Commentary - Now with more Steam

Dublin Core

Title

Commentary - Now with more Steam

Description

So in building this archive, it gave me time to think about what would constitute steampunk; taking an investigative look at this genre. Hunting down pictures, doing interviews, car chases, explosions, suddenly gigantic robot attacks, and at this point I havn’t even left my apartment and I’m still on the internet looking at cat pictures at the same time. However, it wasn’t about the cats, it was never about the cats, except sometimes it was. Now what it was really about is the history of the world. I would say that in definition Steampunk is about mixing Victorian aesthetic with modern technology, but I feel that it could be much more. I feel that it could just begin to become about world history and mixing them all. You could have things like NeanderPunk, or ChromagnumPunk, and it could end up just being an amazing series of great aesthetic for comics or daily living. You could have a computer that is styled after a rock, it would be cool. And in that way of thinking, you could really just say that The Flintstones is a great example of NeanderPunk. Nothing has to just be about what it is in definition, there are ways in which a definition becomes skewed and begins to mean many more things as well.
I would say that this works for most media when you think about it. In comics, movies, literature, and art it is all about the genre. A genre is just a simple way of explaining what exactly you’re getting yourself into and what you may expect along the way. But can something just be much more than it already is? Can you actually just redefine something in that way? I would say so because a genre could be made into anything. You could a story anywhere you wanted to and a genre is really just a guideline to what you may actually want. I learned from the interviews I made that steampunk is really just a jump off genre, it could really be taken as anything. I’ve slowly, but surely come to realize it as a sort of philosophy. It could come to be anything you really wanted. Much more in media you really just don’t see a whole bunch of strictly steampunk things. The only way that you could do this is just to strictly take your audience into a Victorian setting with modern technology, but lately it seems that it doesn’t have to be this way. In the interviews, the comic book store manager was telling me that with comics at least, you don’t really see anything in that sphere, but what you do see is the philosophy. You get technology that should have never happened, and historically didn’t so you would get something like Super Gods where the British has a space program well before anything the Russians or the US ever had available at the time, and it’s a neat idea. It’s a revisionist history of the world.
We could always just use this as a historical basis in that sense, we could review history and see where we had made achievements that were never truly realized. I’ve read of Nikola Tesla’s work with wireless technology that just seems to be out of place because of the time. We really only would think about this technology being available now, but back then it just seems anachronistic. Could it have been possible? Maybe, because at any point in time we could have had technology that broke barriers, but possibly because of political issues it was never realized. Some people speculate that the Egyptians were using batteries and had full blown electricity and lights, so that they might walk through their own temples. I think this is a grand idea and if we use this sort revisionist history as a guideline, maybe we can rationally ponder what really could have been. We can understand ourselves better as a species now and then. Or we could just dress up in crazy costumes for conventions. Either way sounds good to me. These are some things I would like people to think about when they look at this archive.

Creator

Zach Settles

Citation

Zach Settles, “Commentary - Now with more Steam,” Useless Archives, accessed March 29, 2024, https://useless.as.uky.edu/items/show/604.