Back to the retro future


I've often complained in the past about having a steam-powered computer (not since upgrading last Christmas, though), but on Saturday I saw what is very nearly the real thing, as created by Richard Nagy (aka Datamancer).

We were passing the Museum of the History of Science, you see, and decided to pop in to admire all the various measuring and calculating tools and their famous Einstein blackboard - and to check out the current Steampunk exhibition.

Now I'll confess I had no idea what on earth steampunk was before stepping inside. The Wikipedia page gives a fairly good definition and explanation, but it surprised me to learn that it was first recognised as a literary phenomenon, an off-shoot of sorts of cyberpunk, when the medium of visual and physical art seems so much more suited to its expression.

I can't say the exhibition excited in me any desire to read a steampunk novel or browse through a steampunk comic, but the artworks on display - bizarre and only barely utilitarian contraptions that seem to have been spawned from the fantastical imagination of some of forward-thinking Victorian inventor - were fascinating. In a similar though more aesthetically striking way to those 60s visions of a world where everything is Bacofoil silver, collectively they hint at a strange unrealised future. One in which everyone seems to wear goggles of some description...

Link: Pictures of exhibits from the BBC Oxford site