Datamancer's steampunk LCD is gorgeous, but is it really steampunk?
First thing's first: modder Datamancer's "steampunk" LCD monitor (pictured above) is a beauty. It's a 22" widescreen LCD featuring a frame of solid 1/-inch brass and a base made up of a mixture of black marble and brass. It was made for an upcoming movie, and after filming, it'll go up on eBay. I'm tempted to pick it up myself: I would look fine blogging in front of such a monitor, my meerschaum smoldering, a fez perched atop my head.
But those supine quotes smugly curl around steampunk in my first sentence for a reason. As lovely as Datamancer's creation is, I bristle at it being referred to as steampunk. Steampunk means something more precise than just "old and cool looking." I wish we could get back to using it that way.
Joel thinks steampunk is a confluence of aesthetic influences — which I agree with — and is ultimately an adjective without a concrete meaning. But it had a very precise meaning to me: it's anti-retro-futurism. Where retro-futurism is the attempt by people of the past to imagine the future by extrapolating it from the technology of the day, steampunk should be the attempt to recreate — at least in spirit — our own contemporary technology using the science and mechanics of the Victorian era.
I once interviewed Jake von Slatt for Wired. Jake's not shy about artfully adding ornamenture and oxidization to some gadget and calling it steampunk, but he's clearly interested in doing far more. Von Slatt was telling me about what a true steampunk monitor would be like in his mind: all ASCII, maybe no more than 80x40, but each letter would change like the rapid-fire fluttering of the destinations on a mid-century train departures board. He also described a steampunk mouse that was like "a phrenological device for hands." Now that's steampunk.
Maybe I'm just being an elitist snob. There's something to that: when Joel told me on my first day at BBG that our science-fiction category was "Retro-Futurism" because "it means the same thing," I experiences a remarkably vivid waking dream in which I schooled Joel on the exact meaning of the word by garroting him with his own unspooled intestines. But I like to think I try to hold on to the purity of the word "steampunk" just because modern technology mechanically engineered with the knowledge and materials of the distant pass is just so much more wonderful than spraying some copper paint on the side of your Dell and calling it a day. What do you guys think?
Steampunk LCD Monitor [Datamancer]
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I think you're onto something. That sense of steampunk is certainly the sense it was first used in, to describe The Difference Engine. Most of the steampunk creations we see now, wonderful as they may be, are new wine in old bottles. I'm OK with that. I wouldn't want a 80x40 flipboard as my monitor. Making something like that would be an interesting exercise, but extremely impractical and expensive.
Perhaps we can say that the steampunk of the imagination is essentially different from the steampunk of the workshop.
I'll be back later to comment, but for the moment I want to throw in this link to a photoset from the North American Model Engineering expo last weekend in Toledo. Anyone who likes working models of steam, gas and hot air engines should take a look. There's some astounding craftsmanship here. And real steam!
http://www.pbase.com/montana_aardvark/names2008
This whole kerfluffle seems to me to be a sort of "true Scotsman" fallacy.
In other words: lighten up, francis.
Like any neologisms, steampunk will always be used in different ways by different people. Think eg. about 'hacking' or 'metal'. These words are always defined by the people who called their own things that way and used by the rest in a way similar to the original meaning.
It will need some more years to come to a definite conclusion. Maybe factorial analysis will help... (science, yeah!)
Sort it out folks, I'm fed up! Don't wanna read the word 'steampunk' next to any copper looking thing with electronics in it.
Valid question.
While I will applaud creative and elegant design in any form, I don't believe in diluting the meaning of useful terminology. Steampunk is one specific style; related styles are a fine thing but deserve their own names, and/or a more general term which steampunk would then be one particular subset of. Art Techno to go with Art Deco, maybe. (Techno Deco? Techno Devo?)
But this is another instance of the "reality is fractal" problem. Human endeavors don't divide cleanly into categories; there will always be a fuzzy edge with exceptions upon the exceptions to the exceptions. The general customization aesthetic of which steampunk is a part is clearly a movement rather than a style per se; folks who are interested in it will appreciate and applaud creative customization in a wide variety of styles even if it doesn't fit the specific style they work in.
On the other hand: the same piece, in different contexts, may be categorized differently. Part of the fun of playing with steampunk or other styles is finding the objects which weren't intended to be interpreted that way but which can be recontextualized -- sometimes with no modification at all -- and made to fit. I think Datamancer's design may be dancing on that edge. It doesn't have the ornateness that I like in some of the steampunk work I've seen... but its simplicity and the choice of materials means that you could probably drop it into a steampunk-styled room without it feeling out of place.
So while I agree that you've posed a good question, I'm not sure the answer is cut-and-dried. I think it would depend on what you surrounded this with. It doesn't scream steampunk all by itself, unlike some of the other designs we've seen... but I'm not sure I'd say it clearly _isn't_ either.
I think the closest thing to a steampunk monitor you'll find are the ones on the computers in the movie Brazil. The tiny little CRTs that were magnified via a big lenses...
I think you're right here. The catch is, of course, that part of the attraction of steampunk is the sheer craftsmanship it demands. Even if one were to contemplate mass manufacturing of a real steampunk device, it would still have that air of care towards mechanical detail.
But we get the benefits of our modern systems precisely *because* they are almost throwaway in their design. We can take a computer and use it for some almost inconsequential purpose because it's mundane and has no essential defining purpose before we start.
Building an actual "steampunk monitor" would be such an exercise in craftsmanship and inefficiency that we'd immediately consign it to a museum, in part to show it off, and in part to protect it from expensive damage.
About all I can suggest here is that rather than a colour monitor, he use a "brass monitor" -- amber, that is. Or sepia. And since those are hard to come by, the best thing to do in the short term is modify the desktop theme to make those colours dominate.
Considering the monitor is to be used in a movie -- I think this would work out nicely.
I tweaked the photo to do this -- check out http://www.flickr.com/photos/mutatron/2438517247/ (sepia) and http://www.flickr.com/photos/mutatron/2439341794/ (amber).
As it's been said, steampunk is using the aesthetic or 'ideals' of a specific time, and appropriating them to technology which has since been invented.
The aesthetic for this is not Victorian, it's more World War era (post-Victorian). the "-punk" style for this time period is usually called "Dieselpunk". (Think Rockets, Atoms, and glam-Nazis)
That said, the '-punk' suffix is thrown around quite a bit, which mystifies me. It's attempting to describe a gritty, rough, perhaps dystopian world. This piece, and many others do nothing to provoke this imagery. They instead have a clean lined, ordered charm to them. This computer should be called "AristoSteam", if we want to make genres on the spot.
I would just like to note that Brownlee's defense of Star Wars as sci-fi, not retro-futurism, was that it occurred "A long time ago..."
"Von Slatt was telling me about what a true steampunk monitor would be like in his mind: all ASCII, maybe no more than 80x40, but each letter would change like the rapid-fire fluttering of the destinations on a mid-century train departures board. He also described a steampunk mouse that was like "a phrenological device for hands." Now that's steampunk. "
My mind instantly turns to a Kinotropy-driven display right out of Bruce Sterling's "Difference Engine." Which, after all, is my vision of steampunk. All it's missing is Magitek armor...
A mechanical display would be cute as a Steampunk artifact, but a functional computer display that still embodies a real steampunk aesthetic should be a projection. Create a visual style for your favorite desktop as a jumpy, scratched filmstrip, casemod the projector, and throw it onto an antique screen or dressed-up old windowshade.
It needs some thing better than a plain blue desktop background, that's for sure.
@12: iawtc
I think I'm tired of reading the word "steampunk."
I don't really know what it's exact meaning is, but I have a clue as to why it's so popular. In our world of mass-produced gadgets, we yearn for the old-timey craftsmanship of yore. The days when labor was cheaper than technology, the days when you could pay somebody to hand carve filigree into anything, or turn out some fantastically ornate banister on a foot-powered lathe.
It's backlash against disposable durables—cheaply made gadgets and appliances that are easier to replace than repair. We yearn for quality stuff.
Anyway, these things are beautiful. I dig them.
Joel, you make like it is absurd to point out that a science-fiction film that says, in the first five seconds, that it takes place in the distant past can not be a movie that is supposed to take place in the future, which is the absolute pre-requisite of retro-futurism.
It is absurd! Star Wars is obviously Lucas & Co.'s vision of the future — or a past civilization so far advanced beyond our own that it is "futuristic." To deny this is to miss the forest for the trees.
I've always liked the concept of steampunk, but have always been hesitant to like the pieces seen (like the monitor/laptop) because the concept is invoked merely for the appearance.*
Eventually we'll get some hardcore folk who will actually make a monitor that will run on steam, and then I'll be actually sold.^
At the very least, said monitor would be worthy of the term "punk."
* this is fine, but it lacks substance!
^ this is substance!
Serious question: if you removed the "A long time ago..." intro from Star Wars, would it change anything?
Joel, so by your logic, any fiction that features alien races more advanced than our own is retro-futurism, even if it takes place in the past or contemporary times. War of the Worlds? Retro-futurism. Independence Day? Retro-futurism. Thundercats? Retro-futurism.
You're just arguing this to be a dick. You totally know you're wrong. :)
@12 "smcinpdx" A mechanical display would be cute as a Steampunk artifact...
In a manner of speaking, such displays exist right now - but are usually found in HDTV sets, not computer monitors (tho' my Samsung has a VGA port on it, too)
They're HDTV displays powered by Texas Instruments' DLP technology :)
I don't remember enough about Thundercats to recall its intricate backstory — I was busy reading Proust and writing Lonely Planet guides to your mother's cervix — but Independence Day and War of the Worlds are retro-futurism: past visions of an unlikely future. This is why all sci-fi is ultimately — given time — retro-futurism. If you're going to going to quibble about something, quibble about my sweeping semantic brush, not the first three words of Star Wars.
You know who you need in here? Teresa. I bet she'd back you up.
OK, so it's retro-futurism because it *becomes so* simply due to the arrow of time marching on? The specific speculative vision in the past is thus doomed to inherent retro-ness, even from the moment of creation -- it just takes us a while to spot its connection to the time that produced it?
Or is it simply that futurism conceptually implies the past from which it's being imagined?
Rob has it. And thus, with my first disciple, I claim the ultimate and inevitable title of Master of Categories.
Someone needs to create a SteampunkOrNot.Com site
I swear I saw a "steampunk" entry in some "sci-fi encyclopedia" like thirteen or fourteen years ago, where steampunk was defined (and I'm really struggling to remember this correctly) as being a setting with futuristic (or at least modern) technology but with the absence of computers or internal combustion. It was the first time I had seen the word outside of Castle Falkenstein, and it was a cross-reference from the entry on Frank Herbert's Dune that led me to it.
And if you want to get really wacky with the steam-era monitor idea, check out "The Amazing Screw-On Head." There's a videophone, for lack of a better term, with a picture of Abe Lincoln's face that has two flipboards: one for the eyes and one for the mouth, and it has a big brass bell for a speaker (a la gramophone).
As a certified authority in Talmudic sci-fi subgenre quibbling, I agree that the answer to this important question is not cut-and-dried. However, Brownlee's right and everyone else is wrong.
Well, Joel, while you're correct, it's a trivial correctness that seeks to replace common currency with a tautology implied by it, namely that all futurism is retro-futurism, because it inheres the past from which it is projected.
However, your rhetorical ninjitsu sneaks around what seems to be an obvious point: most people reserve the term "retro-futurism" for examples where this temporal tits-up has become the work's defining characteristic.
Furthermore, fuck Star Wars.
You know what really sucks? Sci-fi. All of it. Ever.
I'm taking my big glowing balls and going home.
Glowing balls? Do you have twisted testicles?
Steampunk is just The Flintstones technology interpreted by Victorians.