Value(s) of Solar

How Art Creation Plays a Central Role into Regen Crypto

Value(s) of Solar is the art program accompanying Younergy Crypto and co-creating value alongside the funding of solar energy panels and the avoidance of CO2 production.

As Younergy Crypto, a solar app allowing individuals to invest directly into solar energy and get NFT-carbon credits/Co2 avoidance, came out, I have been invited by Younergy crypto director Sebnem Rusitschka along with artist Mariana Carranza to create, co-create and produce art.

Younergy Crypto proposal to the general public is radically new. New by its token mechanism but also new by its offer to anyone -you, me, your parents, your baker, your neighbor…-to invest directly into solar energy and get NFT carbon credits. This offer doesn’t fit into traditional consumer value proposal. It doesn’t 1fit either into traditional investment products. But it prefigures new types of motivations and values transactions.

What are people motivations to invest into solar energy? Do they appreciate to be rewarded with carbon credits? What kind of values and information are linked to Younergy Crypto contracts? How do people relate to them? How do we think about the culture that is emerging along carbon crypto usage? And why it is important to investigate it now.

Why Art?

Art creates the space for weak signals to emerge and make sense. Moreover, Art contributes to the emergence of a regenerative culture by its capacity to connect humans desires and dreams. Indeed, the Art produced with Younergy Crypto creates the ground for new significations to grow in place of unsustainable consumer values. Interdisciplinary art-crypto-carbon creations are insights as well as vehicles  for new motivations and behaviors. Art opens up and connects imaginations of a future world nurtured by people dreams and visions. This way, it creates the possibility of an alternative to consumer markets culture.

Why is it important to think beyond today’s consumer culture?

In Captains of Consciousness, Advertising and the Social Roots of Consumer Culture (2001), historian Stuart Ewen describes how today’s consumer society is a result of early 20th century industrialists needs to create a mass market for the cars, furniture and beauty products flying off their assembly lines. “The solution was psychologically informed ad copy ruthlessly targeting people’s deepest fears and desires and encouraging palliative purchasing and self-criticism.”

Values conveyed (til our days) by consumer culture were developed to find “solutions” to the new tools of that time- factories- born after the industrial revolution.

Technology is central to human condition (see below boxed text) and is intertwined with Culture.

As a key learning from consumer culture history and its related “casualties” (waste disaster throughout the planet, life destruction, economy of attention…), I suggest to explore simultaneously technological inventions and related possible cultural values. While Web3 technology opens up doors to economical innovation what are the cultural values we want to foster? And how are these values transformed into new behaviors and adopted by people cultures?

When integrating the outside world through new “tools” as Leroi-Ghouran describes, what are the values from our inner world that we want to develop out there? In short, do we leave the tech to reinforce ultra individualistic competition or does our inner spaces are inclined to enhance collaboration and Regen?

In the case of Value(s) of Sun art program, we explored how values such as 1/Avoidance (of Co2), 2/Invisibility (of clean power), and 3/Retirement (of carbon credits) could be linked to people motivations.

1/AVOIDANCE

How can we visualize what is not? What is invisible? A necessary absence, a continuously effort to avoid?

Mariana Carranza’s Grow a Forest data visualization is part of Value(s) of Solar program. She uses an algorithm which feeds in data from live solar rooftops' electricity generation and consumption data. With each solar rooftop and energy-efficient consumption of the clean electricity - carbon emissions are avoided effectively when most of the power grid is still fed by power plants running on fossil fuels. In another creation (ref: Forest Stillness), Mariana has used algorithms to visualize the stillness that fill up the space with silence in place of restlessness consumer culture. She now values the invisible Co2 avoidance through the development of Grow a Forest. This value is shared with Younergy crypto investors who are rewarded with the YCo2 NFTs, both art and carbon credit. These YCo2 NFTs signify a time- and location-based carbon credits as described by EnergyUnlocked, which can be minted monthly, daily, or even on hourly bases. This Co2 “avoidance” is now conveyed through an aesthetic NFT to consumers investing directly in solar energy. How do they relate to it? What does that mean to them? What are their motivations? Grow a Forest  is extended to an Augmented Reality experience sharing new modes of relation with audience and consumers.

Extract from Mariana Carranza data visualization video

2/INVISIBILITY

Light from solar is both art and energy

When, I created “This is an NFT” for Younergy Crypto, I had in mind that light from solar was at the heart of the creation of images by humans since, at least, the Antiquity (Ref: Plato Cavern Myth). Images created by light or shadows are at the root of imagination, of our capabilities to invent and create new worlds. Light from solar is both art and energy since the early times of humanity. It contributes both to imagine new worlds and to “grow” them. My attempt was to place NFTs into the continuum of art history, into photography and film history.

I choose to use one of the early techniques of photography, Anthotype, which activates photosensitive material from plants. This is an NFT!, is based on solar interactions like early photography. It is both a physical and performative experience and a digital one. What NFT contracts add to traditional photography is the possibility for NFTs to move from (digital) hand to hand, like energy. Thus, NFTs materialize another characteristic of Solar energy: invisible circulation- which opens up an entire new spectrum of possible cultural behaviors inspired by value flows.

According to French philosopher Georges Bataille (1897-1962), the sun's energy is in excess for humans and for all life. What matters is to balance (in place of controlling) the overwhelming flow of energy that we get from the sun. What kind of cultural values and behaviors could emerge from the concept of solar energy displayed in a balanced circulation throughout local communities and neighborhoods?

3/(CARBON) RETIREMENT

Let’s go back to the basics:

Definition of Consumption: “Action of destroying the utility of a product, utility that production has created”. 

Burning carbon credits is a sophisticated act of consumption! We want to destroy a negative utility: the right to pollute. And in the form of an aesthetic and knowledgeable experience of an NFT featuring data from avoided CO2 thanks to the corresponding solar energy production the investor supports.

The value Younergy Crypto proposes to consumers who are getting NFT carbon credits might be an answer to the call for constraint made by Gary Cross in his book  on American consumerism, An All-Consuming Century (2002): “ The conservative upsurge of the 1980s and '90s indulged in its own brand of self-aggrandizement by promoting unrestricted markets. The consumerism of today, thriving and largely unchecked, no longer brings families and communities together; instead, it increasingly divides and isolates Americans.” (…) “The challenge for the future is to find ways to revive the still valid portion of the culture of constraint and control the overpowering success of the all-consuming twentieth century”.

What if market restrictions would come from people? And what if this individual actions based on intimate values would bring people together at the level of local communities which is where solar plants are installed? Burning a carbon credit might becomes an autonomous consumer control over negative impacts of consumer goods production.

In Conclusion

As Ruth Catlow wrote in Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain (2017): “When artists approach new technologies a number of things happen: by making connections that are neither necessarily utilitarian nor profitable, they explore potential for diverse human interest and experience; they discover expressive and communicative potentials of its tools, devices, systems and cultures; they make difficult concepts more feelable, legible and fascinating.” (…) “They know that a way to get to know some- thing that doesn’t yet exist is to collaborate with its possibilities and to do something/anything with it or about it. And by doing so they materialize and shape what it will be, allowing many other people to access, approach, and reach out to it with different parts of themselves”.

We propose a step further by investigating crypto carbon art interdisciplinary collaboration, beyond art and with artists…