I have been on a bit of a Steampunk kick of late and in had manifested itself in one of my recent posts about a way cool Victorian home turned museum in Texas. Prior to that my interest had been merely in stumbling on some really cool sites of people who are really into Steampunk and some of the sub genres like dieselpunk.
Over the course of the next few weeks I tend to feature some of the best of these Steampunk aficionados. Until that time NY Times has beat me to it with this articl:
Steampunk Moves Between 2 Worlds
New York Times 5/8/08 By RUTH LA FERLA
…It is also the vision of steampunk, a subculture that is the aesthetic expression of a time-traveling fantasy world, one that embraces music, film, design and now fashion, all inspired by the extravagantly inventive age of dirigibles and steam locomotives, brass diving bells and jar-shaped protosubmarines. First appearing in the late 1980s and early 90s, steampunk has picked up momentum in recent months, making a transition from what used to be mainly a literary taste to a Web-propagated way of life.
To some, “steampunk” is a catchall term, a concept in search of a visual identity. “To me, it’s essentially the intersection of technology and romance,” said Jake von Slatt, a designer in Boston and the proprietor of the Steampunk Workshop (steampunkworkshop.com), where he exhibits such curiosities as a computer furnished with a brass-frame monitor and vintage typewriter keys.
That definition is loose enough to accommodate a stew of influences, including the streamlined retro-futurism of Flash Gordon and Japanese animation with its goggle-wearing hackers, the postapocalyptic scavenger style of “Mad Max,” and vaudeville, burlesque and the structured gentility of the Victorian age. In aggregate, steampunk is a trend that is rapidly outgrowing niche status…