Steampunk is not Zero-Era

It has been a while since I've posted... I apologize for this, although I doubt anyone cares since no one ever reads this blog. Anyway, here is some newly minted rants spoken into the great abyss where all solitary cyber-voices go when no audience exists to reify the content.

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I am not writing this to piss of the steampunkers... Look, I'll be the first to admit that a lot of the fashions and babbage-age hacks are really cool looking. However, I have to define Zero-Era beyond mere aesthetics -- to the theoretical underpinnings behind the aesthetic. And this is where the two "movements" (for lack of a better word) separate. Whilst Zero-Era is an attack on the contemporary, it is not merely fetishization of the past. In fact, authentic period-piece clothing is the anti-thesis of Zero-Era. Not to do Steampunk a disservice, it is not mere sophistry of Victorian-age worship, it is quite the opposite.

In fact, Steampunk is born out of a trans-dimensional construct first introduced in literature. It presupposes advanced technological progress during the gilded age - thus demolishing the historical timeline of known reality. It runs as a parallel reality to our own.

For instance - in the film Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod Crane is not a lowly schoolteacher caught up in ghoulish plot, he is a constable with fantastical gadgetry -- CSI meets 18th century New England.

Yet it is obvious we are dealing with an alternative universe. The townspeople do not gasp with horror at such diabolical wizardry. They simply deride him for being so reliant on technology (a prescient issue, no doubt).

And while this Ichabod may be the Cadfael of his day, his rational and scientific mind is not depicted in the film as far ahead of the times, but perhaps just on the cutting edge.

This is the heart of Steampunk - a past where technological wonders are part of the time and place, not fearsome constructs of some future world.

Zero-Era is unconcerned with technology, only fashion and aesthetic. Steampunk glorifies accessories and unique, stand-out things, while Zero-Era shuns them. This is for a very good reason. For the theoretical underpinnings of Zero-Era are not based on the existence of an alternative reality, but our very own reality and shared history. It comes from the basic concept of "how would one blend-in in any time period without having to change one's wardrobe?" While Steampunk looks to accentuate and extrematize

Both concepts are based upon Science-Fiction speculation, Steampunk's being the existence of alternative realities, and Zero-Era being that of the existance of time travel. But while Steampunk is wholly anachronistic and already well defined (to some degree), one could think of Zero-Era as having something of an unobtainable, ephemeral quality.

A fashion for all ages escapes the imagination, for as we are caught in linear time the best we could hope for are approximations of such a fashion. It may even be an impossibility. Yet, unlike Steampunk, it is not based solely in the past, for Zero-Era must consider also the hypothetical fashions of future times. Thus, unlike Steampunk, I feel it has actual relevance to the dialectic of aesthetics going on at present. While some might, understandably, feel the premise for such excercises into the deconstruction of fashion silly -- there is no time travel and there most likely won't be for any imaginable time in the future, with hindsight -- was the underpinnings of Futurism or Surrealism any less silly?

Surely, their ideals were just as unobtainable as that of Zero-Era, but are they given more credence because they embarked on ridiculousness with stony faces and post-modern philosophy to back them up?

Neither Zero-Ero nor Steampunk claim any such heady idealism to our respective aesthetics - but are we not living in a world when the lines between high and low art are muddled and mixed? Can not solid and toothful critiques of modern fashion come from genre fiction as easily as from philosophical diatribes?

But I digress!!! I am starting to bore even myself. Zero-Era is not Steampunk, and thus I will sum up the differences with a few bulleted points.


STEAMPUNK:

• Anachronistic
  
• Techno-centric
• Concerned with Authenticity
• Derived from a Parallel Universe

ZERO-ERA:

• Wholistic in time-frame
• Unconcerned with technology
• Concerned with Utilitarian and Multi-Purpose clothes
• Derived from Time Travel

Ok, peace out! If anyone ever lets me know they read this thing - that would be pretty nice! *wink wink*