Now You Have An Excuse To Pet Your Mouse

Technology has tended towards sleek, streamlined design, which makes it look like, well, technology. However, there’s a movement that’s been going on for sometime, with the goal of adding a bit of romance to the almost obvious form of most technological devices that we use today. It’s called Steampunk, and it hearkens back to the days when showing an ankle was considered hot and if you were one of those gentlemen who needed to pay to see a palm-sized patch of flesh, then you would dial up the number of the nearest bawdy house on a telephone so large that it could be used to knock out an elephant.

Fortunately, for us, we can pay to trick out our LCD monitors, tower cases and laptops to a point that where H.G. Wells would be beside himself with jealousy. This fawning over brass and baubles even has its own genre of fiction, to which such respected authors like Neal Stephenson and Michael Chabon have contributed a tale or two. Steam and spring-propelled gadgets aside, it seems that this interest is perhaps a response to the over-homogenization that technology tends to bring with the inevitable benefit of being able to mass-produce technology on a level that makes it available to everyone. But how many colours can an iPod assume before we look at it and across to the bloke on the bus ride home and notice no apparent difference other than the paint job on an otherwise cool little mp3 player?

Steampunk brings us back to an age where the craftsmanship mattered as much as the thing being crafted; where the signature of individuality wasn’t a matter of saying, “I want what he’s having”, but instead having something made that suited YOU. Some businesses have cashed in on the want for distinguishing your things as yours (or uniquely you).  But slapping what are little more than stickers of really pretty traditional Japanese paintings or creating customized mouse pads of The Matrix, which you know a thousand other people, who have visited that Staples, already have sitting at home, doesn’t make you feel like it’s yours–does it? Wouldn’t it be nice to have at least some say in the blueprint?

Try Saying No To That Report When You've Got This Beast Looking Out At You

Makes Cents (4)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 at 2:54 pm and is filed under Arts, Jobs, Tech, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tags: Art, Design, George Panayotou, Gothic, Industrial, Punk, Screw You Recession, Steam, Victorian