Okay.

Yesterday, I went to one of my daily link fishing holes and found a link to an interview with me.

Today, I went to one of my faviorate design blogs — Design Observer — and found a post about Steampunk quoting none other then my pal Sean Orland and with a photo of friend Tom Sepes Whirlyigig Emoto.

The relationship between design and Steampunk is not a new subject for this blog. I wrote a post some months ago on the subject: Has Contemporary Design Embraced Steampunk.

The article however is highly dismissive of “Steampunk” the final paragraphs sum up the negativity:

Steampunking, with its commerce driven, faddish re-skinning of their own history, is closer to Disney than punk or sci-fi. A laptop styled like a Eastlake sideboard is merely a threat of bad taste, not a threatening reaction to massive social and economic disenfranchisement. In its essence Steampunk seems suburban in its attitude: nostalgic for an imagined, non-existent past, politically quietist, and culturally insular hidden behind cul-de-sacs of carefully styled anachronisms that let in no chaos or ferment. The larger, more impossible questions are missing. How would the Victorian imagination conceive and execute a functioning computer? The answer must be more interesting than adding wood veneers to your laptop or turning a mouse into a contraption of gears that looks more like a medieval torture device.

We are being taken for rubes. At worst, the Steampunkers seem to be mediocre hobbyists with great publicists. It seems fine to me that an obscure niche of DIY hobbyists want to create an imaginary Victorian present, no matter how insular or simpleminded it might be. Reality is what you make of it, even if it is apparent that some people prefer reality to look like a discarded sci-fi movie prop. It is entirely another thing for the press, in their endless “style” trolling, to claim Steampunk as some sort of important movement. If the press behaves as a gaggle of inept tastemakers, then the uncritical pimping of Steampunk must serve as a “mission accomplished.” What it boils down to is that instead of inventing something new, the Steampunkers have mastered one of the oldest of arts: that of self-promotion. P.T. Barnum, that 19th century master of theater, hoax and hype, would be proud.

My reaction to this article is still developing.

But here are my quick first thoughts:

• This article is too quick to accept that everything the style sections have lumped together as Steampunk are of the same type. A wooden box with old gears glued to it is unlikely to be equal to, say, a complex set of brass apertures.

• The quick dismissal of a group of artists and makers as”mediocre hobbyists” smacks of the arrogance that makes most people who actual build object think that those who simply design them are over-paid snobs. Design is difficult and so is fabrication.

• Aligning Steampunk closer to Disney then punk or sci-fi exposes a lack of understand of all three. White it is true the “punk” in Steampunk came about as a reaction/comparison to cyberpunk the Steampunk does in fact have some elements in common with the essence of punk. While I am no authority on the punk movement I do know it included more then punkrock. A core element of punk culture is the DIY philosophy which Steampunkers have in spades.

• The article tosses the baby with the bathwater — in dismissing the media hype (rightly so) it also dismisses the creators of the work. It never asks why people have chosen to work in brass and copper. Why people have chosen to restyle modern objects in antique style. Brass and copper are very workable metals that require simply tools to cut, form and fuse. Unlike working with mild and stainless steel it’s easy to make things from these materials in your basement with tools from the local hardware store. Also building objects with wood, brass and copper is largely a reaction against the over use of plastics by the contemporary design lot.

• However, allot of what is dubbed as Steampunk is largely about style then function. And allot of it also has a cheesy prop look to it. But the point is not that the “Steampunk” objects people make on the weekends out of old junk are cheesy and cliche — it’s that they are making objects. Steampunk is part of a larger subculture that is emphasizing the actual making of objects.

• The author dismisses Seans quote “The wonderful thing about a steam engine is that you can follow the path of power generation …” by saying “One could easily argue that following the etched surface of a printed circuit board would provide no less a fascinating visual “map” of the processes of a computer or electronic device.” While this statement has some truth in it, it largely misses the point. Sure an electrical engineer could deduce the function of a _simple_ PCB, assuming he had full knowledge of the chips and code involved (for this reason the authors statement demonstrates a poor understanding of how modern electronics work) but your average person could not. It is because, as Sean said, you can not just see how it might function (as is with the PCB) but you can see it working (unlike a PCB) that people will stare and marvel at the steam engines and Steampunk devices that KSW shows.

• I wish I had a good publicist.

I’ll think a bit more about this. The bottom line is while there is much to malign about Steampunk there is also much to praise. It should not be picked on simply because it’s gotten allot of press lately.