Excerpts from a discussion session With https://www.instagram.com/experimentalrealism on the 11th of April 2026.

GIF from Chobani’s “Dear Alice” Advert.

Cyberpunk: an acute and narrow De-Facto Future?

Today, it feels like most our technological visions, (both fiction; and products given to us by big tech companies) are all acute, narrow, and pointing at a kind of future that has us locked to digital products and services. Moreover, they all feel like variations on “Cyberpunk”, which has now whittled down to an aesthetic featuring neon highlights and “AI” avatars.

To illustrate my point, here are three separate images from a film, a game, and a TV show:

Ghost in The Shell (2017)

Cyberpunk 2077 (2020)

Altered Carbon (2018)

Solarpunk

“The very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope.” – Octavia Butler

While writing a Solarpunk themed story for Eliza - The Ghost in Every Machine, my Speculative Design and Fiction project, I couldn’t help but think that an act of optimism in writing a utopian story was naive and rejected problems at hand. However, the world today lacks better visions, and I wanted to use Eliza as a means of imagining bolder futures. If we can imagine them, we can make them too.

In a pure / reductive sense, designers are good at

1. Imagining better futures (through diligent design research, signal scanning, concept creation, co-creation, producing many iterations, etc.)
2. Demonstrating how to make them real (through prototypes, visualisation, film-making, storytelling, etc.)

There are woefully few examples of Solarpunk as well, outside the classic Chobani advert.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-Ng5ZvrDm4

ExRe Discussion Highlights