Original subtitles

People constantly ask me, what is steampunk?

It's stories and stuff -- movies, pictures, objects.

That draws its inspiration

from the science fiction of the 19th century.

Based around a fantasticated Victoriana.

Looking back to look forward again and say, but what if?

It's not a historical movement; it's an anachronistic movement.

You get the fantasy stuff, and you get the science fiction stuff,

and it comes together, and it's made of awesome!

I would call it the crossroads of technology and romance.

There's adventure, there's excitement.

You break away from the prim and the proper

and the straight and the narrow

and you end up going just a little bit wild.

Things are on fire. Things are gushing steam.

Things are powered by zombies and ether.

I mean, that's exciting.

People ask me why I like steampunk.

I'm like, "It's fun!"

I love it when a kid runs up and goes,

"Oh my god, this is steampunk!"

The Society for Creative Anachronism

never seemed half as creative as this.

People will debate really what steampunk is.

People have different visions of it.

But trying to distill it down to something

that you can tell your mom is kind of difficult.

And I think it's been very hard to explain to people

that, yeah, steampunk is political.

I made the claim in an issue of Steampunk Magazine

that steampunk would save the world.

I'm a little bit into blind optimism.

We're causin' a riot.

When you walk down the street in a top hat and spats,

you are causin' a riot.

You're makin' a statement.

We're writing a book on steampunk.

So we're getting a group of steampunks together,

along with a futurist

and a cultural historian

to talk about the future and to talk about

what steampunk can tell us about the future.

We've got representatives from all around

the different portions of steampunk culture,

so everything from literature

You get to fashion to games to music, You get you name it.

And there's a whimsy to it and there's a play with the past

that I think can tell us a lot about how human beings

think about themselves in relationship to their past

and what that takes them toward their future.

In the work that I do in future casting,

it's looking five, ten, fifteen years out,

and so I'm always searching for different visions of the future,

and that's one of the things that I found really interesting

about steampunk because steampunk gives you

a revisionist history of the past.

It's recrafting the past, and that fascinated me.

We've referred to me as an embedded cultural historian

in a sense, and so in some senses

I am becoming a part of this culture increasingly.

In other senses, I'm studying it.

I have questions.

I have questions I want answered.

I am here so that I can build a better future,

so that we can build better technologies for people,

and I want to learn from these experts

to get to, what is the future that we want?

And that's not easy.

In the end, it isn't just about being fans of steampunk.

It isn't just about thinking steampunk's cool.

I think that we can really learn something important

and I think that tonight we could actually do something

that's quite important to think about

what is the future that we want to live in?

And it might take a little bit of digging,

but I think we can get there.

I want to thank you all before we start.

Cheers. Thank you so much.

So just give a sort of a little overview

of sort of what you see as steampunk

but then, more importantly, how did you come to it?

It just connects with so many different things that I love.

Like everyone else at this table,

I love things that are beautiful and beautifully made.

I love things that are both functional and ornamental

and I love the creativity and the imagination

that go into a lot of the things

that people in the steampunk community do.

Steampunk is an odd recursive coining

that echoes cyberpunk.

Certainly ever since cyberpunk,

there's been a kind of, I would say,

a sort of parlor game among geeks,

which is, you know, X punk, Y punk, anything punk.

It's nostalgic cyberpunk.

That's like super interesting.

It's science fiction unshackled

from all that tedious reality stuff.

It is retro futurism.

It is the science fiction of the future that never happened.

It's full of grand and glorious stylish people

doing beautiful, hand-tooled stuff with technology.

Imagine the Victorians flying to the moon

in a hot air balloon.

People want to get into things which will have history,

that have stories that are unique and personal,

and steampunk is all about that, and you can do it

not only with the clothes that you're wearing

but with the ideas that are in your head.

And people usually get pretty excited about it.

It's a fun thought experiment.

When the Victorians were writing this sort of material,

they were like, "Oh, this is great!

"Let's build a gun big enough

"to shoot a bullet at the moon!" You know?

And it's like, sure,

and you know what it's gonna get there? Paste.

But you don't have to deal with that in steampunk.

It has more of a sense of fun, and people like that.

When it comes to steampunk, the appeal is so much broader.

It's about 50 - 50 men and women, and you see people of all ages.

I found science fiction very early on as a kid

by watching television shows like Star Trek.

The idea of mashing up science fiction and robots

with this Wild West aesthetic just blew my mind.

And I love the rivets

and I love the gears and I love the steel

and I actually get kinda kinky about that stuff.

I grew up reading books like James Gurney's Dinotopia,

which is a fantastic example

of just a beautifully designed world

that embraces science fiction

and embraces the Victorian setting.

The actual movement,

I probably started to pay attention to it around 2004,

and at first I had a very heavy disdain for it

because, um, as I summed it up:

"It was just robots with top hats."

And I think I had already become tired of the tropes

that I would later associate with steampunk.

But then I met like-minded artists and craftspeople

and I realized that the only way

that subculture is going to improve

would be if we participated in it.

We did Burning Man in 2008

and we discovered this whole steampunk thing.

I come upon this Victorian house on wheels

and this entire camp of people

dressed up like they came out of the 1890s,

and it just seemed like a nice transition

from one subculture to another subculture.

My husband was into neo-Victorian things and goth,

and I was a little bit into it.

I was mostly a huge science fiction fan.

So I started wearing steampunk

to general science fiction conventions,

and people would come up and go, "Oh, is that steampunk?

I've heard of this. This is cool!"

Probably since the early '80s,

I've been wearing bowler hats and vests,

and I've been making models of airships and things like that,

but it wasn't until a few years back

that I went to my first con

and they had a big steampunk theme,

and I thought, I like this, you know,

and it's right up my alley, and, oh, look, it's got a name.

We started a comic quite a long time ago now,

and we called it "gaslamp fantasy"

because we felt that we didn't quite fit the mold

of what was out there being called steampunk.

So it was already in full swing

by the time we found out about the whole subculture part of it,

and it was a really cool surprise.

Somebody said to me, "Oh, well, you should really

look into steampunk, 'cause I think you'd really

like the aesthetic."

So I started hunting around on the Internet,

and it was a really wonderful environment to share

and we started talking about what would happen

if this became a subculture, hypothetically?

I actually started Steampunk Magazine

in, essentially, a cultural vacuum.

I was only aware of steampunk in this very periphery way.

And what I found right away was that there was actually already

a small and growing community around steampunk.

To me, the fun part was the punk part.

I like the idea of taking history and just twisting it.

It has a pleasingly counterculture aspect to it,

but it's not the kind of angry, antagonistic

kind of counterculture which you often see

in the original punk movements.

We can do this ourselves.

We don't need this handed down to us.

You know, the government or culture, you know, writ large

has nothing for us.

We can go out and find it ourselves.

You find a lot of artists in the movement:

writers, musicians, makers...

What might bring all of these people together, I think,

is a sense of theatricality and of wanting to live

in a reality that's slightly different.

If you were the kid who took the light bulb out of your lamp,

wet your finger, and stuck it in just to see what would happen,

that kid's gonna go grow up to be a steampunk, if they survive.

We're not steampunks 'cause there's something wrong with us.

We're steampunks 'cause our brains are exploding

from this plastic world we've been put in.

That's why we're breakin' out.

It's not because there's something wrong with us.

It's because we need to be more.

That was definitely my gate to steampunk

was the literary genre.

I think a lot of things came later

as it started to grow and expand and include more things

or be expressed in more venues.

But for me it was that literary gate that brought me in.

I'd picked up the novel Infernal Devices by K.W. Jeter,

and at the time it just struck me as

here's a kind of alt history version of science fiction.

There was this half-satirical windup

by the author in Locus magazine saying,

"Hey, why don't we call this steampunk?

Then we might get more attention for it."

And, of course, it didn't really work out for him that way.

The attention came 30 years later.

It was an exciting time in science fiction.

In the '80s, there was a lot of new stuff going on.

And I was a punk rocker in the early '80s,

and so I tended to gravitate actually more towards cyberpunk.

So I think the first steampunk book

that I ever read was The Difference Engine.

I was working in a bookstore when The Difference Engine came out.

The cyberpunk novels were very big.

William Gibson and Bruce Sterling

were great towering giants of the field,

and within the mainstream

of hardcore science fiction readers,

all of a sudden everyone knew what steampunk was.

One of the things that most affected

writers of my generation was the appearance

of the word processor on the scene.

So, you know, I had many discussions,

especially with William Gibson,

about what it was that this new form of composition was doing

to the way words appeared on the page.

In the world of The Difference Engine,

scientists and engineers are at the very peak of society.

So we wrote this book, Difference Engine,

which was really a kind of study

of the effect of computation on society,

taking the effects of the world

that we were seeing around ourselves in the 1980s

and back-projecting them to an imaginary 1850s.

It's a radical restructuring of history.

We were trying to use the kind of cultural density of the past

to make it clear to contemporary people

what the stakes were of an industrial revolution.

When I started thinking about Boneshaker,

I grew up in the Southeast, where, let's be honest,

alternate theories of the Civil War

are kind of a regional pastime.

And I went to the University of Tennessee

for my graduate school work in Chattanooga,

and you can go through the old patent archives

and find crazy, crazy patent submissions

for machines that people wanted to make,

and they were the most steampunk things I had ever seen,

and I thought "I would love to use these..."

... except they never happened, because they ran out of war.

So it started there.

I'm like, well, what if they didn't run out of war?

Steampunk didn't seem to have a mythology

to account for all of the minor tropes of it.

It was kind of a collection of things that people wore.

And I tried to make technology

that was symptomatic of the place

because I didn't want it to be gears on hats.

I wanted these people to have things

that were going to be practical to them

in a very strange environment.

Certainly I didn't set out to write steampunk,

but then I think probably most people don't.

The fact that Perdido Street Station came out in 2000

and was based around a world

that had a very roughly Victorian-era technology

is probably one of the things that means

that it is put in that box, and I have no problem about that.

You know, your fiction does stuff that you intend it to do,

that you don't intend it to do behind your back.

It does stuff differently for every single reader.

If somebody decides this book pushed me

into this field of steampunk that I absolutely love,

then how can that be anything other than very flattering?

I started writing this book, and I thought,

oh, I kind of want to write an urban fantasy,

but I really want something set historically.

I'm more comfortable writing in the past.

And as I started to imagine

how Victorians and Victorian scientists would react

to real supernatural creatures in their time period,

I started coming up with this alternative science,

and it was while I was world building

that I realized the books I was writing

were going to be steampunk books.

And in my world, the steampunk element is the result

of the incorporation of a supernatural element.

So all of the laws of my universe

have to be explained using Victorian science.

Boilerplate is a robot

who was invented in 1893.

"For the purpose of preventing the deaths of men

"in the conflict of nations."

Because Archie Campion has this idea

that he can prevent humans from dying in battle.

And then unveils them

at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.

Archie takes Boilerplate all over the world

to demonstrate him.

He goes to the Klondike in the gold rush in Alaska.

He's a beat cop in Chicago.

He builds railroads across the Sudan in Africa.

He's involved in the Philippine War.

He fights in the Boxer Rebellion in China.

He's in Australia

at the birth of the Australian Commonwealth.

Yes, the robot gets around.

But it's all logistically possible.

Boilerplate has been my gateway drug for steampunk for people.

Like, if they're like, "I don't like it.

"It's just goggles and it's just, you know, gears."

And I just pull it off the shelf and I go,

"Just browse through this for, like, 10 minutes."

And they're immediately sucked in

because it's so based and grounded in something

that they can understand.

And that's how I conceived Boilerplate,

as really an excuse to share historical stories

that I thought were really important

that people should know about

and that were relevant to what's going on today.

History builds humanity.

Part of what makes us human

is the stories that we tell ourselves.

The future and the past were more interesting places

for me to escape to

because I lived in the contemporary world.

That was boring. I wanted to be transported.

I realized that the Victorian era is the birth of modernity.

From the large things like airplanes and telephones

to the everyday things we take for granted.

You go back to the late 1800s, we have mass media...

Food safety legislation...

Various people demanding their rights

that hadn't been demanding their rights previously.

Women having the right to vote.

Concerns about what technology was going to do to us.

The eight-hour day.

And I felt that was very important to share with people.

History has some of the richest and most exciting

and most absorbing stories,

and you can mine them as a storyteller

and swing them and sway them and take battles

and rewrite them and put them into space.

I mean, there's so many things you can do if you know history.

And there's so many things back then

around the world that are way cooler

than anything we come up with in steampunk,

and so it's really neat to just look at the technology back then

and build upon it, look at the costuming around the world

back then and build upon it.

We're able to pull music and voices and images

and all sorts of things out of an increasingly deep past,

and we take it for granted.

If you do nothing else,

go and sit with your grandparents and say, you know,

"Hey, tell me about World War 2."

I sat down on the couch with my dad,

who was in the Korean War, and I was like,

"Tell me a little bit about what you were doing there."

And he told me this story of testing

these huge sort of skyrail trains,

and his job was to crash them.

There's a scene in Blameless

where these huge skyrail steam-powered trains show up,

and they're stolen directly from his stories.

And so we're kind of combing the Victorians

to see the things that we like and the things that still work.

And use this as kind of

our artist's palette from which we draw.

It forces you to look back in order to look forward.

When you are capable of seeing that connection,

then you kind of like see the threads and how to unravel them

in order to kind of rethread them

so that we can create something better for the future.

It creates the past that tells the story of who we want to be.

When I started off designing clothes,

I'd never heard of steampunk.

I actually got into doing clothing

because I'm fascinated by storytelling and narrative

as a way of understanding human psychology.

I'll just costume myself at home

because it improves my enjoyment of whatever I'm doing.

I change clothes to sew stuff, I change clothes to cook eggs.

And I think it's what I really enjoy about the steampunk scene

is that it's, everyone's so interested in telling stories.

If you had known steampunk 30-odd years ago,

you would've seen that it would be in my future

because I was always fascinated by BBC costume dramas.

Even if I didn't understand what was going on,

I could just watch those dresses.

I remember one of my first Halloween costumes

was turning a hula hoop into a hoop skirt.

It didn't exactly work,

but, uh, that was one of the first things I did.

At the start of it, I don't think people really thought

it was much of a movement.

It seemed just like period cosplay.

Cosplay is short for costume play.

It's an important part of the culture of comics conventions

and it's become an activity quite fantastically unto itself.

As an artist, you start out imitating somebody.

So cosplayers, I'm sure, began making costumes

based on their favorite movie, literary character, TV show.

But at some point you want to go beyond the out of the box,

and I think that's much more satisfying:

"Oh, I'm tired of Star Wars. I'm gonna try this instead."

Which is not to say that we don't want people

to dress up as Boilerplate in the future,

because we totally do.

It actually surprises me

how many people who I would consider introverts

or really shy actually feel comfortable

coming out and wearing costumes.

I think in a way you're not presenting yourself,

and so I'll find people who are normally so quiet and so shy

just become exuberant when they put themselves behind a mask

and can kinda wear that new identity.

I was really just t-shirt and jeans

unless I had to wear something, like going to work

and I had to dress up and, God forbid, wear a tie.

When steampunk came along, it was like, I get to dress up

and I get to wear really fancy clothes all the time.

So this coat I had made specifically

as my Airship Ambassador coat and my uniform.

So I'll wear that when I'm kind of in that role.

My first big steampunk costume that I made

was the khaki gown that I have.

Originally, it was a volcanologist

just because I really liked volcanoes,

but I also absolutely love ancient Egypt

and Victorian Egyptomania.

That's when it became sort of a mummy hunting costume.

And so it was very much that same idea

of taking something I love

and finding a way to twist it into a character

and a more badass version of myself.

The two things I wanted to be when I was growing up

were an astronaut and an inventor.

And I have, like, Trapper Keepers

filled with, like, illustrated inventions that I made,

and I had, I mean,

just delightfully ridiculous kid inventions.

And, in particular, I designed a flying costume.

It was a suit made out of ripstop parachute nylon

that was flameproof.

It had copper tubes that ran through it

that you could attach propane torches to

which would inflate the hot air inside the suit

that would make you neutrally buoyant

so you would lift up with the suit and the wings

and then you could glide back down.

And I hadn't made the connection until my parents came in

and said, "Oh, you finally made your flying suit."

Being able to say

you're the hero of your own life, of your own story,

and so I will take this one thing I've always aspired to do

and make a costume around it, is pretty great.

And then it's just fun to filter that through Victoriana.

When I discovered that I could do steampunk costuming,

people would come up to me and say, "What's that from?"

And I could say, "That's from my imagination."

And they'd go, "You can do that?"

And it was infectious, it was lovely.

Every chance I could wear a costume,

I wore a costume as a kid

because I'm a clown all the time.

The idea of being able to dress in the style and be a goon,

play a character, I'm free, free to do as I see fit.

I was a Civil War reenactor when I was 16-17.

It's part of how I got into history.

So some of my steampunk clothes

are actually my Civil War reenactment uniform.

I've worn waistcoats and a pocket watch for years, right?

I've just all of a sudden found

a whole bunch of other people who do that.

Believe this or not, this is essentially

most of my everyday clothes.

I looked at that time period and thought,

"That is nice, good and proper."

In a way, for me it was kind of my rebellion

against the, like, "You must show more and more skin,"

and I was like, "No, I don't want to."

And I thought, "Well, I'll just go back

to that period of modesty."

When I stepped really into the steampunk style as a costumer,

I left my edges unfinished

and I started trying to play with torn fabric.

The function turns inside out, so that you see the function

and the form side by side.

Here is a previous corset that I have made.

The idea is that it has this busk that buckles up the front

and then you lace it closed in the back.

You could probably take a bullet in a well-made corset.

It'd just have to be a very specifically-aimed bullet.

Goggles are sort of -- have become sort of the symbol

of steampunk for a lot of people.

Do you know the steampunk salute, sir?

Nice goggles.

When somebody is ready to spend

what I charge for these, they're in.

It's kind of a badge of belonging in a way,

and I enjoy watching people make that transition, too.

When you put something on

that makes you feel really good about yourself,

you are good, you are better.

I wanna make people feel so good about themselves

because of what they're wearing, because it was made for them,

it fits them, they can have that confidence

to step out into the world and be better people.

What I'm hoping costuming will go towards

is being able to make our own clothes again,

make clothes that fit us

rather than we have to fit the clothes,

and having it last,

which will totally put textile workers

out of jobs, but...

In this day-to-day world

where everything is ready-made, we frequently feel inferior

because, "Oh, our clothes don't fit,"

and, "Oh, it's not quite right," and "It must be my fault."

But I really feel strongly that it's my fault

as a designer if the clothes don't fit.

So my purpose here on Earth

is to make people feel better about themselves

through the clothes that I make for them.

I've been into, you know, frilly costumes

since I was a tiny child.

And when I was a teenager, I got into goth fashion

and I wore corsets

and did a lot of different styles within goth,

but the new Victoriana was definitely a thing.

The dress-up aesthetic definitely appeals to me

and also science fiction has always appealed to me

since I was really little.

This song is called "The Heroine."

My name is Erica Griffin Mulkey.

I perform as Unwoman.

* The city is war-torn

* And nearly impassable

* I act the lovelorn

With steampunk, I can be in a corset and tons of makeup

and have ridiculous huge hats on.

It's extremely empowering, and I just rock it.

It just makes me bigger than life.

* Now it's closing night *

* And you can't be found *

* Go through the motions again and again *

* But you are not here to see them *

I didn't think of myself as a steampunk performer

until 2009, which is when Jordan from Sepiachord

had me come up and play the first Steamcon.

* ...actually feel them

With Sepiachord talking about music, my idea was

I didn't want culture handed down to me anymore.

I wanted to give it back and give it out.

And it went so well and I fit in so well,

it became a thing that I pursued and I started writing

to other conventions and saying, "Hey, I want to play for you.

"I think people will like me."

And I've turned that into, you know, my job.

* That was my best poker face

* Trying not to care

* I watch and I wait

* While you never appear

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Abney Park show.

Steampunk I discovered in 2008,

when I saw Abney Park in concert for the first time.

If anybody's heard of steampunk at all,

they will have heard of Abney Park.

* I made my own machine

* Yes, we're building steam *

* I hate the same routine

I love playing with Abney Park.

They put on a fantastic live show. They're full of energy.

We've got a new album that's coming out in about a month,

and that's our 11th album.

We've been doing it for 22 years.

* 'Cause I'm a Victorian vigilante *

* Bring some justice on your head *

* From the palace to the riverside *

* For your troubles you'll get bled *

I don't want to write the same song over and over again.

I don't want to write the same album over and over again.

* Here we come, on the run

* Our coal fires are burning

* Here we come, fife and drum

* Propellers in the dawn

* Here we come, on the run

* Our coal fires are burning

* Here we come, fife and drum

* Under the radar, we crept on

Abney Park takes place within its own world

outside of the context of history.

To continue to look back into history

and then pull that stuff into what we're doing,

I think that's the fun exploration.

I do have some parameters about what makes music steampunk,

but it's pretty wide open.

I feel like almost every genre of music can be steampunk

if there are elements of the old and the new.

I don't necessarily want to say

that an indie rock band that throws a cello in is steampunk,

although I'll probably play in your band if you ask me to.

When I first started thinking about what is steampunk music,

I thought, "probably music that's of the era

"that's also innovative,

"and in that regard, not of the era."

Like neo-cabaret, one might say.

I would love to see more bands

working with historical sounds and music and styles.

And I think that's where... I find that more charming

when the punking is less in the style of music

and more in the lyrics.

* The city is war-torn

* And nearly impassable

* I act the lovelorn

* I used to be laughable *

When you're dealing with the Victorians

and their optimism for the future

and their excitement for the future,

they didn't mean for everybody, they meant for us,

for us right now,

and we're not really paying attention

to all those little people over there doing those little things.

I am not a Victorian re-creationalist.

I am... I'm a steampunk.

I think that the 19th century was bollocks.

Victorian London, as, you know, full of beautiful, clanking machines,

was built on systems of massive

and brutal exploitation around the world.

There was not a lot of beauty in Victorian England.

I mean, we see the beautiful things

because they're some of the things that survived,

but there was also a lot of poverty

and horrible living conditions and unpleasant parts.

People were intolerant of gays.

People were sexist.

People were racist.

There was rampant colonialism.

There was abuse of the workforce.

It was awful. There is something frankly quite troublesome

about the fact that what is being eulogized here,

in a sometimes very winning and very wonderful way,

is an era of bestial oppression.

I would say that steampunk needs to look at itself in the mirror a little bit.

My first hints that steampunk as it existed

might not be for me was when I put out a call

for contributions to Steampunk Magazine

looking for pro-feminist anti-colonial work.

One of the best comments, "best comments" I found

was someone saying, "How can you call yourself steampunk

"and be anti-colonial?"

And this, of course, to me, it was, uh, it caught me by surprise.

You know, as I say it, I looked around

and was like, "Aw man, am I in the right room?"

I was put on a steampunk panel,

which made me wonder why I didn't like steampunk,

what's wrong with steampunk, because I should.

Most of what I saw currently as steampunk

seemed really colonialist.

Yeah, it's a form of escapism,

but we still carry with us kind of like ideas

and prejudices and stereotypes from a larger culture.

Now, if you depict a fantasticated version

of a society, and you write out the relations of oppression

and what... you know, something is going on there

in just the same way as it would

if you wrote a utopia about white South Africa

in which there were no black people during the '80s.

You're doing something whether or not you intend to.

Immediately when you think adventure,

I'm just thinking of those people in the pith helmets.

Pith helmets are obviously imagery

from British occupation and the Zulu wars.

There was oppression, there was bigotry,

but that's a story for another time.

We're reinventing history and making it fun and positive.

That's not what I think of when I think of positive.

I'm sorry.

I have a totally different perspective on that one.

There's so many options out there

that don't draw from that painful imagery.

I feel like these things can be reclaimed,

but I don't necessarily think it's my place

as a privileged white woman to reclaim them.

So I actually haven't worn my pith helmet in a while.

I've switched over to... I have a National Park Ranger hat.

It's really kind of difficult sometimes to get people

out of that comfort zone and say, "Okay, let's talk

about the social ramifications of what you're doing,

or the political ramifications, or what you're saying

about gender when you do what you do."

A lot of people would look at me and go,

"You're crazy. This is fantasy. This is fun."

And I think that unfortunate disconnect from reality

is what kills a lot of really interesting

and exciting artistic movements.

A lot of people think that it's total killjoy

for people to go around pointing people out

and saying that things are offensive,

but if it means more people join this subculture

and feel more comfortable and welcome,

because it's still

very middle-class white Western subculture.

What I want to urge people to do is look at the globe

and look at all the opportunities for stories

there are outside of this tiny island.

As a reader who loves cool stuff

and who is, frankly, kind of tired of steam engines

but very open to being reenchanted by them,

I love the idea of seeing queer steampunk,

steampunk of color, anti-imperialist steampunk,

altermondialiste steampunk, feminist steampunk,

you know, surrealist steampunk,

avant-garde steampunk, you know, punk punk steampunk.

Bring it the fuck on.

Going to steampunk is kind of like

pressing a reset button on that era.

It's like, "Can we reset this era

"so that we don't have these problems?"

What if things had gone differently?

They're looking back at the past and saying,

"Yeah, a lot of these really horrible things happened,

"but here's some really cool things,

"and that if they had gone in this direction,

"if they had moved over here and gone that way,

"then wow, what could it have been?"

Well, it could've been this.

That's about genres and subgenres growing up.

That's good stuff.

As you map the cultural activity,

so you map the amount of stuff that's being produced,

the amount of steampunk stuff,

so TV, and games, and comics,

and fashion, and music and all of this stuff,

there has been an incredible spike in cultural activity

around steampunk.

So what is it about steampunk

that has ignited all of this cultural activity?

What does steampunk tell us about today?

If you have more people who are interested in it, why?

In the second half of the 20th century,

there were national movements: in the '50s, beatniks;

in the '60s, hippies; in the '70s, punks;

in the '80s, hip-hop; and then with the rise of the Internet

and corporatization of media,

that dissipated like a fractal pattern.

After a generation or so

of not having a cohesive movement like that,

I think people are really hungry

for some kind of tribe to come together:

aesthetic, music, fashion.

What we're seeing right now with steampunk

is something similar to what we saw

in the late '50s with the Beat Generation

or that we saw in the late '60s with the hippie movement

is all of a sudden we've got the Summer of Love.

All of a sudden, it's becoming cool.

And what that does is it creates a shitload of people

walking around with goggles on their top hats

and calling themselves steampunk.

And the people who were at the core of this,

who are at the core of this,

who have a strong ideological commitment

to this idea of changing the narrative,

of changing the world, are going, "Wait a minute!"

But what happens as a part of that process

is you actually do get cultural change.

And this is why I really like it is it's not a literary movement

or a film movement, and it actually is

a broader cultural movement, and you don't have to read

The Difference Engine to know what steampunk is.

Do we try to keep this a small, little, private thing

just for us to savor, or do we get annoyed

when big mainstream things try to take over steampunk?

For myself, I don't really mind.

I don't like steampunk because it's elusive.

I like steampunk because I like steampunk.

And if big mainstream people want to attempt it,

go for it; that's great.

They'll either do a good job of it

or they'll do a crappy job of it.

If they do a crappy job of it, we'll ignore it,

like when Justin Bieber did his music video.

The only way that that music video

affected my life was having to discuss that music video.

People who just want to do it for a fad, they're going to

patronize all these lovely people in there.

These people are going to make money off that.

That's great, you know?

They're good artists.

They're good artists; they make good things.

If their stuff sells more because a bunch

of douchey people want to come in and buy it,

by god, knock yourself out.

Look at the album art inside of T-Pain's new album,

and you'll see a picture of T-Pain dressed exactly like me,

with a microphone just like my microphone,

and literally, it's his steampunk album.

On the one hand, I'm thinking, like,

"Oh! All these uninvited people have come to my party!"

What the hell are you doing here? Go away!"

But on the other hand, if someone co-opting

the fashion style brings them to this place

of looking into the cultural and sociological parts of it,

that's not necessarily a bad thing.

I remember people saying to me, "Well, as soon as you see

the steampunk styles in Hot Topic,

then you know it's over."

Okay, well, guess what?

They're in Hot Topic and they're in the L.L. Bean catalog

and they're in all these other places,

but it's not just the clothes.

You know, it never was just the clothes.

Just like with punk rock, it wasn't just the clothes.

It was the attitude.

It's still possible to write

alternate histories which demonstrate

technologically-driven social change.

Just because Justin Bieber did a steampunk music video

does not mean that we have jumped the shark.

It means we're just getting started.

It's not a trend that will have its day

and then fall out of favor.

It is a movement which will grow

into an actual physical community.

Maybe ten years from now we won't recognize

that it's steampunk anymore, but the ideas and the attitudes

will just pervade the world, and that's what I'm hopeful about.

I don't think... Are we gonna have

a steampunk candidate for president?

Probably not.

Would the steampunk candidate be Republican or Democrat?

No, it would be the Steampunk Party.

Yeah, but what would they be more aligned with?

What do you think?

I don't know.

I think within geek culture,

we are often our own worst enemies,

because we love the stuff we love

and we love the stuff so much that we want to keep doing it.

And inevitably, that degrades it.

Steampunk, as with any subcultural trope

that becomes trendy,

it gets harder and harder to do interesting things with it.

It's not impossible, but the bar is high.

And just like I think the bar these days should be very high

for zombies and vampires,

I think the bar should be extremely fucking high

if you're doing steam engines and gears.

A lot more people are coming into things like steampunk

through the mainstream, one could say appropriation

or one could say trickle down or whatever of steampunk,

primarily as an aesthetic and not as a philosophy

or a politics or a way of life.

But instead of turning up our noses at people

who buy their coat at Hot Topic, I think we can say,

"Oh, that's cool that you're interested in this.

"Are you also interested in the real element of this?"

Now, imagine the '80s TV movie where, you know,

the kid is all of a sudden, like, getting into

Dungeons & Dragons, and then all of a sudden

the crazy Satanist anarchists come out of the corner

and say, "Hey, kid, why don't you try, you know,

"being queer and overthrowing the government?"

Somebody else has said that, you know,

"Making is the religion of steampunk."

I kind of like the maker aspect of contemporary steampunk.

We are not reenactors or even re-creationists;

we are reimaginers.

They have a sort of lot of social credibility

and they're very keen into sort of do it yourself,

do it together styles of ideology.

We grew up in a situation of don't look inside the box,

don't know how your VCR works, you know, and so all of a sudden

you run into a group of people that the first thing they do

is grab a screwdriver and a hammer and go to work.

My job is not just to consume, but steampunk says,

engage with it, make it your own,

break it, risk it, reinterpret it,

turn it into something else.

Save the broken bits for later.

I love getting my hands dirty.

You know, I'm always wanting to make something.

I certainly was always the kid that took stuff apart.

This has been a way of learning how to put it back together.

This is Captain Nemo's underwater rifle.

It took me approximately three months to make.

There are 93 parts to it.

These are the ray guns.

This is the ceramic one.

You know, when you look at it close up, you can really see

that it's made like a film prop.

This one, this doesn't disguise its origins at all.

I mean, these are coat hooks and so on.

These are found bits from other stuff.

It's not meant to pretend that it's functional.

I think with steampunk, upcycling's very important.

You take what you have now,

usually a bunch of mundane stuff,

and you combine it into something

which looks like it came out of Jules Verne.

So this is the world of Captain Chronomek.

Captain Chronomek is a steampunk superhero.

He travels through history solving historical puzzles,

solving historical mysteries, righting historical wrongs,

and he's ultimately very invested in the idea

of bringing the wonder of technology

into the world again.

The thing that I'm most emotionally attached to

is the Luminiferous Tessellator.

It embodies how we make steampunk art

and how we make props.

It's held together with glue and tape and paint,

and it's all about taking these things

and imagining the story you can tell with them.

There's something a little revolutionary about it

because you're not just going out and buying

a premade something or other, you're creating your own reality

out of these bits and bobs, out of our consumer culture.

These clocks, the feather on the second hand goes

It's a bit of that humor,

and a bit of that sentimentality.

That's a word we haven't used yet,

but that's a very steampunk word is "sentimental."

Not just romantic, but sentimental.

The nice thing about living in a slower era

was that you could master a technology

before it was obsolete,

and you can't do that anymore.

To me, the heart of punk is just

grab it, make it your own, do it yourself.

Steampunk, they're grabbing these technologies

and they're making them their own.

They're making things themselves.

They're taking pieces of this and pieces of that

and putting them together and making something brand new.

They will have a story of where this thing came from,

and they are actually creating narrative

that is basically storytelling of a different type.

When I conceived this character,

I realized that I would have to build a physical model

in order to Photoshop it into these vintage images.

I really think that's part of what sells it

in the photographs and all of the digital imagery Paul does.

It is actually a physical object.

I wanted to make one of my own because, heck, that's what I do.

I thought, "Well, gosh, wouldn't it be great

if there was a one-to-one scale, full size Boilerplate?"

Every time you see Boilerplate moving in the books

or sitting down, that's all Photoshopped.

So basically, we've got to build all of that into this guy.

I would like it if his head could turn.

Oh, cool.

Oh, he lives!

That excitement of seeing people actually creating something

and sometimes on really large scale,

that creates that kind of fevered imagination

and wanting to be part of something

that I don't think you can get through the other elements.

The Neverwas Haul is a three-story

Victorian house on wheels

that is built on the frame of a fifth wheel travel trailer.

We built it in 2006 for the Burning Man festival.

It is a sculpture art car,

70% to 80% built from recycled, repurposed material.

Obtainium: that which we can obtain.

Shannon decided to build a drivable house,

which is actually directly out of the book Snow Crash.

We had the Haul up on the playa.

People came out of the woodworks in their Victorian finery

that they've obviously been carrying

out to Burning Man for years.

That's where we first heard of steampunks.

I don't think any of us knew anything about steampunk.

We had no knowledge of it.

We had no idea that this was even going on.

We didn't realize that

the fun stuff that we were getting into

was something that actually had a label to it.

If "The Mouse" had to build the Neverwas Haul,

it would cost him about a half a million dollars

and they'd have hire somebody to actually fabricate it.

We were building it on beer and pizza.

Shannon O'Hare really pulled us all together

and made it something cohesive.

The thing about working with Shannon is, it's like, Shannon hacks

building construction the way I hack machinery.

And I would never have tried to take on a project that big.

I would love to foster

more people doing creative things with their hands.

And so I've started dabbling more and more

and now I'm cutting metal and wood

and assembling things with tools

and doing stuff I never would've done ever in my entire life.

You know, we love the fact that the Neverwas

has become an art collective.

It's a lot more like a family in a way.

Sam and Katherine,

they've been with us for close to four years.

So they are having a amazing steampunk ceremony

done here on the Neverwas.

Sam proposed to me as part of a three-act play.

Dr. Professor Samuel Tweed, that's my character,

rides off in his airship and he crash lands on the moon.

And he's stranded and he's totally, you know,

out of water, out of food, out of supplies.

I send a message back to Earth,

and the Neverwas Haul and their crew from the Hibernian Academy,

they come by and they rescue me.

With his beloved librarian.

Yes, there is a library on the Haul.

And he's so overcome,

he just gets down on one knee and proposes.

Oh my dearest Katherine, I love thee so.

Even though my airship is grounded,

my heart soars to the sky.

Katherine Becvar, will you marry me?

Of course, my love!

Actually, most of the people in the audience

who were just there for the fundraiser

didn't realize that it was a real proposal.

They just thought it was part of the show.

But it was not.

I actually proposed to her and gave her a real ring.

And so tomorrow at Obtainium Works,

we're going to take this to the next level

and we're actually going to get married.

It's going to be monumental.

I mean, these guys do not do anything small.

So this is the main mechanism here.

And then, of course, you have to crank it to start with.

You know, they just love doing the same stuff

and the whole costuming thing and the storytelling

and, you know, the characters and so forth...

they are steampunk.

I think one reason that we keep going back to the Victorians

is because there was such enthusiasm

and such optimism for technology.

It was a time where instead of people looking at technology

and seeing it in such a negative way,

that it was incredibly optimistic.

Science will save us, we'll have the cures

to all diseases, we'll go to the planets.

They honestly believed that the technology

was going to save them.

And, well, Mary Shelley thought maybe it could raise the dead.

If you look at the history of computing itself,

computing started off as a crazy idea

that was too science fiction for its time.

And in the same way,

fantasy and fiction has found a way

to combine the magical and the practical in steampunk.

When people look at that, they can romanticize about an era

in which a lot of people just got together and said,

"Damn it all, let's just go.

"There's nothing too far away that we cannot reach."

There was this idea that we are on the cusp of greatness.

We're on the cusp of, you know, saving humanity

and conquering the universe and doing exciting things,

whereas the science fiction of the last 20 or 30 years

has been more to the tune of

"We're going to destroy ourselves with our technology."

There's so little science fiction

that talks about exploration and invention.

It's all "Oh, God, don't build giant robots, they'll kill you!"

And the Victorians were like, "Let's build giant robots!

And, "Oh, shoot, they killed us."

Real science has shown us an amazing universe out there

that we aren't capable of getting to.

So in a way, going back to a time

when science fiction seemed like it could do anything,

even though we know it can't,

that's not rational; it's magic.

I'm very object driven.

Part of being into the aesthetic of steampunk shows in my work

in like I describe all of these dresses and stuff like that,

and part of is that I love

what objects can tell you about culture.

And so what I love about the Victorian era

is that they are in an industrial revolution

where new technology is being constantly invented

and so much of it is silly and whimsical.

So I love crazy curling tongs and dusters that are automated

and the first vacuum cleaners

and teacups that are made with little moustache protectors.

I just encountered a letter opener

that had a hidden pocketknife in the handle.

Why do you need a pocketknife in your letter opener,

which is already quite sharp often?

I have no idea, but there it is.

That's the kind of things that

the Victorians were doing all the time.

It has so many elements, but one of them has to be

nostalgia for the Industrial Age, which is over,

and so as soon as something real is gone,

you can have the fantasy of it.

One of the most common misperceptions of steampunk

is that these people are just trying to go back.

They're just trying to go back to like a simpler time.

And they're just trying to get rid of all of this stuff.

No, most of these people, they love it,

but they're recognizing it for the tool that it is.

As our technology has become so terribly, terribly powerful

and we've become so dependent on it,

there's simultaneously something very fragile about it.

Sure, we love technology and it's magical,

but, you know, not only do none of us know

how to like open up an iPad and repair it or make it,

but we kind of almost feel like it's controlling our lives.

I have an iPhone that we call the Jesus Phone.

I can see myself from space with that phone,

but god help me if I drop it in a bathtub.

I mean, it's all over.

And I think that goes back to some of the issues of control,

like taking control of your own identity and your own destiny.

I think that a lot of people feel they don't want to be

that far removed from how things work.

When the grid goes down,

what do we have that still works?

Well, we have the old things.

We have the analog things.

The steampunk aesthetic is kind of a rebellion

against pretty much the whole industrial design aesthetic

of the last 50 years

where they've basically been trying to boil everything down

into a magic box.

The technology's insane, it's absolutely amazing,

but because it's everywhere, you don't really notice it.

I think the mind begins to kind of slide off

the seamlessness of Apple design after a while.

If I really sit back and think about it,

it's just like utterly bizarre to me.

I mean, an iPad is like, you know, it's fuckin' magic.

I can just touch it, and I can, ooh, sending stuff.

It's just like in these movies --

Blade Runner didn't even have shit that nice.

Our current industrial design movement

is beautiful and amazing and streamlined.

Oh sure, and it's designed to keep you

from killing yourself in the gears.

Right, but just the fact that you see it over and over again.

It's really amazing, but it doesn't look like anything.

It doesn't look like a machine.

It looks like an Etch A Sketch.

Somehow or another we're supposed to accept the idea

that less is better.

The Victorians would not have bought into that

for five seconds.

They thought if you were going to make

a giant death ray killing machine,

it should fill an entire room, and it should be gorgeous,

and it should have a million levers and buttons

that don't even do anything. They just look cool.

But it should look like a giant death ray killing machine,

and now we have a button.

Something like your slick, shiny iPod or your laptop

or your slick modern surface

just doesn't have that same degree of humanity in there.

To some extent we like sleek functionality,

but we need some rough edges

for our brains to kind of latch onto.

Sometimes we want that kind of validation

that there is stuff in our lives that we can touch

and that connects you to the real world.

It's great to have a smartphone, but that phone is boring.

I mean, look at this phone,

like look at how fucking tiny the buttons are.

Like, this is aggravating!

There's a banality to like a candy bar phone.

It's made to be as lightweight as possible,

very cheap clattery sound when you drop it on the floor,

really, really junky piece of hardware,

but it's a miracle.

You give that device to a French semaphorist

in the 19th century, and he would weep.

And what I think steampunk does

is make you remember just how miraculous it all is.

For me, it just shows the maturity

of, sort of, our technology,

is we're having more of it, and because there's more of it,

people want different things from it,

because one size doesn't fit all.

What kind of relationship

do we want to have with people, and between people?

And how does your technology mediate that?

How can we use technology or change technology

or create technology in a way that allows us

to express our own individuality

but also at the same time not be confined to that

and not have everything that we seek out through technology

only merely reinforce that?

We are really entered an era

in which part of the business model of contemporary technology

is often making it illegal for you to modify your technology,

and if your needs aren't widespread enough

that someone can figure out a reason

to market a product to you,

you're just out of luck when it comes to shifting your device.

And that inhumanity in the scale of technology

and in the way technology works

is, I think, one of the great frustrations of the modern time -

This passive voice: "Mistakes were made.

"There is no human agency responsible

"for this thing that's getting in your way."

Really frustrating.

People's interaction with technology is kind of,

it's kind of strange.

I mean, we're both addicted and frightened of it.

One of the big questions today is whether or not

we will have enough tinkerable stuff in our world

that when someone takes away the tinkerable,

we go, "Wait a second!

"Inherently, technology should be tinkerable!"

I think the way that humanity interacts

with technology right now is incredibly alienating

and incredibly destructive,

and I understand why people want to reject that

and just throw out everything.

But I consider that to be a horrid mistake.

I'm not interested in throwing away technology,

I'm not interested in throwing away human knowledge.

I am interested in redeveloping technology

from a more human perspective

and with basically different motivations.

I would say that right now

technology is essentially profit-motivated,

and I would argue that that is actually,

it does a disservice to science.

Steampunk ships broken.

The idea is that you are supposed to open it,

the idea is that you are supposed to modify it,

you are supposed to personalize it,

you are supposed to humanize it.

An object from the notional steampunk past,

parallel dimension arrives with the intention

that it's not to be used when it comes out of the package.

You're meant to do stuff with it to make it yours.

Stuff has to happen to it. It's meant to be bodged,

and it has obvious snags hanging off of it

where you're meant to add stuff, or fix stuff,

or attach stuff, or move stuff around.

It has a lot of user-serviceable parts.

And so that appeals to me

partly because, you know, there is no device

that is exactly perfect for you, and even if there was,

it wouldn't be perfect for you tomorrow

because your needs would change.

And so the idea of having configurability

built into the hardware around you is very seductive.

Technology is a manifestation

of our relationship with nature, with people.

Is there a way that we can restructure how we see people

that would change the kind of technology we produce?

I think that a lot of people are really interested in steampunk

as a reinterpretation

of humanity's interaction with machinery.

Once you understand machinery,

you realize there's really only so many ways to do things,

and you can start hacking machinery

the way people do with software.

And there's new plastic crap coming out all the time

that somebody has to go through and see how it can be bent

to be used for something else.

And maybe the grid won't go down,

maybe we will end up in some, you know,

vast space-exploring science fictiony future,

and that would be fantastic,

but the hammer and nail is never going to go away.

In real terms, anything that anchors you more in a reality

that isn't based in the Internet and the electronic world

may actually be a lifesaving point of view down the road.

I believe that we will be forced to reconsider

all the motivations behind our technology

by ecological concerns, and I think as we do that

we're going to start coming to the same answers

that steampunks are on the forefront of.

Probably not the ray guns.

There are very few places left

where adults can go and learn new skills.

It's the great leveler,

is making and sharing and teaching,

and teaching doesn't have to happen in a school.

I've learned more about history and music

and artwork and people because of steampunk

than I ever did in grade school, high school, college.

I like learning, and I feel like by teaching,

you get to share with people, and that's just so exciting.

People actually absorb information much better

when they're being engaged and entertained.

When people look at Boilerplate, they smile, they laugh,

and that's exactly what I was looking for.

When you go to these sorts of events,

you get to talk to a really wide range of people

about how they interact with technology,

how they interact with the world.

The fact that there is a community

that is doing different aspects of the same thing, it's fuel.

And it's interesting to hear kids who are 11

talk about wanting to build robots that are steam-powered.

You'll walk around in the hallway

at a steampunk convention and you'll see

a 16-year-old boy and a 70-year-old woman

having an in-depth discussion

on how to crochet an octopus or something like that.

And that kind of exchange of knowledge

is how we all better ourselves.

People often say, "How did you get into science fiction?"

And my pat answer is always,

"Well, how did you get out of it?"

Because if you look at a class of 8-year-olds,

most of them are reading that kind of stuff,

which suggests that those of us within the field,

we're not so much converts; we're the ones with rigor.

I'm going to be running a workshop at Maker Faire

where I'm going to bring a collection of essentially junk

to get kids to make their own steampunk props

within the universe of Captain Chronomek.

Maker Faire and the do-it-yourself world

is a revolt against the corporate

"This is what you're going to buy today" consumer world.

My whole thing has been children playing with live steam.

Showing kids the ways in which

they can have fun and be engaged in technology creates the people

that are going to be designing the technology in the future.

I do believe that

if more people grow up reading steampunk,

they're going to have a better idea

about how technology can actually be ours

and not a cold, alienated thing.

If every child goes home

and builds something great and wants to create more,

then our job is done.

I think steampunk will be a gateway

into a future phile, a tribe,

of aspirational, elite, intellectual,

and artistic creative people.

I would love to live in that world,

and I think I'm in it right now.

A few times a year.

Why not make it 24/7?

Welcome to Obtainium Works!

The steampunk wedding of the century!

I am just having the most fun day of my life.

You throw a party, and all your friends show up.

Weddings are awesome!

I think there are too many people in the world right now

who just, you know, they won't sing,

they won't tell stories

because "Oh, well, I'm not a professional,"

and I want to see more and more people going,

"So what? I'm not a professional. This gives me joy."

Even if it's only pretty.

You know, pretty is its own reward.

At the end of the day,

steampunk is really a story

about artisanship on a human scale.

If we can open the door

for other people to experience, for other people to create,

for other people to express,

maybe that does change how the human equation happens.

Thank you, everyone, for coming.

I hope you enjoy the show.

There's nothing magical

about Victorian top hats and brass.

This is not what's important.

Make your own dream.

I keep meeting really amazing people,

and if steampunk has brought me anything,

it's brought me a lot of really, really excellent friends.

I have family all over the world now.

Perhaps in some ways it's almost been good therapy.

There were different events in my life that made me pull back,

and there were many days when I would be really happy

to never walk out the front door again.

Being in the ambassador role,

I had to go out and meet people in person and be present,

and that's been a very good thing.

I have two young daughters, and the 8-year-old

is trying to understand what steampunk is.

We took her with us to the Abney Park show,

and she had a blast.

It was her first rock concert ever,

and she now wants to become

an artist rock band fiddler airship pirate.

Creativity is the most important part.

Here in our heart.

That's how we hack that.

Because they don't own this.

By the power vested in me

by the Church of the Subgenius and the Universal Life Church,

I hereby pronounce you husband and wife.

Professor Tweed, you may kiss your bride.

There's a spark of inspiration and creativity and imagination

in all of these people that we've spoken to.

Fundamentally steampunk is about

the power of the human imagination.

Words cannot express the delight

that I am feeling at this moment.

Thank you.

I want to say thank you all, very much.

I really feel honored to have this dinner with you all.

Cheers.

I'm very happy with what we've learned.

You can take this interplay

and take the questioning and envisioning

and thinking about the future

and actually have it be fun and cool and hip.

It's taking the absurd

and the weird and the cool

and putting those things together and making it fun.

And it steampunk makes somebody smile,

that's to me the success.

I have no problem being a jester for the world.

I have no problem with people going,

"You look like a complete buffoon."

And I'm like, "I feel good.

"I like the way I look, and I made you smile."

When I get up in the mornin', I'm gonna put on my leather.

When I go to bed at night, I'll take it off

and put it back on the next day.

I'm not stoppin',

and I don't think anybody else is, not for a while.

We all do our little bit

to, you know, make steampunk really, really complex,

just the way that, you know, society is.

It's good times.

We must dance!