ART

THE COMIC JOY OF STEAMPUNK

and why it's more fun than cyberpunk

By Joonseok Ryu

In the 19th century, when the steam engine was a new technology and transforming the world, artists had to respond. And by respond, I don’t mean that they all consciously sat down and started drawing engines or that every novel had to account for how the world was changing. No, I mean that the technology was so powerful and widespread that it influenced how people thought and created. So, it’s a bit odd that in the last quarter of the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st, as computers start to take over all our communications and really our lives, that a genre of art should emerge that turns back to the 19th century and specifically the combustion engine. We call this genre steampunk, a combination of the steam of steam engines and one of most radical musical genres ever to rear its tattooed face, punk rock. But we might ask ourselves, well, why? Why are people creating an aesthetic out of a 19th century technology when the real action in tech are the smart phones of the 21st.

We might find the answer or a partial one in the similarly named cyberpunk. It is a genre of science fiction which is almost always about the near future and what’s wrong with it. The best examples are Blade Runner, Minority Report, and Total Recall, all based on Phillip K. Dick novels. In contrast, steampunk isn’t concerned with the near future, but with the near past. It is always taking present day technology and placing it, anachronistically, in the past.

The unhappy cyberpunk

If cyberpunk is dystopian, steampunk has more than a whiff of the utopian: what if we could fly in the 17th century; what if the Ancient Greeks had trains; what would the Egyptians done with cars? Steampunk is always fascinated by and taken with the idea of radical transformation. If cyberpunk is about cultural anxiety; steampunk is about hope. Interestingly enough, both genres flourished in the mid-80’s and 90’s, just before the tech revolution really took off. Perhaps the first and one of the most famous popular representations of steampunk is from Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle.

In the film, a witch curses a little girl and she goes on an adventure to remove the curse. In her travels, she meets one of the main characters called Howl. He is the owner of, as you would guess, a huge moving castle. But it’s not just a moving castle, it’s actually something much more specific. It’s the epitome of steampunk style. Howl’s Moving Castle takes place during Europe’s industrial revolution and the moving castle is a product of that time: steam, complex copper parts, huge, mechanical, and full of the ambition of harnessing mechanical power.

The moving castle

The picture above is the moving castle. In this still from the movie, you can see the steam in steam punk. The genre requires our belief that a moving castle is possible and so makes quite a display of the energy that it would require to actually get that castle to fly. Steampunk is interested in showing us the how of the technology rather than in normal science fiction that just says, well, the technology works. Part of the charm of steampunk is that it cares about process. So, Miyazaki gives us tremendous amounts of steam, burning flames, and many cogwheels. I don’t actually think it would work, but it sure looks like he was working hard to make it seem like it might. Although this castle is huge and fanciful, it seems friendly because you already have seen many of these components in real life. From this central image, you can feel Steampunk’s bright and comic vibe.

Another good example of Hayao Miyazaki steampunk style is Castle in the Sky, a story about two young children who search for a sky castle named Laputa. In the film there are a whole bunch of robot soldiers and, ironically, they are quite popular. The children meet a robot called the Golem that sleeps in an ancient sky castle and it helps the kids. Like the castle from Howl’s Moving Castle, the robots have a friendly vibe. They have round bodies and heads, flat long arms, and short flat legs. They are cute and recognizable. The most interesting point is that they are covered in moss and have many flowers clinging to their bodies. Miyazaki makes the combination of green nature and cold rusty metal seem natural. The robot seems that it is full of life. In dystopian sci-fi the robots are always taking over; in steampunk they’re our friends.

Steampunk love

In these films you can feel the peaceful and friendly utopian vibe. Also, Miyazaki works hard to take contemporary technology and see it through the lens of the past. That is the reason why steampunk is easy to approach for us. We feel that we have already experienced it and we have twice: once as technology and the second time as style.

Steampunk is popular among the cosplayers. It’s a combination of detail that works well in fashion. The most common fashion items of steampunk are cape and coats for men and extravagant laces and velvets for women. One could call it a kind of Neo-Victorian style and the late avant-garde English designer Alexander McQueen is the most prominent example of the style.

You can wear steampunk

These McQueen shoes from his Fall 2012 line are a perfect example of steampunk fashion. The heel has a mechanical geometric shape with copper material. The frames are connected with nuts and bolts that appear to have a special function, such as a booster rocket or a weapon. McQueen harmonizes matte leather texture of the shoe and smooth metal of the heel.

If you like video games or movies, you might already have run into this kind of fashion there. For instance, there are many characters from League of Legend the most popular game in the world who dress in this way. Ekko in League of Legend wears a jumpsuit, a red muffler and a pair of rubber boots that are representative of the steampunk fashion.

That steampunk style!

The harmony of the leather apron, gloves and the jumpsuit make his costume seem like a steampunk engineer. And the goggles which are hung on his neck add to the steampunk vibe as well. In the story of League of Legend, this equipment controls time. Despite the fact that this is impossible, the style makes us wonder if it might be possible. Of course, that’s the fun of Steampunk: it assumes anything can happen. Again, the utopian is the defining feature of steampunk and we might also include the idea of freedom and escaping from our daily routines.

One of my favorite steampunk artists is Sue Beatrice. She makes physical steampunk goods with old watch components. Do you know how many parts are in the small watch? My answer was NO, because modern watches are made with simple parts. Beatrice's watches are different. She says there are lots of charming components: wheels, pinions, bearings, and nearly microscopic screws which have high potential in design. She has collected a tremendous amount of watches and their component parts for her work.

They work!

She claims that even she doesn’t know how many clocks she has now. Beatrice creates steampunk style metal sculpture with watch components. Not huge sculptures, but tiny and cute miniatures. Her tiny sculptures are smaller than half of palm, but they have a great amount of detail. You can see how detailed they are by looking at the pieces above. In one of my favorites, Beatrice depicts a fox roaming around a field of reed and she used cogwheels for fox’s fur and bearings for his eyes. She makes me imagine how a fox moves. Like most of steampunk, the result is enchanting and comic.

Currently, people are skeptical about the progress of civilization and science. Steampunk resolvers that anxiety, by cloaking the past in the inventions of the present. It allows people to imagine a utopian future without fears of a dystopian outcome, because it has fundamentally already happened.

©Joonseok Ryu and the CCA Arts Review