Out-of-place technological artifacts and productive unease

Gregory’s last post on Babbage and railroads, illustrated by that arresting Montparnasse train wreck photo, got me thinking about Victorian visual technologies and their ability to register accidents as phenomena. At the same time, Daniel’s analogy between aircraft data recorders (black boxes), on the one hand, and Babbage’s proposal for their 19th-century railroad equivalents, on [...]

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Past Futures

There’s a lot to like about this diagram from Doogie Horner’s new book Everything Explained Through Flow Charts (I found this particular one posted on boingboing). I love the way the causal chains suddenly morph into spatial maps, and I was particularly moved by the street urchin’s “important lesson.”

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Aesthetics Old and New

I expected to be able to hear Molly Porkshanks Friedrich’s Complete Mechanical Womb tick. It didn’t look as though it should pulse with life, but I did anticipate a mechanical buzzing or whirring. I was alone in the basement of Oxford’s history of science museum, at what the museum billed as “the world’s first museum [...]

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“But look past my airplane goggles. This is my lifestyle…”

McSweeney’s offers some mild satire of the Steampunk lifestyle in one of its “Short imagined monologues.” (Just wanted to mix in some levity with the bronze hand cranks and the soldered brass we’re featuring this month). (h/t: The Steampunk Librarian)

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Steampunk Bodies

Steampunk machines are real, breathing, coughing, struggling and rumbling parts of the world. They are not the airy intellectual fairies of algorithmic mathematics but the hulking manifestations of muscle and mind, the progeny of sweat, blood, tears, and delusions. The technology of steampunk is natural; it moves, lives, ages, and even dies” (4). This is [...]

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Steampunk and Neo-Victorian Month

May is Steampunk and Neo-Victorian Month here at the Floating Academy. We’ve been a little behind in our posts, but we are all collectively interested in putting together some ideas about the phenomenon, which seems to be gathering steam – pun intended, of course! – in academic circles of late.

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