It’s back!
I had such a blast in 2008 I’ve joined the organising committee for this year’s event. It shall be GRAND!
As the flyer says, tickets go on sale at the end of the month. Artists, bands, performers in general will be announced on the website. EXCITING!
Mad Uncle Cliff is one of three local Steampunks featured in this month’s issue (with the John Lennon cover) of the Australian Rolling Stone:
Check out some of his creations in his etsy store; drool over his communicator!
I met Cliff after his excellent Steampunk Manifesto presentation at the McSweeneys #32 launch; which, of course, I recorded on my futurephone, and you too may now enjoy:
Good show old chap!
It’s fascinating to see the profile of this movement rise, as big media begrudgingly give it the attention it deserves.
I recall with interest the piece MTV did about a year ago, which I viewed whilst fighting against a kanji keyboard in a net cafe in Osaka, Japan. That country is chock full of steampunk goodies, but everytime I mentioned the word I was rewarded with nothing but blank looks.
Perhaps because they think nothing of integrating imagined pasts and futures with their present condition, and thus don’t need a special word for it.
“Euchronia” is a play on words, in this form taken from the Greek “eu”, meaning “good”, and “chronos”, “time”. Time is a central theme of the event, and you may notice things not quite as they should appear in a twenty-first century ball. If you look carefully at the details, you may see evidence of some rather astounding happenings occurring during the evening.
This in no way influenced any purchases I made in Japan.
The third issue of the Steampunk Magazine’s just hit the ‘net. Full of great stuff as always.
The Q’n'A with Alan Moore’s been my favourite so far. Especially this part:
Do you have any thoughts about steampunk as an aesthetic or its potential as a culture?
Well I think that steampunk, if I’m reading it rightly, is a kind of a manifestation of an ethos that is becoming more prevalent in culture today. It seems to me that at this juncture of the 21st century we are more aware of ourselves—we are more aware of our past—than culture has ever been before. Because of the internet, because of our tremendous archives that we’ve accrued, the culture of the past is open to us. And as we look at it, we can see that it’s a fabulous junkyard of ideas that may have been incredibly beautiful—and may have had an awful lot of life left in them—that have been discarded by the relentless forward rolling of culture and our insistence upon new things every day. I think that we’re now in a position where we can look back at the wonderful, glorious remains of our previous cultures—our previous mindsets—and we can use elements from that treasure trove to actually craft things that are appropriate to our future.
I think that in many respects that is the definition of “decadence” as it was given by the decadent writer Théophile Gautier who said that the decadent writer should feel free to borrow from the most gorgeous and sumptuous of ancient legends, and at the same time should borrow from technical vocabularies—from the most up-to-date pieces of writing—to be able to bring the past and the future and the present all into a kind of glorious stew. And I think that at its best, that is perhaps what steampunk is attempting. It is taking these abandoned elements that probably got nothing wrong with them at all and were perfectly functional but had simply been left by the wayside, from our previous culture, and putting them together in a new way in order to create ideas that will help us to extend ourselves into the future. I mean that seems to me to be what steampunk, whether consciously or not, is doing.
I think that that art, technology, media, this is all changing the basic way in which we see time. I think that until fairly recently we’ve seen the progress of time as a kind of conveyor belt where we are dragged through it from the past into the future; there’s nothing we can do about it, and the landscape of our past—once the conveyor belt has left it behind—is gone forever. Whereas that’s not true at all: all of the ideas of the past, which are the most precious commodities of the past, are all still entirely within reach. And I think that some people, like perhaps the steampunk writers, are realizing that it’s possible to embrace the past as a means of progressing into the future. It is not simple nostalgia. That would get tired really quickly. It’s essential that there be some progressive, forward-looking aspect to the way that we utilize these bright fragments of previous culture. Looked at from my perspective, where I’m not consciously a steampunk, I would think that that is probably what it’s about.
Been devouring the Steampunk magazines – thanks to a heads up from BoingBoing and Warren – a xerox subsidy that saw me getting caught in pre-longweekend traffic. grr.
On my first pass through I’ve skipped the plethora of fiction, preferring the articles examining just what is Steampunk. Mostly defined as a sub-genre of Cyberpunk, that definition in turns helps define just what is Cyberpunk. All of which is just a long excuse for me to quote the following (from Varieties of Steampunk Experience, Steampunk Magazine, issue #1):
… the Cyberpunk movement which imposed the present melancholically upon the future, decrying what we are presently losing by showing a world where it was lost
… Cyberpunk specializes in exposing the reader or viewer to worlds in which they shouldn’t want to live in
… many Cyberpunk fans find themselves nostalgically ignoring these facts and long instead for the very worlds of cybertechnology, hacks and black rain they write about
Now, I’m gonna out myself as a total n00b here, but I’m definitely one of those of latter case. Until I read that sentence, it’s never occurred to me that my favourite cyberpunk writers are painting the world as it shouldn’t be. I’ve always understood cyberpunk to be dystopian, but I guess I’ve never taken that a step further to fully understand what that means.
As I digest this fact one thing becomes apparent. If the most compelling visions of the future are dystopia’s, and thus there’s a void of utopian visions out there, then – as seems to be the case – people are gonna work with what they’ve got. It’s pretty hard to define a future by what it shouldn’t be. So you can’t blame people for atleast trying to select the best from a bad? bunch of ideas.
Which sees my now getting my hippy on (much as it pains me), and typing these words: maybe then we need to envisage a shiny, happy world where we’re all friends and everything’s worked out just fine. And then try and work backwards from there to now, and imagine just how it might be possible?
And maybe, just maybe we can do so without the post-Apocalyptic trope. Have you noticed how Climate Change has now replaced The Bomb as the destroyer of the world? e.g. – one of the best short-stories I’ve read lately: Paul Di Filippo’s Wikiworld.