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Many of you who are reading my other blog WildCraft know about my DIY ways. I am really into creating and building stuff. I guess thats why I like Linux so much. Right now I have several projects on the burners, none of which I really have time for, but I have them on the burners anyway. Most if not all of them require the use and manipulation of raw materials. (HEY! I don’t spend ALL my time in the digital playground!) One of the things I am really getting into is the whole Steampunk movement. It’s really not a movement as much as it is a small sub-culture, but it has a wide appeal. In fact, there are several subcultures moving around within the steampunk cog. Of these little sub-groups, I guess I would fall into the tinkerer/inventor group. Why? Well, the steampunk thing seems to be a bit of a ‘Goth’ knock-off. Bearing this in mind (Here is where I start making people angry) it is somewhat frustrating to see people hard at work creating stuff, that really doesn’t work, isn’t practical and serves no purpose. It is more or less a journey into decorating oneself with very strange paraphenalia instead of being a trip into pragmatic and utilitarianistic approach to Art-Deco.

What do I mean by that? Well, it’s like this, I like and enjoy the Art-Deco look, and it would make me very happy to have this look with a ‘purposefulness’ in its design. Such as this;

Now while many may disagree, these actually have function, whether or not you would wear them outside is irrelevant, they have purpose, and they work, or ‘do’ something. Then you have stuff like this;

Now it has ’steampunk’ stylings, and it is artistic to say the least, however it doesn’t ‘do’ anything at all. Now before everyone starts throwing stuff at me and getting all upset just know, that I am not attacking the subculture, however, it would seem to me that if steampunk stylings are going to gain any foothold at all, they should at least remain true to the era in which they were invented. During the time of this creation, things were created with purpose and meaning. Every vacuum tube actually did something and wasn’t just there for decoration. Now obviously I am not addressing the concept stuff people came up with back then. But the idea of the ‘mad scientist’ or ‘tinkerers’ or even ‘inventors’ was actually a pragmatic frame of thought. Think, Doc Brown from the movie ‘Back to the Future’ and it’s iterations. His stuff looked whacky and far out, however, they were the things that worked, so he strapped them on his inventions. The gun pictured above is indeed cool looking, and I would buy one for decoration, but I would think, that to stay within the idea of steampunk it is necessary that there is pragmatic, purposeful, and utiilitarian backdrop as it had remained during this time of Jules Vern and post-victorian ideology. Incidentally, since steampunk gets a majority of its form and shape from art-deco it is important to realize this was a time after the Victorian age, and was impacted by the ideas and thought of Edwardianism. Slapping a leather strap on a cell-phone doesn’t make it steampunk-ish it just makes it bulky. However, if you take the buttons OFF the cell phone and duplicated them in etched brass, that is definitely steampunkish, and if you take the buttons off, and replace the buttons with some kind of dial, that is REALLY steampunkish.

So here is the challenge, try to find steampunk items that WORK and DO something. A watch welded to brass tubes doesn’t count, unless the tubes have a purpose, like storing your nitroglycerin tablets, or heart medication.