I’ve been thinking lately that I’d like to see more art that was meant from the start to be solarpunk. So I put together this photobash. If it goes over okay, I think I’ll try some other scenes along similar lines, trying to depict what I think of as aspirational aspects of a fictional solarpunk society.
This one shows part of a tech salvage co-op on a tech raid (inspired by arcade cabinet raids) where members of a co-op have located unused, in-tact technology, and have negotiated with the current occupants (or owners if no one lives there) for the recovery of the devices. These will then be used to extend the meshnet or add redundancies, improve the capabilities of libraries, or provide to others in their community.
I picture this being a kind of exciting event for those involved – all the members of the co-op, along with friends and relatives who wanted to help, would participate. People would pack for spending all day or days exploring and working in an abandoned building, and a motley collection of vehicles, mostly electrical and pedal-powered, would navigate some fairly rough and overgrown roads to the site. The co-op would hopefully have a fairly well planned system, with different roles (based on training and capabilities) and necessary equipment, defined ahead of time.
At the site, they’d meet with any occupants or owners, announce themselves, and start confirming whatever earlier scouting parties might have found. From there it would be something of a combination of urbexing, unlicensed electrical work to make things safe, and a lot of physical labor hauling everything out and packing it for the ride home. There’d likely be a fairly steady stream of vehicles rolling from the site back to whatever settlement the co-op operates out of.
I imagine a lot of the people supporting a raid are volunteers, either along for fun or on a favor-for-favor basis. I imagine that the local cycling clubs, rock climbing clubs, volunteer medics, bakeries, and bike-repair co-ops who support the thing all have excellent technology back home.
As for likely raid sites, I see office parks as being kind of unnecessary in general, and especially so in this setting (one I’ve been playing with for a bit but haven’t published anything in yet), where society and infrastructure crumbling have made commuting unreasonable and some of the work unnecessary. Being outside the cities and not in immediate use, they would have been a low priority for restoration/re-occupancy, making them a good candidate for this kind of salvage operation decades on.
Thanks! I hope to make more - most of my photobashes lately have been making line art for a comic I haven’t put online yet, so it’s been a fun challenge to go back to full color, textures, and all. I really love photobashes for a style I’m trying to get better at, the sketchy, jammed-together sort of scene that looks best from a distance, full of loose brushstrokes, made more for the impressions and overall shape. The stuff I make is too solid for what I’m aiming for, but I’ll try to get there over time. One of the things I really like about photobashes is that they’re this mix of deliberate and coincidental, like certain kinds of painting where you let the medium make some of the decisions. On the comic, I’ve often had some background chunk of an image I brought in and converted to lines turn out to add the right depth or texture to some part of the image, so I keep it even when I get rid of the bit I originally grabbed it for. Good photobashes jam together hundreds of bits and pieces of images, and a lot of stuff comes along for the ride, but in the end, and especially compared to AI art, they’re very deliberate. Items in the scene are there for a reason. That’s one thing this has going for it - I can justify why there’s tin cups hanging on the water rickshaw, or a gas mask and rope and first aid kit on the restoration one. I’m hoping we’ll get more of that kind of intentionality in solarpunk art.