Retrofuturism and the meaning of Steampunk, Clockpunk etc

Henry Jenkins (via BoingBoing) has an essay on the origins of Retrofuturism and Steampunk. Jenkins explains the origins of retro-futurism in the essay and besides it has a stamp of approval by Cory Doctorow so its highly recommended. Here is an excerpt.

From the start, however, science fiction has also functioned as a genre which enabled us to reflect upon the past. Time travel stories, such as H.G. Well’s “The Time Machine,” were among the first science fiction stories written, even though the metaphor of traveling back into history fit rather poorly within the rationalist scientific discourse that otherwise defined early science fiction as a genre. To tell such stories, one had to shed the idea that the genre was governed by reasonable and plausible extrapolation based on known science. Time travel stories, such as Orson Scott Card’s PastWatch or Sterling’s “Mozart in Mirrorshades,” (also published in the Mirrorshades collection), continue to have currency. A second strand of science fiction, alternative history, takes us back to key historical turning points and asks what if scenarios, imaging how the world might have taken a very different shape if the outcomes had been different; alternative future stories, thus, imagine what would happen if the South had won the Civil War, if the United States had not entered World War II, or if Stalin had continued to dominate the Soviet Union down to the present day. A third strand of science fiction seeks to extrapolate based not on contemporary understandings of science but rather on earlier historical formulations, constructing science fiction stories based on ancient Greek, early modern, or Victorian conceptions of science. The term, “steampunk,” was coined to refer to science fiction which built on Victorian society and technology, a genre inspired as much by contemporary representations of the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, as by anything actually produced during the late 19th century. Sterling and Gibson’s The Difference Engine, explores what might have happened if Charles Babbage’s experiments had been successful, paving the way for a pre-20th century version of the digital revolution. Finally, retrofuturism takes earlier science fiction as its raw materials, revisiting mid-20th century constructions of the future from a more contemporary perspective. For the purposes of this essay, I will be focusing on works that mobilize the iconography that emerged through Hugo Gernsback’s pulp science fiction magazines, through Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon comic strip, through films like Just Imagine and Things to Come, and through the 1939 New York World’s Fair, among other sources, but there are other retrofuturist works – for example, Christian Gossett’s comic book series, Red Star, which built on Soviet science fiction and socialist utopian literature – that revisit other historical constructions of the future. These various subgenres suggest that science fiction may be as effective as a genre for imagining the past as it is as a genre for projecting the future or commenting on the present and the key point is that its social commentary works by reading one time period against another.

Check out the full essay here.

“The Tomorrow That Never Was”: Retrofuturism in the Comics of Dean Motter (Part One)

Clockwork Girl

Clockwork girl is a new comic book which is basically a new and unique take on the Romeo and Juliet story where “Juliet’s” family believe in the superiority of technology and the family of “Romeo” believes in the superiority of biology. As the title suggests the “Juliet” is a Clockwork automata. Here is a description of the story by the author.

A nameless robot girl has recently been given the gift of life from her creator. While exploring the wonders of an ordinary world, she meets an amazing mutant boy and they share a friendship that must overcome their warring families.

The Tinker is the Clockwork Girl’s creator and the world’s leading machine scientist. He blames the natural sciences for holding back the machine age with a zealous fervor.

Dendrus is the Tinker’s former friend, chief rival and the creator of Huxley, the monster boy. He cares for his “son” a great deal, but is overly protective and shelters his son as much as he can.

Huxley, the monster boy, is just like every other pre-adolescent boy, only more so. He’s reckless and emotional, impulsive, but has a good heart. He wants to be free of his father’s restrictions regardless if the world is ready for him.

The Clockwork Girl is innocent, curious, but not stupid. She looks at strangers like a kid in a candy store and wants to know everything about this new world around her.

T-Bolt is the Clockwork Girl’s older “brother” and the Tinker’s first automaton. He’s not as primitive as he might appear, nor as a harmless.

Maddox is Huxley’s best friend, and the only sane one in the entire story. He likes apples.

The Duck Automata of Vaucanson

One of the most famous automata builders of the 18th century was Jacques de Vaucanson about whom Voltaire said, ” “A rival to Prometheus, [Vaucanson] seemed to steal the heavenly fires in his search to give life.” Although he built a large number of automatas his most famous was the duck automata (pictured above). The automata could flap its wings, and even eat grain. A replica of the duck has been created at a Museum in Grenoble, France. The following is an excerpt from Wikipedia on the cultural impact of the Duck automata.

The Digesting Duck of France was unveiled by its creator, Jacques de Vaucanson, as the first automaton able to metabolise food and digest it, expelling waste just as a mortal duck, in the spring of 1739. During The Enlightenment, a time of mechanisation of labour, the idea that human beings could be replaced by these enigmatic, never-tiring aberrations of nature created a cultural revolution. These mechanisations of eighteenth-century France probably inspired the illustrious duck of the master toy-maker, Jacques de Vaucanson, which won the heart and admiration of the whole of Europe.

Vaucanson’s Digesting Duck followed the principles of Descartes’s mechanistic universe, and bolstered the Enlightenment-era belief that animals were just meat machines, but automatons nonetheless. The ability to create life no longer was the domain of God and of living organisms, but was now captive in the hands of man’s genius. These ideas terrified and excited many people, but were one of the major ideological changes from a natural to a mechanistic world view.

Vaucanson quickly capitalised on the commercial success of his first android, modelled after a recent sculpture by Antoine Coysevox then in the gardens of the Palais des Tuileries, with the launch of a shepherd who played the tabor and pipe. The most acclaimed member of Vaucanson’s trinity of entertaining equipment, however, was the notorious eating, digesting, and defecating duck. Whereas the rustic flutist inhaled, exhaled, and dexterously moved his fingers over a musical instrument, this barnyard variant of Phil’s and Hero’s bejewelled birds eagerly swallowed kernels of grain to excrete them in the metamorphosed shape of pellets. Unfortunately, this amazing transformation proved fraudulent. The delicate droppings were not the natural result of simulated peristalsis, but of a secondary device triggering the sphincter where a masticated plop lay hidden.

Clockpunk Anthology: I Want a Mechanical Echidna

Here is the latest submission for the Anthology project by Meika Loofs Samorzewski. The story was inspired by Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. Enjoy!

I Want a Mechanical Echidna

The Automata / Automaton Blog

Appearently there a whole blog dedicated to Automatas. Check it out at the following URL:

http://www.dugnorth.com/blog/index.aspx

Replica of Al-Jaziri’s Elephant Clock

One of the readers pointed out that there is actually Al-Jaziri’s Elephant Clock in the Ibn Battuta Mall in Dubai. Here is the link to the pictures of Flickr. Enjoy and thanks for the link Craig!

Da Vinci @ Wired

The Wired ran a truly fascinating article on Da Vinci a few years ago. It shows that Da Vinci was indeed in a league of his own and sheds light on Da Vinci the roboticist! Here is the link and an excerpt below:

The historical record offers no mention of da Vinci having built a cart. Pedretti, however, unearthed a potential clue. “I found a fantastic document, date 1600,” Pedretti says. “It’s a description of a banquet held in Paris to honor the new queen of France, who was a Medici. On that occasion, Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger observed the presentation of a mechanical lion. It walked, opened its chest, and in place of a heart it had fleurs-de-lis.” Pedretti pauses, gathering more papers. “This document, which was totally unknown, says this was a concept similar to one that Leonardo carried out in Lyons on the occasion of Francis I.” It appears da Vinci had engaged in high tech diplomacy circa 1515.

The cart, suggests Pedretti, may have been an early study in an emerging da Vinci sideline. Leonardo, he believes, created animated spectacles centuries before the great age of the European automata of Jacques de Vaucansan and Wolfgang von Kempelen. “The irony of the whole thing is that there is not a single hint in Leonardo’s manuscripts of this greatest technological invention,” Pedretti says. “Imagine to have a lion walk and stand on its legs and open up its chest – this is top technology!” What happened to those pages of drawings that would have revealed the inner workings of these wondrous devices? Perhaps they lie misfiled in some lost archive; perhaps they were destroyed by some church authority in the manner of Albertus Magnus’ mechanical woman, smashed by Thomas Aquinas as a work of the devil.

Half a millennium on, the cart could, says Rosheim, not only rewrite the history of robotics but also bring another da Vinci to light: da Vinci the roboticist. “If it was simply a spring-powered cart, it would not be that big a deal,” he says. “What’s significant is that you can replace or change these cams and alter how it goes about its path – in other words, it’s programmable in an analog, mechanical sense. It’s the Disney animatronics of its day.” The individual parts, interestingly, are not original to da Vinci – gears, cams, and the verge-and-foliot mechanism were all familiar concepts, particularly to clockmaking, the nanotech of da Vinci’s day. Indeed, as the historian Otto Mayr has noted, “clocks and automata, in short, tended to be very much the same thing”; clocks, in 16th-century dictionaries, were considered just one type of automata. But the possibility is that da Vinci married two ideas and created, in essence, a clock on wheels – turning the segmenting of time into the traversing of space – well before anyone else had thought of such a thing. No one could have done it as elegantly, in so compact a package, says Rosheim. “The robot cart is one of the most significant missing links in studying Leonardo. Suddenly, many drawings are making sense.”

Clockwork Insects

The folks over at Cabinet of Wonders have an awesome post on Clockwork insects. It seems that the creator was inspired by the almost Clockwork precision of insects so he decided to combine Clockwork mechanisms with insects. Here is description by the creator of the clockwork insects regarding how the whole thing began (via Cabinet of Wonders via Technovelgy).

“One day I found a dead intact beetle. I then located an old wristwatch, thinking of how the beetle also operated and looked like a little mechanical device and so decided to combine the two. After some time dissecting the beetle and outfitting it with watch parts and gears, I had a convincing little cybernetic sculpture. I soon made many more with other found insects and have been exploring and developing the theme ever since.”
(Source: Technovelgy.com)

The amazing thing is that you can actually buy these insects at the Insect Lab Studio if you have the money that is since most of the insects cost more than $500 at the site.

I Love Clockpunk

 

A friend of mine noticed this item, an “I Love Clockpunk” sweatshirt, on Amazon and forwarded the link to me. I had no idea who came up with the idea about the swearshirt but here it is. It seems to be related to the punk genre of music, other than that I do not have much info. Please let me know if someone knows more about it.

Here is the link to the item on Amazon.com.

Gun Powder Flask-Sundial Compass Watch

Found via Watchismo– a portable compass watch from the late 16th century. Here is the scoop from Watchismo.

Portable watches had only been around a few decades when this multi-function timepiece was built in southern Germany circa 1590.

Consisting of a round powder flask made of rosewood with inlaid and engraved rosette-shaped ornaments of brass and bone. A small clock with 1-12 hours twice situated on the outer ring. The small funnel of bone is closed with a springy lid made of brass. Below the center under the engraved lid with a transversally placed hinge, there is a horizontal sundial with indication of the hours from six o’clock in the morning to six o’clock in the evening. A small compass with north-south indication but without correction for the magnetic pole. The string gnomon is stretched by opening the lid and is only valid for one latitude. On the side of the flask, there is an opening to a funnel-shaped small pipe which is placed in the socket and allows for filling up the powder flask. Diameter 10.8cm