On Friday, November 6, a few hundred waist-coated women and mustachioed men took a break from the standard bustle of Downtown Vancouver and fell into The Fall, a two-level artists’ space at 644 Seymour Street with a retail store and art gallery on the first level, and a tattoo and body piercing studio upstairs. Leaving cars and city busses careening through puddles and  snorting along busy sidewalks behind, these fancy people took off to a time and place that no form of transportation trundling along Seymour could take them.

The Fall served as the backdrop for the Steampunk Symposium, an event of art, fashion and music in the style of steampunk, a sci-fi subculture that imagines what the world would be like if people still subscribed to steam as the main source of machine power.

“I think a lot of it pertains to quality, the fact that a lot of stuff back in that time was made well, was made durable. The steampunk movement kind of stems from the utilitarian ideal,” said Shwa Keirstead of The Fall, who curated the event.

The artwork that adorned the walls of The Fall’s first floor made use of odds and ends that would otherwise be left to collect dust in the back of a discount store, and local artists exhibited works that onlookers could pick up and play with.

The front and centre of an expansive fresco featured a peep hole, through which those curious enough could marvel at what looked like the magnified inner-workings of a mad scientist’s machine. A few dark and seductive steampunk works down from the “looking glass,” symposium-goers could admire a steampunk’s take on a rabbit, with wire for whiskers and gears for hind legs. As one exhibitor wryly put it, “You can bet that you won’t be seeing this kind of design in your next DWR [Design Within Reach] catalogue.”

Apart from the works of local artists lining the walls, the look of the steampunks themselves was a work of art in its own right. The homemade costumes were a mad mash-up between Victoria-era elegance and punk attitude; corsets clashed with coils, and top hats loomed over tattoos.

For Tommy Wlasichuk, an Industrial Design student at Emily Carr and the creator of VSteam, a group established this summer for the growing steampunk culture in Vancouver, steampunk’s divergence from the norm is what the subculture is all about. “Back then before things were mass-produced, everything would be beautiful. They would spend ridiculous amounts of time on tiny details, when today we just stamp them out of sheet metal.”

Although Wlasichuk, (aka the Evil Overlord of Steam) admits that the industry today moves too fast for steam power to be viable, he believes that the steampunk aesthetic and lifestyle is worth fighting for. “There’s just so many things that we’re missing in not having the hand-crafted things anymore. It’s nice today that everyone can have a television, but if the television had been designed in the Victorian times it’d be so much more beautiful, it wouldn’t just be a black box.”

A self-professed mechanical steampunk, Wlasichuk designed a steam-powered bicycle as part of his industrial design program. “I go to school for an industrial design degree, I intend to have an industrial design company, I will die fighting to get this stuff out there,” he said. “You can always change things, right?”

In the meantime, he and the VSteam steampunks are just looking to have a good time.

Between a movie night featuring the original Time Machine, to a tea and champagne at the Fairmont, to the Steampunk Expedition in Victoria in May, there will be lots of opportunity for costumed punks to roam Vancouver, enjoying unique art, craft and forgotten inventions. Even if they have to make it all up.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...