Human Entities 2024: Jay Springett (Solarpunk)

Human Entities Podcast

Human Entities 2024: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
Eighth edition, 5 June 2024

Solarpunk means dreaming green
Jay Springett
Strategist and writer

Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?”

In our current age of popular dystopia, climate grief, and biosphere collapse, Solarpunk has become a ‘creative container‘ for more fertile futures. Not one future singular, but many. Solarpunk encourages everyone to re-imagine what life might be like en-route to a better world. Our collective future will not be imposed upon us from above, but instead created bottom up by individuals in polyphony. A texture consisting of multiple simultaneous lines of independent melody.

The future never passively arrives fully formed, instead, it must be dreamed. Solarpunk is one such dream. In this talk Jay will cover the story of how solarpunk came to be and its attempts at inspiring people to ‘remake our present and future history’.

Jay Springett
Jay Springett is a strategist and writer from London.

He is known as a leading voice in the speculative genre of Solarpunk, which described in 2019 as a ‘memetic engine’ – a tool to power the ‘refuturing’ of our collective imagination. In 2020 his Solarpunk short story ‘In The Storm, A Fire’ was long listed for the BSFA Award for Short Fiction. Jay is a Fellow of Royal Society of Arts in London and was selected as one of WeAreEurope’s 64 Faces of Europe in 2019. He is currently an instructor at The New Centre and speaks regularly about the future, technology and culture at events around the world. He currently hosts two podcasts: PermanentlyMoved.Online, a 301 second long personal journal and Experience.Computer, an interview show about aphantasia, creativity, and the imagination.

Jay has been writing online at http://www.thejaymo.net since 2010.

Credits
Organised by ⁠CADA⁠ in partnership with ⁠Lisbon Architecture Triennale ⁠and ⁠Faculty of Fine Arts⁠, University of Lisbon

Programmed by Jared Hawkey/Sofia Oliveira with guest programmers: Andrea Pavoni, Justin Jaeckle, Lavínia Pereira and Olivia Bina.

Funded by: República Portuguesa – Cultura / ⁠Direção-Geral das Artes⁠
Support: ⁠Câmara Municipal de Lisboa⁠; Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia – ⁠NOVA LINCS⁠; Instituto Ciências Sociais, ⁠Urban Transitions Hub⁠, Universidade de Lisboa; ⁠DINAMIA’CET⁠ (ISCTE-IUL) and ⁠Faculdade Belas Artes⁠, Universidade de Lisboa, Departamentos de Design de Comunicação e Arte Multimédia
Design: ⁠Pedro Loureiro⁠
Photography: ⁠Joana Linda⁠
Sound: ⁠Diogo Melo⁠