steampunk | Platypus

Looking Ahead to 2014: Living Analytically

 Patricia G. Lange  January 22, 2014

I am proud to say that The CASTAC Blog has become a truly impressive archive of scholarly and practical information for research, applied practice, and teaching. Last year the Blog saw a rich set of posts on research, pedagogy, and practice that may yield inspiration for student papers, future trends in scholarly articles, and cross-pollination of ideas for new research projects. Indeed, I encourage my anthropology of technology students to peruse the site for inspiration about current topics of interest in the STS community. Of course, it is impossible to cover the contents of an entire year of material in a single report, but I would like to continue the yearly tradition of calling out a few themes that emerged across several posts. These themes include: nuanced ideas about performance; debates about intensive engagement with personal analytics; discussions about taken-for-granted, everyday infrastructures; and re-imaginings of the future of past waste. Interestingly, these themes are not isolated but have their own intersecting echoes and intellectual provocations. (read more...)

Steampunk: Reimagining Trash and Technology

 Matt Hale  August 20, 2013

It begins with a question. What if? What if Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo, if the Hindenburg hadn’t crashed, or if Thomas Edison had never been born? What might the world be like if history had been different? Steampunk is an expressive genre that explores the possibilities of a past that never was, but might have been. Inspired by the steam-powered and mechanistic imagery of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells’ novels and the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethos of cyberpunk art and literature, steampunk combines the aesthetics and materials of the nineteenth century with the technological developments and sensibilities of the twenty-first. It is a style defined by anachronism and guided by an impulse to explore and interrogate the role of technology in everyday life. Although the genre began as a form of speculative literature in the 1980s and 1990s, it took on new life during the first decade of (read more...)