STEAMPUNK IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

Retrofuturist Design Fiction and the Digital Humanities@RogerWhitson, Washington State University

“[T]he immaterial implications of many of our prominent media terms (e.g. the Cloud, wirelessness, ubiquitous computing, cognitive labor) may actually create damaging world views that deny the digital’s relation to the environment and, in so doing, excuse producer and users from any active material responsibilities.

-Amanda Starling Gould, “Restor(y)ing the Ground: Environmental Media Studies” Networking Knowledge. 9.5

“[A]s a design fiction, Steampunk provides an explicit model for how to physically realize an ideological and imagined world through design practice. We contend that the practices of DIY and appropriation that are evident in Steampunk design provide a useful set of design and implications for HCI [human-computer interaction].

-Joshua Tanenbaum, Karen Tanenbaum, Ron Wakkary, “Steampunk as Design Fiction”

“[T]he sites of many villages and towns that anciently existed along the rivers, or on the lower lands adjoining, were concealed by the water and the mud it brought with it. The sedges and reeds that arose completed the work and left nothing visible, so that the mighty buildings of olden days were by these means utterly buried. And, as has been proved by those who have dug for treasures, in our time the very foundations are deep beneath the earth, and not to be got at for the water that oozes into the shafts that they have tried to sink through the sand and mud banks.

-Richard Jefferies, After London; or Wild England (1885)

“London at the end of the nineteenth century was the largest city that had ever existed, the capital of the world’s first industrialized society and of an empire with global pretensions. It was also a novel ecosystem, a manufactured environment in which every scrap of ground and breath of air bore traces of human action. As such, it demanded new modes of dwelling.

-Jesse Oak Taylor, The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf

Thanks!@RogerWhitsonrogerwhitson.net