the references to the Victorian era itself that explain the devotion and how steampunk is indeed a subculture. Cogs, gears, and wheels are a common reoccurring image within the subculture because they provide symbols to illustrate what it means to be steampunk. The ongoing symbol of man’s roots in technology and 5
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strive to return to the beginning of the 20th century of innovation and creativity. Steampunk longs for the days in technology when individuals counted for a lot more than they do today (Swerlick). The Victorian era was the time in which innovation and invention went hand in hand. People were wealthy and had time on their hands, thus ideas were transformed into inventions. Back then, new inventions and discoveries weren’t funded by a province of university or corporate teams, backed by government grants or from R&D funding (Swerlick). Instead the progress came from lone tinkerers, brilliant inventors, or visionary scientists. The Wright brothers’ airplane and the ingenious mind of Nikola Tesla were a few that came out of the era. It was a revolution of discovery and man felt that he was on top of the world. The turn of the 19th century marked one of progress and it is that which Steampunks idolize. (Onion) “Steampunk is the assertion of the individual, the rejection of the mass-produced for the uniquely crafted – the refusal to be labeled as a faceless consumer” (Swerlick). Steampunk takes its rudimentary ideas from punk culture. In punk culture, the idea that people are individuals and not conformers of the media and hegemonic society is also intergraded in steampunk. Furthermore steampunk shares much of the same views as punks in being anti-racist, anticolonial, and anti-homophobic (steampunkmagazine). Hence the term steampunk is a mixture of punk with the steam era that is idealized. The subculture is about the “creative destruction of punk merged with a unique sense of aesthetics and bolstered by an optimism about the ability of human and individual potential” (Swerlick). In regards to technology, steampunk takes what is generally mass produced and creates its own imagery. Technology is excorporated in the subculture. In doing so, steampunk is arising out of the hegemonic society to build its own place in the world, much similar to how other subcultures have done in the past. The ideas behind excorporation of technology is to fundamentally uphold that people still are unique and creative,
and they are individuals amongst a growing concern that humanity is becoming faceless within a corporate society; exclusively this idea relates to first world countries like the U.S. Furthermore the excorporation of the “hegemonic grip of modern design” is taken to become something uniquely crafted. Steampunk can be called a do-it-yourself culture. Many of the creations that have come out of steampunk are handmade. Steampunk Magazine, a print-and-web periodical constantly writes and publishes articles on DIY how-to’s, essays on fashion, historical tracts, rants, and manifestos. The magazine promotes itself on punk aspects of “challenging authority, Do-ItYourself attitudes, and creating…culture in the face of an alienating and boring mainstream one” (steampunkmagazine). The magazine says steampunk shouldn’t have a particular political platform but instead be of a political significance. This results in steampunk having a “profound impact on how we interact with one another and how we organize our society” (steampunkmagazine). Steampunk ideologies say that men and women have an equal chance at making their world better by using the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a backdrop for innovation and creation. Steampunks in this sense use the Victorian and Edwardian era as an example of what humanity can do when given the freedom, time, and opportunity. Unlike today when funding is needed to invent or create, Victorian era tinkers and scienteists were allowed more liberty and ingenuity. This is the byproduct of the late nineteenth century in which steampunks believe. This can also draw on the hinting that steampunk subculture is also anticorporation and anti-consumerism. With items being produced within its own subculture, steampunk places value on items built by people rather than corporations. Furthermore it exalts tinkering and discovery, thus many “steampunk followers like taking things apart so the viewer can see how they work”
(Range 7). Thus most steampunks recycle, reusing thrown out or broken parts, stripping them down, and using them in their creative works. Steampunks like the physical aspect of creating, unlike Futurists who would rather experience its use instead (Onion 143). “Steampunks express the sense that, when one is in the act of communing with a machine, one can access the pure pleasure of understanding” (Onion 144). In the Steampunk Magazine, Margaret Ratt writes that she believes that most steampunks “look at the modern world about us, bored to tears, and say, ‘no thank you. I’d rather have trees, birds, and monstrous mechanical contraptions than an endless sprawl that is devoid of diversity” (Ratt 2006: 1). Hence the sleek and cookie-cutter style of products today no longer have the sense of romance of design or sense of individuality that they once did. Jake von Slatt of the “Steampunk Workshop” refers to current engineering and technology as “jellybeans” because “everything is differently colored, creating an illusion of difference, but is actually executed in fundamentally the same shape” (Onion 144). Steampunk theorist of the Steampunk Magazine, Professor Calamity, imagines the modernistic material world as a misguided attempt to give machines a separate status from the people: The so-called machines of this era seek the cleanness and sleekness of thought, platonic forms unsullied by the earth from which they come. Floating beyond us in mathematical ether far above us and the golems of iron. These abstract replicated technologies ultimately seek in their purity a Nirvana of emptiness. (Calamity 2007: 5) Calamity goes on to argue that “the difference between the machines of then and now is the same as the difference between an old-growth forest and a soulless tree farm” (Calamity 2007: 5). Thus the practice of steampunking current items is retrofitting those that are mass produced and making them resemble something that would come from the Victorian era. An iPod, an ultimate example of soulless and bland contemporary design, which has been retrofitted with gold embellishings, wood panels, and a turn knob to turn on the device exemplifies the idea that
something that is mass produced can still be made to look unique and individualized.6 Steampunk goes beyond creation of machine but onto a “transcendent quality: the creation of a character” and furthers into a fantasy world where man and machine coincide (Burk 2010). Burning man is an annual festival held in Black Rock Desert that serves as an “experimental community, which challenges its members to express themselves and rely on themselves to a degree that is not normally encountered in one’s day-to-day life” (Burningman). Many who consider themselves steampunk attend the event and indeed the event itself holds much of the same values that the subculture tries to exalt. These include but are not strictly adherent to a sense of “radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, self reliance, self expression, communal efforts…participation, [and] immediacy which characterize and create space and time” (Burk 2010). The events experimental community and steampunk ideology overlap to show that human integrity and communal efforts are what make humanity thrive. This is the reason that steampunks post their DIY-items, mainly online, to allow others to partake, remake, and be a part of the growing subculture. Kimberly Burk writes in her analysis of “Burning Man” the ways that people interact in the event are very similar to those practices in steampunk. They challenge ideas and previous methods of problem solving: The ways in which these forms model new methods of making meaning and solving issues, is a signal of positive changes which can be brought back into every day society from these smaller temporary societies. To that, it may be helpful to think of how the idiosyncrasies of these smaller societies are influenced and are influenced by the community, mainstream society. (Burke 2010) “Burning Man” is a community, much like the subculture, which takes on new methods to handle tasks. The subculture in turn takes on technology in a way that idolizes the machine which symbolizes the subculture’s values of the human condition, individuality, and meaningful
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and communal relationships of people. So is steampunk really a subculture rather than an arts and crafts movement and how is this valuable to modern society? As culture grows, especially directed towards the U.S., people have a sense of lost values in community, identity, and strength and value in the human condition. Most people buy products which are manufactured in foreign countries and have been processed to the extent that it no longer serves being a unique item, but a mass production of the mainstream society. Steampunk address this in a counterculture movement which destroys the modern day technology to become a vintage style, turn of the nineteenth century artifact that still functions the same as modern technology. Steampunk combines the influences of modern society’s technology to excorporate it into a movement that values relationships, the unique, and a willingness to not be labeled as a faceless consumer in a world of capitalism, where the things you look at on the internet are monitored so corporations can better sell you their products. To them you’re a profile amongst others who fit into specific categories to be bought and sold products and services accordingly. Steampunk thrives to denounce and throw off the idea that people are conformists and identity-less amongst an ever growing capitalist society. In fact it idolizes the communal efforts of those who make DIY-items and displays how someone else can also make the same thing through magazines, blogs, and online videos. Magazines like the The Steampunk Magazine and blogs such as The Steampunk Workshop provide the blueprints for a community which strives on helping, innovation, and creativity. “By blending opposites like future and past, humanism and technology, this subcultural phenomenon offers symbolic solution model by way of triadic movement and transcendent function” (Burke 2010). Steampunk has a whole artistic movement along with functioning as a subculture to an identity of individuality. Steampunk is a subculture that pushes ideas that can be brought forth in
modern society to have a profound impact on how people interact within the society. Steampunk maintains Victorian era values of community, innovation, and the freedom to create. In a time of “overwhelming superficiality and blind consumerism, [it] calls out for us to have a place with hand tools in it that we use, to make things we need” rather than blindly want (Onion 156). Steampunk “offers solutions and possibilities within frameworks that inspire and support movement towards positivity and progress” (Burke 2010). In this sense modern society can learn from this subculture, making it meaningful. People can learn from those who seek to reclaim innovation, seeking new inventions pushes a society forward. Similar to punk’s notion of anticonformity, steampunk too stresses the importance of remaining an individual in a capitalized and mass-marketed society.
Works Cited "And Mechanical Design In." Cyberpunk Clothing. Blogspot, 26 Sept 2011. Web. 13 Mar 2012. [http://cyberpunk-clothing.blogspot.com/2011/09/and-mechanical-design-in.html]. Burke, Kimberly. "Creating the Future-Past: Understanding Steampunk as Triadic Movement." Brandeis University, August 2010. Web. 10 Mar 2012. [http://bir.brandeis.edu]. "Burning Man." black rock city, llc. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Mar 2012. [www.burningman.com]. Darell, Richard. "Steampunk iPod Case Goes Beyond Extraordinary Details." Bit Rebels. N.p., 2011. Web. 13 Mar 2012. [www.bitrebels.com/technology/steampunk-ipod-case-goesbeyond-extraordinary-details/]. Harrington, Natasha. "Gears and Goggles : The Steampunk Subculture." Range. 2011: n. 6-8. [http://oldsite.coconino.edu/oncourse/magazines/eng101-2011/RANGEmagazine.pdf]. Libby, Mike. Insect Lab. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Mar 2012. [http://insectlabstudio.com/]. Onion, Rebecca. “Reclaiming the Machine: An Introductory Look at Steampunk in Everyday Practice.” Neo-Victorian Studies. 1.1. (2008): 138-163. "Steampunk Hat." Eeyore's Rants and Photos. Blogspot, 19 July 2011. Web. 13 Mar 2012. [http://lissrant.blogspot.com/2011/07/steampunk-hat.html]. Swerlick, Andrew. “Technology Gets Steampunk’d.” The Emory Wheel. 5 Novemeber. 2007 [http://www.emorywheel.com/detail.php?n=24611, accessed 10 March. 2012]. The Steampunk Magazine. Combustion Books, n.d. Web. 12 Mar 2012. [www.steampunkmagazine.com]. Von Slatt, Jake. "Steampunk Flat-Panel LCD Mod." The Steampunk Workshop. Blog, 2007. Web. 10 Mar 2012. [http://steampunkworkshop.com]. "Wild Wild West (1999)." International Movie Database. IMDB, n.d. Web. 14 Mar 2012. [www.imdb.com/title/tt0120891/]. Yaszek, Lisa. “Deomcratising the Past to Improve the Future: An Interview with Steampunk Godfather Paul Di Filippo.” Neo-Victorian Studies. 3.1. (2010): 189-195.
Appendix 1. “Steampunk Group”
2. “Airship Captain”
3. “Steampunk LCD Monitor”
4. “Steampunk Clock and Hand”
5. “Clockwork Mantis”
6. “Steampunk iPod”