This talk will reflect on the changed valence of Solarpunk, from my 2019 article to the present day. It will place it in the context of my recent work on infrastructure and affect and ground the future task of solar aesthetics in a truly ordinary need.

Rhys Williams is Director of the Infrastructure Humanities Group. He works on the narratives, aesthetics, poetics, politics, and infrastructures of sustainable and just futures, with a focus on food and energy. He is currently on a two-year secondment to Glasgow City Council, trying to put theory into practice through work on community energy and public service reform.

Solar design is more than a discipline; it is a new movement that revolves around designing with the sun. It shifts the narrative from solar being purely technical to a seamlessly integrated and beautiful part of our daily lives. It blends creativity, sustainability, and reverence for the sun and its abundant energy. Solar design, a term started by Marjan van Aubel herself, envisions a world where solar integration is essential, not just a technical aspect added later. Instead, it should be the starting point – the foundation of the design process. It is believed that in the future, an object or building will be considered broken if it does not generate its own energy. How can we seamlessly integrate solar power into daily life while embracing aesthetics, interaction, and cultural values? How can we use this technology to create something beautiful that enriches our environment and the way we live together? In her talk, Marjan van Aubel will give a historical overview of how we used to live and design with the sun, what we can learn from this and how to design a post-fossil future with the sun. Through examples of her work – Sunne, a self-powered solar light that mimics the sun, Ra, a solar tapestry, or the Solar Pavilion, a solar mesh on an architectural scale – van Aubel will inspire and provoke the audience to see solar energy in a new light.

Marjan van Aubel (born 1985, in the Netherlands) is an award-winning solar designer whose innovative practice spans the fields of sustainability, design, and technology. She is creating lasting changes through solar design, integrating solar power seamlessly into our environments such as in buildings and objects with the goal of making solar power more accessible for everyone. Most notable works are Sunne, Current Table, Power Plant and the roof of the Netherlands Pavilion at the World Expo 2020 in Dubai. Graduating from the Royal College of Art (Design Products MA) in 2012, van Aubel has since exhibited at world-class institutions such as the V&A (London), the Design Museum (London), and the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam). Her work is also part of the permanent collection at the MoMA in New York, the Vitra Design Museum, Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, The Montreal Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia. Marjan van Aubel and her innovative designs have been recognized via several international awards including WIRED, Wallpaper, and Dezeen.

In the face of accelerating climate change, anticapitalist community-based organizations and elite tech corporations increasingly see eye to eye. Many in both camps envision solar-powered futures where renewable energy redresses gentrification, systemic racism, and underemployment. Importantly, digital media and screen-based platforms shape this shared political imaginary. While solar technologies require mining, manufacturing, and physical labor, many clean energy advocates solely experience solar in the 2D world of the cloud—overlooking the racialized extraction and exploitation that bring solar into being. This simulation of sustainability blurs the ideological boundaries between radical climate justice principles and pro-corporate politics, diluting the political poles that separate white-collar experts from grassroots agitators. Drawing from ethnographic research on solar corporations and “energy democracy” campaigns in New York City, I argue that the material properties of solar infrastructure—it’s shiny surfaces, decentralized spatiality, and quantifiable currents—interact with virtual and visual media—PowerPoint, Google Earth, and spreadsheets—in ways that generate the common yet contradictory sense that solar can eradicate the extractive, exploitative structures of power that it relies upon. As a corrective to this virtual world, I call for a just transition that centers the senses and sensibilities neglected by screenwork through a case study of a solar-powered composting operation.

Myles Lennon is the Dean’s Assistant Professor of Environment & Society and Anthropology at Brown University and a former sustainable energy policy practitioner. His first book, Subjects of the Sun: Solar Energy in the Shadows of Racial Capitalism, explores the intersectional and affective dimensions of solar infrastructure in New York City. He is currently conducting long-term research on young, Black land stewards’ efforts to navigate settler colonialism and redress white supremacy through land-based labor in the United States.

Emerging imaginations of the energy transition remain powerfully attached to the individual and the image of business as usual. What if we start with soil? How can we imagine infrastructures otherwise and design practices that can flip paradigms, embrace grimy creativity and ferment revolt. How does soil prototype communities? How does soil prototype regenerative queer imaginaries? In this talk Helen will share some of the queer geophysics that emerged with their collaborators in Regenerative Energy Communities and The Institute of Technology in the Public Interest. Discussing their work on embodied and joyful experiences for engaging with energy transitions through reciprocity and care. Experimenting with microenergy projects that nurture and care for soil ecosystems. Working towards offering counter approaches to renewables that value maximal aliveness, resist the reproduction of colonial-capitalist ecologies, and cherish queer material resistance.

Helen V. Pritchard is an artist-designer, geographer and queer love theorist. Their work considers the impact of computation on social and environmental justice and how this configures the possibilities for life—in intimate and significant ways. Helen is Professor and Head of Research at the Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM), Basel Academy of Arts and Design, FHNW. They also hold an associate professorship in Queer Feminist Technoscience at University of Plymouth and co-organise with The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI).

In this talk, artist and writer Alice Bucknell presents an in-depth look into the making and outcome of Staring at the Sun, a “sci-fi documentary” exploring solar geoengineering, climate modelling, and digital twin technology.
Developed within the framework of the Enter the Hyperscientific residency program at EPFL in Switzerland, and with additional support from mudac and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the project merges in-depth research, interviews, and field reports with worldbuilding and speculative fiction to create a narrative that hinges between present and future, real and unreal.
The 40 minute two-channel video work was filmed entirely inside a game engine. For half a year prior to the work’s creation, the artist interviewed atmospheric researchers from NASA and EPFL, computer scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in the US, and CEOs running solar geoengineering startups in the US and Switzerland. These conversations provide the foundation for the film’s narrative, which is told across four chapters and features both human and nonhuman protagonists, including a supercomputer named Derecho. In this talk, Bucknell will share excerpts of the film interspersed with insights into the research and process of creating the film’s narrative, alongside insights on the interfacing of science and technology studies with speculative fiction to envision more open-ended futures.

Alice Bucknell is a North American artist, writer and educator based in Los Angeles. Their work explores the affective dimensions of video games as interfaces for understanding complex systems, relationships, and forms of knowledge. Bucknell’s work has been exhibited widely, including recent and upcoming exhibitions with the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Copenhagen Contemporary, the Oslo Munch Triennial, HEK, EPFL Pavilions, MUDAC, and their first museum solo show at Kunsthalle Prague. In 2026, Bucknell will present new commissions at Biennale Gherdëina 10 in Val Gardena, Italy, and Counterpublic, a triennial in St. Louis, USA, and will take part in the La Becque Principal Residency Program. They are currently faculty at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles, where they teach courses on worlding, video games, and philosophies of technology.