The Art of Steampunk

By Sarah N.

Our ability in transforming everyday mechanical objects, merging them with our own bodies, thus creating a paradoxical concept of astonishment, is one of man’s many talents.

Inspired by the Victorian era and typically features steam-powered machinery rather than advanced technology, Steampunk is an 80’s aesthetic genre. People who follow this trend are mostly known as Steamers or Steampunk adepts.

It is not only a lifestyle with aesthetic clothing and DIY craft making, combining past and future all in present time. It is also a political acknowledgment of the humanoid experience.

Steampunk is an ideological concept leading steamers in imagining and creating things unconventionally. Assembling parts and combining them with our bodies to create a unique connection, paved the way to unlocking doors of complex human mind.

The connection between organicity and machinery in order to create and reconstruct is one of today’s leading technology. And steamers, although anarchists in their own way, played a major role in reimagining our bodies in a different way and exhibiting that artistically and socially.

The-Observer, Sarah N -1526x1500

The steampunk culture waltz around steamers community inspired by the works of historical antecedents’ figures such as the English writer HG Wells, which holds political statement reinforcing the concept behind steampunk idea, and the French author Jules Vernes, involving the imagination of very detailed technologies, and many other authors (from the 19 th century until today).

Ernst Jünger said it beautifully: “There is no more to be expected from society than from the state. Salvation is in the individual.” [1] Like Nero, the main character of the notable French writer Jules Vernes, Steampunk is not only celebrated through an artistic style.

It is also a rejection of our current society which is based on human and technological principles, thus shaping a useful fiction and the identity of a futuristic vision.

Inspired by the industrial revolution era, this neo-British sub-culture movement based on artistic craftsmanship and mechanical machinery is growing all over the world.

Some artists of Figurative Destructuralism assume a Steampunk heritage.

With more or less affirmed references, they borrow allegories between mechanical fusion and the body to project their ever more contemporary vision of the world around them.

[1] Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology Paperback – February 6, 2014

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