The DamiLee video that’s been making the rounds generated some interesting conversation around the rather muddled aesthetics of solarpunk. It suggested that the lack of a coherent single aesthetic is a weakness for the genre, and I wonder about that.

I’d agree it’s a genre with fewer big visual examples to point to, and which is being pulled in many different directions.

At the same time, I wonder if it’s possible or even worth doing. I think it might be hard to get a good universal aesthetic going, especially in architecture, as solarpunk buildings should be built to fit their environment - what’s practical, energy efficient, and even what materials are locally available will depend on where the scene is set. Our current society, with its wealth of fuel and concrete, tends to drop the same cookie-cutter building into every climate and just burn more fuel to heat or cool it rather than adapt the design. As cyberpunk isn’t aspirational, the societies it depicts can do the same. But solarpunk would have to look very different in the desert than in a temperate rainforest, or a prairie. Similarly, clothing would have to vary as widely as there’s cultures and climates.

The only universal solarpunk aesthetics I can think of are the ones I’m trying to compete with with my own art (generally the impractical utopian megacities with touches of green). I’d wanted to pull people’s first impressions of solarpunk away from thinking it was an empty eco-utopian aesthetic, easy to dismiss like art of moon colonies or flying cities. I wanted to see if and think “hey why aren’t we doing this?” I try to cover locations, industries, and seasons we don’t otherwise see to show the genre has answers for that stuff.

Maybe that’s why I’m asking this - because if the lack of a cohesive aesthetic is a problem at this early stage, then I’m deliberately contributing to it.

Despite my own art goals, I’d actually love to have a visual shorthand to make my art more recognizably solarpunk. I sometimes reference some of the AI art people post to find bits and pieces of aesthetics that don’t change the message but hopefully pull it closer to what people expect (the solarpunk kitchen’s dark wood-paneled interior and red accent wall came from that kind of search).

Over on reddit, someone suggested that architecturally we could try to work out a specific style for each biome, and some elements of design that could be universal to tie them all together somehow.

So what do you think? Can it be done? And does this matter? Is a cohesive overall theme necessary to build the genre and reach people or just a way for marketers and Hollywood to repackage the genre, make it safe, and sell it back to us, the way they did with cyberpunk back in the 90s when they picked it too early? They defanged it by utterly absorbing it, using it to sell everything they could, making it this joke aesthetic with no deeper message. Cyberpunk won in the end, infecting science fiction with its themes and eventually aesthetics, until now it’s kind of the primary voice in the genre. But they pretty much killed it for a solid decade at the least.