Hey can we use like solarpunk or something instead for our collective imaginations? We’ve been kicking the tires on this cyberpunk thing for the last decade or two and it turns out they wrote that shit as a dystopia, so, it’d be good if we could like collectively Not build that part together.
> Merveilles seems aligned with the ideals of Solarpunk while internally expecting the world of Cyberpunk, it is neither a utopian or dystopian vision, but a way of straddling both contingencies.
Oh man, thank you for that - so good in so many ways. I’ll definitely be following up on this later, I like what they’re doing.
Two things stick out for critique to me -
> Merveilles seems aligned with the ideals of Solarpunk while internally expecting the world of Cyberpunk, it is neither a utopian or dystopian vision, but a way of straddling both contingencies.
I get this, and in a way, I think it’s how I’m operating already, but man, it’s an art movement - don’t give the dystopia space in the room, it’s already got plenty everywhere else.
> The Merveilles visual aesthetic restricts color palettes to black and white, vector or pixel art, with at most a single accent color (usually a sea-foam aqua). Industrial design is minimalist, geometric black-forged metals, natural wood.
My visual aesthetic these days is “all of the above.” For the love of god, colors exist - trillions of them! Take two! Hell, take three or four! They’re cheap! And shapes - my god, man, the shapes you can make! You ever see the temple carvings in Nepal? So many shapes! Take a walk through a forest, and just look at all the shapes! Look at trees, man - the opposite of simple!
