Teslapunk galore
The video project I'm making is taking more time to finish than expected - and some of it is my own fault because I may have gotten addicted to playing The Sims 3 and then I also decided that I wanted to start knitting my first ever sweater... Oops. While I'm trying to get it finished relatively soon, here's some thoughts about one heck of an illustration I did in October for a punk-punk themed calendar.
The theme I chose for my illustration was Teslapunk, "tesla" of course referring to the inventor Nikola Tesla. This year I happened to read a book written by Carolyn Marvin named "When Old Techonologies Were New" and the technological fantasies and ideas discussed in that book, with the heavy emphasis on electrical light and telecommunication, made me want to choose Teslapunk specifically.
Defining Teslapunk is a bit of a challenge since it hasn't been established as well as the classics, Cyberpunk and Steampunk, have been. Some could argue that it's just Steampunk with tesla coils. There are also some smaller Cyberpunk derivatives, like Dieselpunk and Decopunk (even something called Radiumpunk?), that time period wise are pretty close to Teslapunk. With this illustration I tried to avoid the art deco look because I think it makes more sense for the Teslapunk time period being set around late 19th century (belle époque) and art deco only starts taking influence in the 1920s.
Searching for "Teslapunk" usually seems to yield pictures of Tesla inspired guns (and sadly, AI generated slop) but I wasn't going to just draw everyone walking with techy guns. Besides, the challenge is to portray one genre with one picture. A cityscape with people passing by seemed like the best idea. Executing it wasn't easy since I'm not that good with perspective but after some thumbnailing I ended up with a concept I was pretty happy with and what would be something fun to draw. I feel like I ended up investing a lot of time on researching this topic, made a Milanote board for all the references, even played some Bioshock and watched Christopher Nolan's "The Prestige" for inspiration :D
Instead of purely basing everything on Tesla's ideas (e.g. plasma globes and the Wardenclyffe Tower), I added some other elements I think would fit well in a society that uses everything electrics in their everyday life or would fit the Victorian retrofuturistic vibes. The people are wearing light ornaments and going to places with moving walkways (one person in the illustration is also sporting some classy "lighting rod fashion"). There's even fancy electric cocktails served in uranium glass! On the other hand, would it be "punk" without some dystopian themes? There's definitely a lot light pollution with all the artificial lights. Maybe even a weather machine has been produced to create thunderclouds to "harvest" lightings? Originally, I also wanted there to be a references to advertising on clouds but I scrapped that because the illustration was getting too cluttered.
This blog post ended up really long! All in all, I think there's a lot potential for some Teslapunk stories! Maybe someday I will flesh out my own Teslapunk themed story :)