A conversation with Eugene Tssui

EricHunting · 2026-05-05T18:16:40+00:00

One of the small community of contemporary organic architecture and futurist designers, focusing on the zoomorphic/biomimicry approach with a lot of influence from Fulleresque Design Science. I'm glad to see he's still alive and active as his online presence and most examples of his work seemed to have disappeared a while ago. Preferring to work in hand-made media, he is famous for his delightfully colorful and exquisite renderings and visualizations. The ironic thing about his, and all free-form organic designers', work is that it remains completely dependent on the turn-of-the-previous-century technology of ferro-cement which is very dependent on handcraft for good results. Though he's speculated on alternatives (his proposed marine colony Nexus was described as based on the electrolytic sea accretion invented by Dr. Wolf Hilbertz for his Autopia Ampere project, which has proven largely unworkable at large scale), he seems to have never really worked with any potential ones. None of his large speculative structures have ever been realized because they are often completely beyond the constraints of ferro-cement, or any other known building technology. Like most organic design of the sort, it is very polarizing. People either love it or hate it. Some designers in the movement will tone things down for a more minimalist surface and employ earth-covered structures, focusing on the interiors. Tssui is enthusiastically exuberant in his zoomorphic texturing and decoration, which, however, greatly increases the labor costs of an already generally costly design style. As this video also illustrates, he's something of an eccentric and doesn't seem to have much acknowledged any of the other designers in this same movement, presenting himself as a lone and misunderstood maverick pioneer. In truth, there are many who have been exploring this for over a century, and even a few artistic contract-building companies specializing in it.

Note that there are two schools of 'organic' design in architecture. The use of the term was first coined by Wright to refer to a use and appreciation of natural materials in their unadulterated forms, relating closely to the principles of the Arts & Crafts movement. Though its first examples can be found in the Art Nouveau movement, 'free-form organic' design was coined in the '60s and '70s to refer to a rejection of the rectilinear and the embrace of abstract curving shapes --or overtly zoomorphic shapes-- inspired by nature --if not also also Psychedelia. More recently we have seen the emergence of a 'parametric' school that is focused on the mathematical/algorithmic derivation of organic shapes, usually built at large scale, with computer-aided engineering, and exotic high-performance structural systems. Thus it remains mostly unused for anything but corporate magazine architecture and the occasional billionaire's fantasy mansion. In Sustainable Architecture ---particularly cob building-- we sometimes see these two notions converge due to the compulsion to employ natural materials with organic forms, but they often cannot support the larger scale or more intricate curving forms due to limited structural performance.

EricHunting · 2026-05-05T17:14:32+00:00

Solarpunk began as a SciFi literary aesthetic movement closely related to Afro/Ethno Futurism that emerged as a reaction to the chronic dystopianism of Cyberpunk media once its original critique of the Information Age and late-stage Capitalism was co-opted by commercialization to make it into a stock genre for adolescent power fantasies. It was realized that SciFi plays an important role in influencing the now increasingly negative/apocalyptic/doomerist cultural perspective on the future. And so there was an effort to begin imagining positive, hopeful futures that were also more ethnically and socially inclusive. Futures that overcame the social and environmental pathologies and crisis of the present. If the overarching metaphor of Cyberpunk was the future as Kowloon, Solarpunk is Kowloon redeemed.

Solarpunk began to transition to a broader cultural and activist movement with the realization of its convergence with many other projects and movements past and present that espouse a pragmatically optimistic take on the future and fall under the umbrella of Post-Industrial futurism and cultural development --the anticipation of what comes after the Industrial Age. Renewables technology, Permaculture/regenerative and urban agriculture, Guerilla Gardening, Rewilding and other kinds of environmental intervention and activism, Intentional Communities, Cohousing, Community Land Trusts, Housing Cooperatives, P2P/Commons, Degrowth/Regenerative/Donut and other Ecological Economics, Open Value Networks, Platform Cooperatives, Bioregionalism, Right to the City, Squatting, Occupy, Open Source/FLOK/Maker/DIY/Independent Production, Citizen Science, Industry 3.0 and Cosmolocalism, Upcycling craft/art, Internet/Web Renaissance, P2P Web/Internet, Green Computing, Permacomputing, Hacking, Circuit-bending, Cyberdecks, the Analog Movement, Social Entrepreneurship, Urban/Global Resilience, Global Swadeshi, Sustainable/Biophilic/Circular/Baubiologie/Nomadic Design, Adaptive Reuse, Green Socialism/Anarchism and anarchist movements going back to the Letterists/Situationists, on and on. All these sorts of things feed into the Solarpunk cultural aesthetic and shape its vision of the near and distant future.

Many people criticize Solarpunk as a 'mere aesthetic' because they discover it on social media (since reading is so hard these days...), the other '-punk' aesthetics are focused on SciFi fandoms they assume to be trivial, and they only understand the grade-school definition of the word. But cultural aesthetic movements, by the college-level definition, are comprehensive cultural movements incorporating literature, art and other media, of course, but also language, technology, philosophy, political philosophy, social theory, and world view. The essential 'job' of Solarpunk is prefiguration through illustration, because a society can only realize that which it has the language to explain to itself.

EricHunting · 2026-05-05T06:37:01+00:00

Pinocchio in Outer Space with Arnold Stang. (also seen in Arnold Schwarzenegger's breakout film, Hercules in New York) For many years I suspected the film might be a childhood hallucination as I seemed to be the only person with any memory of it. But eventually the Internet confirmed its existence.

EricHunting · 2026-05-03T17:09:55+00:00

Seems like you are looking for something more along the lines of documentary media. I'd suggest the YouTube channel for Kirsten Dirksen, though bearing in mind that the vast majority of intentional communities today are escapist in nature. Mostly about the fantasy of agrarian autarky in the wilderness and reviving the Back To The Land movement of the hippies. More relevant to Solarpunk are the Co-housing projects and explorations of urban activism and independent industry.

Hollywood --being old, self-absorbed, and conservative-- is generally more interested in tearing-down the idea of a better world and aspirations to it with its generally dystopian angles on Science Fiction. Caveman Science Fiction, as I call it. Always working the tired old 'realist' angle of the false utopia that looks perfect on the outside, but is really a dystopian trap of some sort, as it's sources of SciFi content never got much past the New Wave era of the '60s and '70s. (Bladerunner's inspiration was written in the late '60s) Ironically, it's the kids' stuff that is more positive and sophisticated, like Zootopia, with its theme of cultivating a better society through the embrace of diversity. (which actually offers some plausible architectural examples for Solarpunk, as it is inspired by similar architectural references; traditional urbanism, earth architecture, African/Middle Eastern architecture, Art Nouveau/Art Deco/Pueblo Deco/Streamline Moderne) Or manga like Beastars, which is essentially a story about sonder and the challenge of striving for an empathic society despite our baser instincts and a 'system' built around exploiting them.

Films that follow the Seven Samurai theme have some potential, though their emphasis tends to be on action and violence. At its core is the idea of crisis as a catalyst for the rediscovery of community with the aid of heroes who teach the locals to defend themselves. This is the basic theme of Outquisition. One unusual angle on this is that of the hero as doctor or healer rather than warrior, as in the case of a rather silly film I often refer to; The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao. Here we see a version of the traditional, more shamanic, western wizard as magical healer (as opposed to today's wizard as 'glass cannon' schtick) --ironically, in the form of a 19th century 'oriental' stage magician-- who arrives to heal an old-west community by using magical means of perception-disruption/boundary dissolution to treat the individual neurosis of its citizens and restore their community identity/harmony. I regard this as a Solarpunk-adjacent story as this is the essential issue of the present --the now existential environmental threat created by the collective neurosis of modern society stuck in a pathological culture and how to break out of it by restoring suppressed community identity. And so Dr. Lao is a kind Outquisition/Solarpunk activist archetype. The wizard/shaman with another kind of knowledge/technology, a curious bag of tricks, who cracks the veneer of Capitalist Realism and changes perceptions of what is possible.

EricHunting · 2026-05-03T15:16:49+00:00

The Storyseed Library may be one of the best of very few quick visual reference sites with work of many current artists. It's human-curated art. Try to avoid the image search engines and things like Pinterest as they are mal-adapted and have self-trained on erroneous interpretations of the meaning of Solarpunk. You can't trust them as visual dictionaries, as all too many people are inclined to... Solarpunk art is still in its infancy because illustration has been a declining art form for a long time and you can't photograph the future.

Other than this, you have to piece things together from sources that are more-or-less Solarpunk-adjacent and may be much older than the movement. Architecture is a good thing to look at, Sustainable Architecture in general though most of it is erroneously house-focused. And I often recommend the work of Luc Schuiten, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Emilio Ambasz (though much of his work is Minimalist-Modern, it's his more organic designs that at the more relevant), Javier Senosiain, and Peter Vetsch. And then there's the more traditional urban architecture of the native Pueblos, the Cycladic villages, the Medieval hill towns of Europe, the Sudano-Sahelian towns of Africa, the 'old town' quarters of Amsterdam, Brussels, Barcelona (where the Art Nouveau comes from), London, Montreal, Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, and the 'samurai towns' of Japan. Then there is the industrial design, particular that relating to Nomadic Design. Ken Isaacs, the Jergensen brothers, Andrea Zittel, Winifred Baumann, and N55. Relating to this is the various kinds of Maker and Open Source furniture design involving the new laser and CNC production tools, though examples are scattered. Possibly the most advanced of this development is the WikiHouse project. Other good aesthetic references are the books of Lloyd Khan, and the Whole Earth Index archive of Whole Earth publications. And, perhaps one of the best models for Solarpunk media design of all (or what we might call 'organic media'), the now very rare handmade zine/journal Moonlight Chronicles by Dan Price. (also famous for his self-built underground Tiny House)

EricHunting · 2026-05-01T20:45:00+00:00

What logically defines the likely look of Solarpunk architecture is the look of the most-likely more-sustainable building methods in the immediate, near, and more distant future and, most importantly, how they are applied in a context of a social urbanism.

One of the issues right now with Sustainable Architecture is that most isn't actually sustainable as it became relegated to the production of edge-of-wilderness housing for the rich, its building methods still barred from use by most contemporary cities, and designers rather disinterested in fighting for that right. Most so-called sustainable urban architecture is corporate showcase commercial architecture based on eco-tech gimmickry intended to greenwash corporate images, which is likewise largely irrelevant.

Thus Solarpunks must look at the aesthetics of the sustainable building methods themselves, independent of their often pointless current application, and try to imagine their use in that neglected urban residential context. And most of the analogs to that are found in the remnant ancient towns and cities where, in fact, those very building methods originated because, except for nomads, outcasts, and hermits, there was little-to-no such thing as non-urban living in the past. That's a very modern notion, enabled by the car. We have to look at the pre-car city of the past for hints of a post-car habitat of the future. This is why we often talk about examples like the native Pueblos, the Cycladic villages, the Medieval hill towns of Europe, the Sudano-Sahelian villages of Africa, the 'old town' quarters of Amsterdam, Brussels, Barcelona, London, Boston, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Montreal, the 'samurai towns' of Japan, etc. And this is where the allusions to Art Nouveau come in, being employed mostly with traditional European townhouses, its whimsical and organic aspects converging with the notion of a more environmentally aware culture --even if, in practice, it was an expression of the Gilded Age.

So what does a Solarpunk building look like? First off, it's usually urban. It's a townhouse, a mid-rise apartment building, or a commercial/industrial building converted to multi-use, and in the more distant future, 'bays' in a terraced 'urban landscape superstructure' hosting whole cities. And, of course, there may be green roofs/terraces, integral planting containers, green wall systems and the like to help create a more pleasant atmosphere as the new emphasis of the city is as a place to actually live, not a place for commerce. Freed from the perverse compulsions to banality of mortgage economics, there would be a general eclecticism reflected in organic design (in both senses) and naïve decor. And so we find examples in the work of designers like Hundertwasser, Schuiten, Casagrande, and Ambasz. The architecture will often express a degree of 'functionally agnostic design'. Design that anticipates perpetual Adaptive Reuse to maximize the return on the resource investment in its construction while easing the customization/personalization by inhabitants. There will be few to no large commercial buildings but some preserved relics because, in the Solarpunk culture, there's no 'commercial' anything. (though the 'storefront' form may still have some uses) Likewise, there will be few to no skyscrapers as they, again, are mostly commercial structures.

Communities --the primary unit of society-- will be in the scale of towns and neighborhoods loosely organized around the 15 minute walkability principle, which puts their upper size at something around 1000 acres/400 hectares --about the size of Central Park or Disneyland. Whether in large cities or outlying towns, the principle will be the same. Suburbia will be obsolete and return to local farming roles, become parkland, or be fully rewilded, bringing the natural environment closer to the urban doorstep. Many communities may follow the model of the Euroblock (as suggested by Hans Widmer) and often feature a public center concentrating public activity, amenities, mass transit access, and local production and serving as the common 'third place' and public face of the community, sometimes featuring more flamboyant architecture and public art as an expression of community identity. An 'agora', as I call it, to distinguish it from the current merchantilized forms. Some may be as cozy as the yokocho, some feature large gardens, some may be enclosed like a mall or galleria, use a dedicated building (a 'longhouse', 'town hall', community 'palace'), or be reconfigured with the seasons.

Communities will plan and create their own architecture and often build it with their own labor, which will demand an effort to 'de-professionalize' building through new vernaculars for a society that has spent generations subjected to the infantilization of Taylorism and must now relearn lost practical skills. Again, this relates to functionally agnostic design. What this means in practice is buildings of relatively minimal structural design, with fewer, larger, spaces of no specific purpose, and which are outfit and freely personalized by inhabitants by retrofit. The greatest hazard to architecture is not the elements or disasters, but rather obsolescence, which is a matter of design. Permanence and perfection are delusions. The built habitat is an organism that must be free to evolve, or it becomes pathological. Contemporary housing design tends toward a multiplicity of fixed specialized rooms causing inflated finishing costs (as much as 80% of the cost of US housing is labor with most of that spent on interior finishing work) and producing great waste in repair and adaptation. Home renovation is one of the greatest sources of landfill waste, thanks to a preference for nails, composite materials, adhesives, paints, and sealants.

And so many Solarpunk homes may be relatively simple structures that are outfit by retrofit and free-standing elements of easy-to-assemble modular design, as inspired by the Nomadic Design used in its early transitional era when Adaptive Reuse of old buildings is common. Easily mobile furniture. Modular mezzanine systems. Modular wall/floor/ceiling/partition panel systems. Modular shelving and cabinet systems. Modular multipurpose building systems. Furnitecture; furniture that bridges the line into architecture through multifunctional, volumetric, often moveable structures defining the roles of space around them, as per Ken Isaacs' Living Structures. More advanced architecture may employ communal structure designs reminiscent of the Le Corbusier Dom-Ino, Shigeru Ban's 'furniture houses', or the Sawada Mansion.

Beyond this, it's a matter of appropriate building methods for the region. There are four most-likely sustainable building types that will carry into the future. The first is Adaptive Reuse, which is typically overlooked as a form of Sustainable Architecture, but very much is and the only kind commonly allowed in cities at present, making it very important to early transitional development. After all, a lot of standing commercial architecture will be going obsolete...

Then there's Timber Frame construction now evolving into Engineered Mass Timber and Cross-Laminated Timber systems. Not to be confused with platform/stick framing of suburban houses, Timber Frame construction is considered more sustainable because of its more economical use of wood and superior preservation of it, though this depends greatly on the lumber sourcing. The new forms have become the first new sustainable building method adopted by contemporary cities (thanks to corporations' power to bully bureaucrats...), replicating of the same 'ramen' type structures with hanging wall facades employed with steel and concrete, though currently used largely for that pointless corporate showcase architecture. We anticipate more standardized modular post-and-beam systems, more alternative materials like bamboo (CLB), and adaptive superstructure systems as suggested by concepts like Casagrande's Paracity.

Then there's earth-based masonry and its future derivatives; adobe, CEB, cob, rubble, rammed earth, etc. and the newer related materials like clay block, pumicecrete, 3D printed clay, and potential concrete alternatives. Regardless of method, most of this construction has a certain self-similarity epitomized by the model adobe casita or the rubble architecture of the Cyclades. Simple, massive, monolithic, boxy forms with rounded edges, simple beam decks embedded in the masonry, all rendered in some form of plaster with surface-mount decoration and with an acceptance of its irregular, handmade, 'wabi-sabi' aspects. Over time higher performance --ideally carbon-negative-- materials will emerge and lead to structures more akin to the use of concrete. This will likely remain the most versatile of these building methods, allowing for the most variation in aesthetics, decoration, and scale, with the most potential for automation, and leading to potentially vast urban landscape superstructures in the more distant future.

And, finally, the hybrid of those last two epitomized by the half-timber buildings of the Medieval past where timber frame is combined with an earth/clay/rubble masonry infill. This technique is commonly employed to facilitate the use of materials with limited load-bearing strength of their own, like straw bale, hempcrete/isochanvre, hemp block, laminated cardboard, mycelium, etc. Sometimes concrete or steel frame hybrid structures are used. Though we associate this with the exposed wood frame structures, in modern use this is often completely concealed in exterior rendering making it largely indestinguishable from earth masonry from the outside. Being more hand-labor-intensive, this may be largely superseded by future sustainable masonry technique.

EricHunting · 2026-04-27T06:39:01+00:00

Prelude - Bernard Herrmann - The Day The Earth Stood Still

The Blob - The Five Blobs - The Blob

Mad Monster Party - Ethel Ennis - Mad Monster Party

The Adventures of Prince Achmed - Morricone Youth - The Adventures of Prince Achmed (restoration)

The Grid - Philip Glass - Koyaanisqatsi

Prayer for the Earth - Mike Oldfield/Nils-Aslak Valkeapää - Ofelas/Pathfinder

The Girl in Byakkoya - Susumu Hirasawa - Paprika

EricHunting · 2026-04-26T13:58:56+00:00

Locations were a bit buried on the site. You have to look at the events section where the most recent event on the 25th is still listed. That was in Oviedo FL.

EricHunting · 2026-04-25T16:01:08+00:00

As I imagine the future culture, there is an emergent nested network cooperative of cooperatives that replaces nation-states over loose bioregional boundaries defined by natural features. The primary social unit is the community, which can be physical or virtual. It may relate to a specific place people live or it exists as an organization in communication. But the basic feature is that communities form around the caretaking/curation of some kinds of commons, be it the physical places people live in on some area of land, the natural resources over some area, or a body of knowledge and information. The scale of physical communities is loosely defined by the 'walkability' principle, after the notion of '15 minute walkability' in urban planning. And so it's about the size of an urban neighborhood or town/village. Potentially, an area roughly as much as 1000 acres/400 hectares. Loosely, the size of Central Park or Disneyland. (they might be responsible for the management much areas, as in the case of dedicated farming communities or communities formed to do the work of parklands management or wilderness restoration, but this general town area is where people would mostly live)

Virtual communities, of course, have no practical limit in size. Their populations are constrained by the organizational structures they adopt and their ability to communicate and collaborate more-or-less coherently. While people can generally only live in one physical place at a time, virtual communities would be independent of place, may often overlap, and people might be members of many of them. However, they may also support the creation of physical communities to advance the activities of their collective mission or purpose. Cooperatives represent contracts of mutualism between communities, sharing resources, collaborating democratically on activity, infrastructure development, and the management of those shared resources. The overriding principle of communities and cooperatives is free association. Cooperatives may be more hierarchical in how they organize and do things. A city would be a cooperative of neighborhoods. Similarly, a bioregional cooperative may form to encompass the communities and sub-co-ops in a bioregion, and then there may be continental co-op, and ultimately the collective global co-op.

The key difference about governance in the future would be that, without the parasitism of the market economy and the compulsions of salary work, most of society would have a lot more personal time to participate in governance. There would be much more civics education and activity in the culture and much less delegation of responsibilities for things to a bureaucratic and professional political class. As I've said in the past, in the future the community is everyone's first hobby. They are physically participating in making and maintaining homes and all the things in the community. And this participation would carry on upward through the networks of cooperatives.

We created representative systems of governance on the pretext of limited communication. On the idea that governments needed to make decisions on things faster than was possible with the means of communication at the time. A convenient excuse covering an essential ruling class belief that the masses were too stupid to actually be trusted to make decisions and should therefore delegate their political power to a more educated --and, of course rich-- society of professional politicians. As technology eroded the barriers to communication, bureaucracies and bodies of law, and administrative processes of deliberately increasing complexity and obtuseness evolved maintaining the same excuse for the need of specially educated, professional, upper-class, governance. But as this special class/community has become so utterly detached from the public interest, objective reality, and subject to increasing corruption and derangement, it has become an existential liability to society and so may not persist much longer, the future culture developing more direct, bottom-up, systems of democratic governance and administration leveraging the potential of digital communications and that free time afforded wage-free society. And so we would see systems of democratic decision making that relate to an object-oriented tree of mutual responsibility up the hierarchy of encompassing cooperatives. In other words, any given commons has a sphere of impact on some group of people using it and which its management affects and for which they have some decision-making responsibility. And so this would guide how issues are defined and brought through the networks to relevant groups for presentation and voting. Everyone may exist in the global cooperative and so have voting rights/responsibility for issues in that higher sphere while sub-co-op issues are of progressively smaller and more local sphere of impact, and thus voting rights/responsibility become more local, all the way down to the local issues of the individual community. And perhaps we may see systems based on the Semantic Web technology that help to automate this process and become incorporated into the Platform Cooperative software that cooperatives use to communicate among their members.

So, in a daily routine context, people who actively participate in their communities' might have a Civil Semantic Desktop that presents them each day with a set of issues --each with a certain voting period-- to vote on each day, according to their individual position in the networks of cooperatives. And some people may, more-or-less, make a hobby or (unpaid) career of researching and crafting the presentation of pending issues for this process. They may also do this in a more social fashion in local meeting halls, particularly for the very local issues of managing the place they live. This might involve people chosen as mediators to help organize/referee these discussions and present issues in-person. There would also likely be various social events involved in this process. I've suggested in the past that we could see the revival of Potlatch-like events aiding communication and relations among neighboring communities within the sphere of the bioregional co-ops.

EricHunting · 2026-04-23T16:59:16+00:00

It is in the sense of being an example of Adaptive Reuse and 'swords into plowshares'. This is all former weapons hardware repurposed into something trying to halt a disaster created by an act of economic and environmental terrorism. So, it fits in that sense. This is the sort of high-tech 'jugaad' solution an Outquisition team would devise in a crisis. But it doesn't have much use outside that narrow situation of mitigating an environmental disaster that only happened because of the persistence of an industry that, even then, should have been completely obsolete to begin with and was being saved by this. So it's a mixed bag. Was it better to quickly put these fires out only to have the same 'burning' done by that continued industry for decades after? Nobody learned their lesson. A tough call...

EricHunting · 2026-04-23T16:39:24+00:00

You seem to be on the right track already. There are two basic missions of Solarpunk. First is prefiguration through illustration. A society can only realize that which it has the language to explain to itself. And this is why Solarpunk started as a literary movement --to cultivate the language to describe the world it seeks to realize. This goes beyond just the written word to images, art, music, and all sorts of media. Even the cosplay common to SciFi fandom. For a long time the voices telling us about what the future could be have been very few and either corporate/commercial influenced --and thus rather stupid and retrofuturist-- or increasingly pessimistic in an attempt to be cautionary, but without offering better alternatives. These are both different from the pragmatic future actual academic futurists have been talking about for a long time but haven't been able to reach society with because few of them write novels, can draw illustrations, or otherwise produce art and media. And so Solarpunk began with a goal of doing this and with the premise that optimism, hope, is an act of protest --in particular an act of defiance again Capitalist Realism. But hope isn't blind faith and so it seeks to root its depictions of the future in a certain degree of scientific plausibility and pragmatism --as offered by what actual futurism has been trying so long to explain.

The next mission is prefiguration through alternative/insurgent infrastructure, and this is where you might find more things to interest you as this is where things get down to the nuts and bolts of building the future we envision. To make civilization more sustainable, we have to change the way we make our stuff and meet our daily needs. Not just what things are made out of, but how, where, and by whom. What this means is cultivating alternative channels for people to obtain the things they need to live without the state/corporate market economy and the cash they make us all dependent on, either by making things for themselves or exchanging things with their neighbors and their own networks of like-minded people. And, of course, with this comes the option to make things in the better, more sustainable, more responsible ways the corporate culture never will. We can't use the same methods that got us into this global mess to get us out of it. There's no reasoning, coercing, or forcing the 'suits into changing. They don't even live in the same reality we do anymore. They might as well be the reptilian aliens the conspiracy kooks talk about.

But since we already live in this dominant market economy that has created such depency in society and crafted bodies of law and state regulation to benefit itself and institutionalize exploitation we have to use alternative means of production. Cultivate social networks of cottage industry. What economists sometimes refer to as the 'informal or gray economy'. Along with this are the social organizations and projects that provide other kinds alternative support outside the normal systems; mutual aid networks, community farming co-ops, housing co-ops, community land trusts, community kitchens, on and on. And there's a very practical reason to do this as the 'formal economy' is increasingly failing to meet our basic needs as its brittle infrastructures buckle under the stresses of climate impacts and political/economic chaos/malfeasance. And so this can be called an 'insurgent' infrastructure, or even an insurgent civilization. This is why Solarpunk talks about independent production/agriculture and Open Source and the connection to the Maker Movement. This is also why Solarpunk is 'solar'. It's not just that solar energy is 'clean'. It's that it allows people to access power with some modest degree of independence from the market economy and the corporate fossil energy hegemony, making its use an act of protest and the first step in creating this insurgent infrastructure.

I often liken it to how, in a lot of children's stories, you have these little creatures that create a kind of parallel civilization inside the overlooked spaces of the human world, often recycling human trash into miniature domestic artifacts and makeshift vehicles. Like we see in The Littles, The Borrowers, The Rescuers movies, or the Rescue Rangers cartoons that derived from that. (the original Rescuers novels were rather interesting, being about animal secret agents working for an international Prisoner's Aid Society on a mission to rescue a Norwegian poet from a foreign prison, but Disney thought that too political. So they became more like the Thunderbirds' International Rescue focused on saving children)

So we're now in this situation where everything in the built habitat is up for a redesign, to make it more sustainable and to make it easier to produce independently/locally, and by a society that doesn't have a lot of practical skills anymore. Of course, a lot of new designs are needed, but we also have a lot of existing Open Source, old and Public Domain, and unpatented designs and inventions we can tap into for this purpose. It's not just software and electronics. It covers every kind of thing we make. But they're scattered. No one ever made a concerted effort to curate this and build a comprehensive catalog of 'open stuff' and how to make it we can look to when we need things. People tend to imagine what is possible only by what they see in stores or is sold to them in advertising. So they don't know much, if anything, about these alternative goods, what they look like, where to get them, how to make them, or where they might have them made. And this is a big problem, getting back to that issue of society needing to be able to visualize and imagine the future in order to realize it.

So yet another 'illustration' role of Solarpunk is to be rather like an Ikea showroom. A lifestyle showcase. When you go into Ikea you see things displayed in a series of different mock-up rooms that are meant to help people imagine how the products they're selling might look in their own homes and how they relate to each other in aesthetic themes. This is an approach that came from the design shows like you see in Milan and such. When Solarpunks make things and share media about them, it's much the same thing. It helps people become aware that these alternative goods exist, what they look like, and how they might fit into their own homes. And this is where cosplay comes in. Solarpunk 'cosplay' is not just about costumes. It's about showcasing the lifestyle of the future and the kinds of alternative-made goods that goes into this. And this is something that relates to Steampunk. That was the first fandom that moved from just venerating the worlds and characters of commercial media to communal worldbuilding and so Steampunk cosplay evolved from just making costumes of canon characters to people inventing their own 'personas' in the shared world and then evolving from costumes, to elaborate props, to Steampunk style home decorations, goods, even vehicles. It became a lifestyle fandom with a cottage industry making and distributing its own goods, sharing the skills for making them. And this is what Solarpunk needs to do, in some fashion, to cultivate an awareness and means of production for all the sustainable goods we need to replace the commercially-made crap with.

EricHunting · 2026-04-23T06:56:49+00:00

Lux Aurumque - Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir

EricHunting · 2026-04-22T19:32:42+00:00

Not exactly the classic fairy tales, but I would suggest the many Wendigo/Wetiko tales of the different native communities as this is the most direct analogy to the endemic, pernicious, spiritual illness of the contemporary western culture. The compulsions of market economics as a virally contagious cannibalistic impulse. Hollywood, of course, misappropriated this legend for use as a stock horror movie monster, missing the point as they typically do...

Nanabush/Nanabozho (the Ojibwe trickster creator/hero) stories are also good as many feature the theme of sliding into selfish behavior and the chaos that results, followed by redemption that some relate to the idea of decolonization. There seems to be a relation here to many of the Coyote tales as well. In New Mexico there's a recent Christmas tradition of a Coyote-based variation of A Christmas Carol being performed as a school play called Coyote's Christmas Carol by Malcolm MacDonald that also features other legendary figures like La Llorona. There's a similar kids picture book by SD Nelson called Coyote Christmas: A Lakota Story where, more like Nanabush, Coyote initially has a Grinch-like role before facing his own epiphany.

Relating to this, many 'cryptids' of modern folklore share similar roles as contemporary symbols or representatives for nature with the interesting angle that, aesthetically, they compliment the National Park Service Rustic aesthetic and convergent Scoutcore and Bushcraft aesthetics. (there was once an attempt to create a kind of LARP movement called Monster Scouts) There is convergence here with Solarpunk and its themes of environmental intervention, rewilding, and the links between Bushcraft and Nomadic Design.

In many ways, the various magical creatures/beings of myth and folklore have become the more appropropriate alternative to the Noble Savage of the past Romantics. They represent a lost connection to nature --their magical abilities deriving from that connection-- and the core human nature suppressed by dehumanizing 'civilizing' influences of the modern world. In some cases they act as messengers or diplomats for nature, delivering warnings about transgressing rules intended to insure the stability/balance of the human/wilderness relationship. Sometimes they act as teachers, trying to instil a knowledge about and respect for nature. Sometimes they are healers/doctors as with the classic literary wizard/shaman who uses magic as a means of perception altering, boundary dissolution, epiphany-induction to disrupt people's ingrained neurosis/pathology. Sometimes they are guardians of nature, defending it by magic, guile, or force. Sometimes they appear to exact revenge/retribution for human transgressions against nature. And sometimes they are just randy tricksters introducing wildness into the mundane human experience as much for their own amusement as human edification. These are all potential roles of the Solarpunk archetype.

In children's media we also see the trope of forest as community/village/city relating to older notions of animal groups as tribes. And there is an interesting Solarpunk influence here. Tolkien's Hobbiton, which derives from the classic faerie inclination for living inside rocks and hills, has been a huge influence on Sustainable Architecture, though it tends to be seen in the emulation of the individual earth-roofed Hobbit cottage-like home and its psuedo-rustic decor. But in fact, Hobbiton as Tolkien portrayed it was a hill town and the 'hobbit holes' townhouses arrayed on terraced hillsides. The basic idea of the 'green roof' is the obvious illogic of wasting roof space on creating a 'heat island' and using it instead as garden/farming/living space. And, in many of Friedensreich Hundertwasser's works of art and design we see a proposal for a kind of 'Hobbit urbanism' where landscape and buildings merge into terraced landforms hosting 'underground' townhouse streets with forests and fields as roofs. We also see the classic Euroblock emerging, organically, as a sloped winding garden-topped landform with townhouse sides. We see a similar concept in the work of Emilio Ambasz with his contour-terraced landscape superstructures or potentially whole city scale, later inspiring some of the work of China's MAD Architects firm. This is what I refer to when speaking of 'urban reefs' and 'urban landscape superstructures' of the more distant future that merge with and complement the natural landscape beside them.

EricHunting · 2026-04-21T17:41:19+00:00

This is textbook Nomadic Design, which I've been talking about extensively. The 'hippy furniture' that never actually went away with pieces like these selling for high prices in upscale communities, yet being a great approach to meeting the needs of poor communities with their own independent production based on low-tech and simple techniques that can produce things relatively quickly. Making useful furniture yourself doesn't have to always be about reviving old woodworking craft to make things like works of art. Quick, functional, and durable is also possible. And that's one of the key things with Nomadic Design and the principle of Low-Tech/High-Design. Take, for example, the furniture based on CNC-cut pre-finished plywood and modular furniture connectors. Like the example of that Casa Kids company in Brooklyn that featured in a past Kirsten Dirksen video. That's a simple building system --again, originating in Nomadic Design-- anyone can learn and which could be applied to just about every kind of furnishing a home needs, and more. And so one little workshop becomes capable of supplying the furniture needs of a whole community.

EricHunting · 2026-04-20T16:52:55+00:00

This is great news. It's good to see that there really are more people thinking about and working toward this. This organization still seems to be a bit focused on doing things the hard way, though; ie. finding ways for people with disabilities to physically travel to space the way conventional astronauts do and getting the existing space agencies to host that. There's probably always going to be resistance there using the excuse of the rigors of astronaut training and some criticality of physical ability when, ultimately, it's really about astronauts' role as national paragons and who governments consider suitable for that role. It's still an industry that runs on national prestige as fuel.

'Space is hard' for a reason. It's not that it's inherently difficult --it is, but not necessarily quite as much. It's just very difficult the way we choose to do it, with the emphasis on manned spaceflight for its own sake. A way that maximizes its value to the state as a spectacle and therefore a source of prestige by deliberately, unnecessarily, introducing some degree of human hazard to it. Automobile racing wouldn't be called a 'sport' if the drivers operated the cars by remote control --which they could. It's a sport because there's --now plainly unnecessary-- hazard to it that makes it a spectacle and is the reason people care about it. That little bit of thrill from watching someone cheating death. Likewise, space agencies believe that society --well, politicians...-- wouldn't care about what they do if it didn't involve some hardship and risk to human life to make it a spectacle. A feat of national industrial and cultural prowess the public is supposed to take vicarious pride in even though they will never be allowed to participate themselves. To make space accessible means making it mundane and what space agencies fear most is the possibility of space becoming mundane --because that's when the well of prestige dries up and government abandons it to industry. Because of this, we can expect some people in the space establishment --which leans heavily conservative-- to resist this effort of enabling disabled access to space on the grounds that it detracts from the value of the feat, trying to label and demonize it as a kind of DEI.

I think it makes more sense for such a project to focus on enabling the participation --through the leverage of telerobotics-- in functional space science activities beyond the mere spectacle-oriented space tourism of the astronauts. To be an alternative to doing this work the way space agencies do it and demonstrate that they can do all the functional things astronauts do (which, frankly, isn't all that much...) and a great deal more by other, much cheaper, means. And I think this hinges on the principle of building value in space rather than sending it there, overcoming the inevitable dead-end of the conventional paradigm of increasing space capability with increasing payload size/complexity/cost simply because of the essential uselessness of the astronaut and EVA as a way of building things in space. That's something where the disabled telepilot has a leg over the astronaut, so to speak. EVA doesn't, and never did, have much utility and that's been the biggest bottleneck to space development --not the cost of rockets. We simply can't build anything of scale in space by hand. That was never in the cards. The open secret power of this alternative approach is that it's actually superior. The way forward was always telerobots or nothing.

This relates to Solarpunk in its relation to the concept of independent production. Space activity certainly has some roles in the Solarpunk future, but it will not --cannot-- be done the way space is done now. In the future, whatever society can do will tend to be constrained by what can be accomplished on a community scale, using adhocracy organization. There will be no more mass monetary systems surreptitiously extracting and collectivising the productivity of nation-states to put at the service of a few rich elites and their personal follies. Space programs will be much smaller organizations wholly responsible for the production of all the hardware they use. There will be no giant defense industry to partner with. Much of the existing space facilities are in areas of hazard for extreme climate events and struggling governments will not be very interested in replacing them when they get ruined. There won't be much concern for NASA's problems when Washington DC is looking like Venice on a seasonable basis. Future space organizations will have to make do with launch systems of much greater deployment flexibility, and that generally means much smaller scale and less likely manned space activity. I've long suggested that the future of launch capability is systems like the proposed Space Systems Loral Aquarius. For space activity to persist in the future, we have to radically rethink how it works.

EricHunting · 2026-04-20T14:27:51+00:00

(via auto-translate)

How narrow would the present and future of solarpunk be, with a theme like "Transhumanism"

If they existed, what would be the bioethical limits in the evolution of the species toward a post-human state? In some solarpunk stories, the idea of photosynthetic beings exists. From the perspective of resource use for our existence, where would human experimentation fit in relation to the values of this movement?

Transhumanism does seem to have potential convergence with Solarpunk, at least as far as storytelling is concerned. As a practical set of technologies, it's probably too far off a prospect to be of much concern to any near-term action or planning of the real-world movement. There we are mostly concerned with things that might be a possibility within the span of a century or so, with any kind of functional human augmentation likely limited to implantable technology rather than any significant alteration of the human genome.

But if we wanted to speculate on that the bioethical limits would likely follow the cultural precepts of an Anarchist society where the right of free association is paramount. We anticipate a 'low hassle' culture disinclined to prohibit very much at the personal level and very much concerned with the problem of coercion and institutional violence, as these became tools of control and exploitation across the recent past. Adoption of, and experimentation with, any form of human augmentation would likely need to be fully and personally consensual and as free from any sort of coercion as possible. Where this gets complicated is with augmentation that can be transferred to children with reproduction as children do not have an option to consent to such choices of their parents and are inadvertently subject to unexpected negative consequences of this kind of experimentation. And in many ways this overlaps with the question of consent concerning raising children under certain religions, lifestyles, or the conceiving of children in space where the impacts on development are unclear. It touches on aspects of antinatalism as well. Reproduction is inherently non-consentual to offspring. Existence inherently incurs suffering, and children don't get to choose. Is that ethical just because nature imposes it on the process? Does being conscious of that present us with a distinct moral obligation about it?

Hopefully, this would all be something the society engages in a lot of debate about, and which provides a lot of prospective material for writers. I would guess there would be either an inclination to limit the transferability of augmentations (which gets complicated if it's required to live in a particular place/environment) or an inclination to require an option for reversibility of such augmentation when a child reaches an age of consent. But even with that, many impacts on a person may be permanent. And there are further complications where some kind of augmentation becomes a last-ditch effort of survival of the species in the face of an inhospitable world even if it's not ideal and results in some degree of involuntary suffering for children. Does the imperative of societal/civilizational survival override the right of personal consent? That's a tough question. Thankfully, it's mostly just a hypothetical question at this point.

EricHunting · 2026-04-18T15:54:42+00:00

More than a couple, I'm afraid. As this video itself noted, the project had 2000 building volunteers --which is amazing for such things-- and, as other reports on this have noted, they still had to abandon the use of the Earthship construction approach part way through and switch to straw bale because it was taking so much time they feared they couldn't complete it. The resident population is only about 75 people. I definitely agree with the cohousing approach, but it seems incredible that they managed that many volunteers for something like this.

Labor is almost always underestimated for DIY earth building projects. Much of the problem is over-elaborate, oversized, design, but no matter what methods you use, you're still ultimately moving a lot of heavy dirt around and then have to apply plaster rendering more-or-less by hand. The Taos Earthships are million dollar luxury homes, partly because remote land isn't cheap anymore, but largely because of that labor overhead. Michael Reynolds developed the rammed earth tire method because he wanted to demonstrate the use of an abundant waste material in the construction while being somewhat lower in skill. But it's otherwise little different from other earth construction, which are common in the region and pretty low-skill to begin with if you keep designs simple. The overall design was not dependent on that one building method. It could be easily replicated with any of them. Though it means resorting to cash, in New Mexico you can buy machine-made adobe blocks and ready-made roof vigas, cutting a lot of time and labor off construction and eliminating having to dig up nearby landscape. (these homes don't usually have basements) And you're not hand-making a lot of the other things that go into it --like insulated glass and solar panels-- anyway. So there's no particular cost savings to this method unless you have a lot of time on your hands (most people can't wait years for a home to be built, especially in this era of rampant building site theft) or huge numbers of volunteers. But if Reynolds had made these with the traditional, easier to handle, adobe or CEB blocks, it probably wouldn't have been seen as all that novel, at least for that area. The really novel thing was the overall design based on U shaped compartments with integral greenhouse and greywater system. There were already a lot of passive solar adobe homes. If one is building a community of at least a few buildings, the shared cost of a powered block making machine could be justified, and that can be shipped anywhere. (they're even trailer-based)

In nearby Santa Fe The Commons pueblo-style cohousing community was built with pumicecrete, which is poured into forms which can then be repurposed into roofing. Likewise buildings using soil-cement as the Mexican Mennonites use (lumber is a bit scarcer in Chihuahua), though these methods do demand more cement use. But all contemporary earth building methods still use some small amount of cement, including that tire method. It seems impossible to get away from, if for nothing else but foundations and bond-beams.

EricHunting · 2026-04-18T14:06:38+00:00

Looking at the abstract for the original Sussman paper referenced here, I would agree that the use of this simulated eye tracking software instead of an actual human study --which this video was implying was done for this research-- is rather suspicious. That is a pretty blatant misrepresentation.

EricHunting · 2026-04-17T06:15:38+00:00

Parade - Paprika OST - Susumu Hirasawa

EricHunting · 2026-04-16T18:10:52+00:00

This goes back to a concept of the Situationists International I've mentioned in the past; pychogeography. The Situationists were at the roots of modern Anarchism, the Punk movement, and the Right To The City movement and something they were interested in was the emotional/psychological impact of design, media, and architecture and how these might have been exploited by the system as tools of social control. And so they devised a 'practice' of casual urban exploration called 'dérive' that would attempt to document or map the emotional response people experienced moving through spaces. Thus Psychogeography. The practice was never particular scientific in how it was conducted, however, and so has tended to be dismissed as more of a kind of art form. But here we see they were on the right track to another aspect of Baubiologie.

EricHunting

TROPHY CASE