A collection of photobashes I’ve been making around a fictional solarpunk society. They might not show the width and breadth of this world, but bits and pieces of what this society would consider aspirational, or values worth showing off.
All of these images are available under a Creative Commons CC-BY license, meaning you can use them for whatever you want.
Because wordpress compresses the files, I’ve included a link to a filehosting site for full-size versions, should you want them. https://mega.nz/folder/PA1XGQhQ#eXMPhzAwkv01_PQDINJvfw
I’ve come to really enjoy solarpunk fiction, especially the short fiction, and some of the online communities for how practical, hopeful, and punk they are. But the visual art is almost a separate genre, full of scratch-built megacities with touches of green, glass skyscrapers, almost condensing ‘solarpunk’ into this unreachable utopian aesthetic rather than a visual space to explore real possibilities. It looks beautiful, but so much of it is as easy to dismiss as a painting of a moon colony or flying city. There’s no call to action, no suggestions in there. It’s not attainable.
I want people to see solarpunk art and think, “why aren’t we doing that?” or “could that work?” This series is an attempt at nudging the visual aspect towards depicting a more lived-in, human future and demonstrating possibilities, technologies, and alternative ways of doing things. I’m trying to cover seasons, locations, and topics like industry that I haven’t seen in other solarpunk art to sway people’s first impressions from thinking it’s an empty aesthetic. I try to advocate for values like reuse I think fit the movement but are underrepresented in the art.
The postcards are set in a period of rebuilding. I’m pessimistic enough to see bad times ahead, but I want to emphasize in these that that doesn’t mean giving up. For me, that’s a big part of the appeal of solarpunk, that the people in it keep working to mitigate the damage at any level they can access, and will try to rebuild more deliberately, carefully when they can. So these scenes are a little post-postapoclyptic, with hopefully a more inclusive, vibrant, and colorful society on the other side.
It’s not a utopia, but I hope its aspirational, somewhere you’d want to live, even if it has problems and a lot of arguments over how to rebuild. Because all societies have problems, and fixing them, improving them, and trying to keep things good is a constant uphill battle.
Postcards from a Solarpunk Future by Jacob Coffin is licensed under CC BY 4.0
.
Jacob Coffin Writes 