Oil Punk

A late-era Steam Punk variant, concerned with oily grime and powerful machines etc.

It’s weird this whole steam-punk thing. It’s like supernormal stimilu not just present in an object, but the essence (or an essence) of an entire era extracted, purified then steeped into every available artefact – creating an entire supernormal environment.

It goes beyond nostalgia-for-a-time-that-never-existed to something more entirely. We’re reinventing the Wheel of Time in our own image. It’s like a type of mirror. History rewritten through the (grimy) filter of an hallucinatory prism. Pass the laudanum.

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Of course we’ve been doing this for years:

(oldest(?) known sculpture)

The Temples of Khajuraho

(Lady Colin Campbell from the NPG in London)

(Mai Shiranui : not sure where this one came from)

There (apparently) is a species of moth that sexually selects for a certain set of characteristics – and will actually choose anatomically impossible models made by scientists over real potential mates.

Supernormal stimuli isn’t just about sex though – it’s also about art – that which resonates with the human condition, amplified, and given back.

I wonder if there’s a genre called “wank-punk”?. Oh dear god, I do hope so. The name’s so good it has to. I shall search the internet until I find it.