Our residency ended as Edge Esmeralda came to an end. Once again, I feel so nourished by the community we have created. Thanks to everyone that showed up, said hi, hosted something, and helped making our experience meaningful~
My personal, biggest takeaway from this month is the value of grit.
Enjoy this playlist I put together for our Solarpunk Soirée, a big immersive theatrical party we created for Edge Esmeralda, an all night event to help people ‘embody the spirit of grass’.
Special thanks to iContact Opera for rolling in with an amazing immersive theater performance!
This is our new storytelling & worldbuilding project (a trailer coming soon).
We started our Solarpunk journey researching communities outside of default society. Why?
Because our current society has many layers of interconnected problems: the endangered environment, fragmented communities, economical unrest, unreasonably distributed resources. These interwoven systemic challenges is often described as the ‘Metacrisis’.
One of the greatest challenges of our time is going beyond single threaded solutions that only address a fraction of the problem.
We believe, in order to fundamentally transform society, we need to fundamentally change the way we live.
I believe in the power of storytelling. It’s an essential tool to inspire social movements. We could incept minds with seeds of regeneration in order to allow them to be brought to reality.
This article is the beginning of a wild dream, and answers to some key questions we’ve been pondering.
How do we design new spaces for a more cohesive, regenerative, connected, long-lasting lifestyle? What are the values, principles, culture, infrastructure? What are the stories and characters that inhabit it, the new mythology that’s yet to become reality? In the end, stories are fun because of drama, tension, and this is by no mean the story of a Utopia. But there are seeds of Utopian principles and concepts, and bold ‘kinda-out-there’ ideas for humanity’s next phase of evolution.
Here I introduce you, an initial draft of world building of our new story: ‘The Campus’.
Image by Colton Art
Like Laputa, The Campus is a floating island protected by storms and clouds. It cannot be easily entered.
The builders of the Campus remain anonymous, they are referred to as ‘the Initiates’. Rumor says they are a bunch of rocket engineers, mystic teachers, exited entrepreneurs, and audacious visionaries. The quiet leaders influencing the world in subtle yet powerful ways… but there is no way to verify their identities.
The Campus’s mission is to align incentives for all beings on earth to operate as one connected super-organism, and reach a state of collective awakening. The Campus believes that global coordination isn't a political problem or a technological one. It's a human one. And humans, given the right conditions, are capable of extraordinary things.
Aside from maintaining its own state of floating secrecy with regenerative energy — nuclear fusion paired with zero-point field harvesting — the Campus trains people, incubates projects, and distributes them across the earth to assist its vision for global harmony.
Waste is a failure of imagination. It’s what happens when a material reaches the end of one use cycle and has nowhere to go.
The Campus generates no waste, but the resources are abundant. Nothing comes in wrapped. Everything that exists on the island was designed to return to the island.
It is designed with a combination of intentional consumption, meticulous tracking of resources, and a circular principle that mimics the natural ecosystem where all elements feed into each others. One system’s waste becomes another system’s material. The buildings are designed with Passivehaus principles to maximize efficiency of all material construction.
A planetary sensing instrument — the most sensitive of its kind. The device reads coherence: the degree to which a person’s electromagnetic field, nervous system, and behavior are aligned toward service rather than extraction.
The science it draws from:
Schumann resonance (the electromagnetic frequency of the earth itself, which human brainwaves entrain to)
Morphic resonance (Sheldrake’s model of collective memory fields shared across species)
The color-coded consciousness map of Spiral Dynamics — where orange represents achievement, competition, and self-interest, green represents pluralism, care, and service to others, etc…
The Campus uses these frameworks to identify its recruits — individuals whose frequency signature is anomalous: more coherent than their environment, more oriented toward service to others than service to selves, more awake than the world around them. These traits often make them lonely, weird, and seemingly unfitting for various social occasions.
They aren’t all perfect people, they come with all sorts of quirky personalities, backgrounds, ideologies, expertises, shadows and trauma… But the Campus is well equipped to nourish them.
Each resident enters with a full diagnosis: their gifts, their wounds, their blindspots, the particular ways they’ve learned to protect themselves from the world, their zones of geniuses and zones of play.
There is no fixed curriculum. All trainings are built around the individual resident. Some need to be broken open physically — mountains, freezing climate, strenuous exercises. Some need years of emotional excavation — silence, intense shadow work, relational awareness training. Some need to have their worldview dismantled and rebuilt from scratch. Some are already close, and just need a little nudge and inspiration. There are no two identical paths.
The foundation beneath all of it is the same: love. The belief that every person who arrives here is worth the full investment of the community’s attention and care. Beyond building a team, the Campus is building a family.
The training will be difficult. People leave changed in ways they didn’t anticipate and can’t always explain. But no one is pushed past a threshold that isn’t possible. Over decades of practice, the Campus has grown to know the difference between growth and hell.
The goal is a Bodhisattva — someone who has done enough inner work to stay so centered without losing themselves, and who has fully committed to giving back, back into the mess of it, to do their part and push society forward from a different quality of presence.
Most graduates move between the Campus and the world in cycles. Some return as teachers. Some become what the Campus calls spirit anchors — people planted in communities, in cities, in governments, in institutions, in companies, in forests, whose main function is to hold coherence in a place. They may be giving a speech at the White House, or sitting next to you on the train.
There is no official code of conduct from the Campus that any particular element needs to be kept as a secrete, but the secrecy became a culture of the residents in order to protect operations of the Campus from noise and honor its mission.
The buildings here are alive. Both in a ritualistic way as they were built, each of them have a birthday, a name, and their own astrology readings, but also in a way as they operate, each of them has a local foundational AI model, extended IoT sensors and robotic arms.
They operate in response to the input they receive, if there are people (organic intelligence) nearby, the buildings activate themselves, otherwise, they hibernate. Temperature control, lighting, energy consumption are all designed to be responsive and intelligent.
The buildings sense the collective frequency of all beings around, it encourages activities as energy becomes more harmonious and joyful, and encourages tranquility when energy becomes extractive.
Nature is our best teacher, and by being integrated, immersed in nature, we produce our best work. The Campus hold this philosophy strongly.
The materials are a combination of earth-based walls and large transparent windows. The windows change in degrees of shades based on needs — for example, when the sun is too bright outside, shade can increase programmatically on the window so that people indoor can see screens and other necessary things.
Spatial computing is the most prevalent ways of interfacing, screens are around but kept to a minimal so that the environment feels vast, empty, and organic.
When I think of Utopian sci-fi, I think of Avatar, a beautiful combination of mystical fantasy and frontier technology. The space is deeply integrated with nature, and everything feels alive.
That’s how the campus should look & feel, it’s an organic, conscious island as much as a well engineered spaceship. It embodies the design that perfectly integrates technology and nature into a beautiful harmony. And it carries the dream of what I want to see in our world.
I’ve been blown away by his creativity when I discovered artworks by Moebius. His work reminds me of Miyazaki with a twist of French expressionism and humor, where the vibrance, optimism morphs with sci-fi mechanical bio-punk designs, but with grass and crystals, all in a surreal reality. His work has layers of depths, emotionally resonant, spiritually expressive. It’s elaborate, imaginative, and echos the ancient future vision of merging the ‘yin’ of poetic designs, and ‘yang’ of functional infrastructure.
The campus is a space for deepening of your craft, as well as widening of experiments. It’s a space for intensive festivities, as well as tranquil meditative practices. The aesthetic is magical realism, moss, alien architecture.
As our residency came to an end, we’re shifting a more inward building phase, where we’ll focus more on worldbuilding, research, reading and writing and art making.
This is the first reveal of the future film concept. More to come! If these concepts resonate with you, leave a comment, send a DM, subscribe and stay updated ;)
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