Helio-Tactics and Seeds of Disruption: The Revolution will not be televised.
Blogging traces of quantum entanglement
2019
Land Acknowledgement
I would like to begin by acknowledging the Susquehannock peoples, upon who’s unceded land we are gathered today as the Pennsylvania State University. In acknowledging this, I reaffirm my own commitment to the work of dismantling the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism, and the exclusions and erasures of many Indigenous peoples that continues today.
Ontology + Hauntology: Complementary Storytellings
Funky little mechanics tinker away at the apparatus
Attending to Diffractive Cuts
The “cut” in media (e.g. film an audio) really captures the uses of the word as physical action to (re)configure a story and to archive something different. And so, I am making a short list for this post of terms in media editing as homologies for cuts in our STEM practices of Solar Ecology emergence.
Spooky Transformations of Academia
Great news Big Fab Solar Collab! I am embracing the me that is many– both my ghostly nature haunting the halls of academia in search of mattering, and my re-discovered realness among the undercommons of the side hustle as a queer - trans - non-binary person engaged among a group of wonderful friends and family (HT Fred Moten and Stefano Harney)
On Mattering
We measure what we value. We value what we measure.
2016
Imagine a World without Thermometers
This is my world, the world of solar energy–where there is no public value for measuring light, and there are effectively no solar thermometers available for the public.
Bridge to Horace-Bénédict de Saussure
Today is a mash-up of two great contributors to society, each of whom have rested just on the periphery of our common knowledge. Today we look to participants that have helped me to see the shape of the story of solar, each of whom had such an impact on my work and my livelihood in this new space of Solar Ecology.
Exploring the patterns of the flow of light: An interview with Jeffrey Brownson
Solar ecology is meant to be a systems framework to engage in both discovery and design of the space of the sun, the light from the sun interacting with the earth, with the environment, with the solar technologies that we create and use, the solar technologies that we adapt for food, and the solar technologies that we live in. It is an exploration of patterns of the flow of light from the sun within the dynamic context of the place where we live and act out our lives.
Bye-Bye BIPV. Hello, Co-creation of Knowledge
Time for a lesson in commodities, systems integration, and hopefully a little comment on the value of jointly intentional group agency to develop solutions, nerded-down with the smooth phrasing of ‘co-creation of knowledge’. News was just posted on GreenTech media that ‘Dow Chemical Sheds Its Solar Shingle Business’. My gut reaction was–finally, it’s about time.
Solar Ecology and Living Walls
A quick share for you on solar ecology implemented as design for the built environment from UT-Austin’s School of Architecture. It’s always worth noting that our buildings that we live and work in are another variant of solar energy conversion systems, and can benefit greatly from inspired design. Here, students and faculty collaborated to implement a vertical living wall.
Fuel Constraints and Porches
Whether we know it or not, solar energy applications are fairly pervasive in society, and essentially break down into simple conversions of solar irradiance to do some kind of work found useful or interesting to society. In looking back across history, technologies and common intergenerational traditions of solar use, called solar vernacular, that have been developing for millennia. These developments in solar adaptation often coincide with a specific fuel constraints, something that we call the energy constraint response.
Gnomon’s Land
Sometimes it can help to tell the local time it is using the Sun. The relative behavior of the Sun and the tilted Earth over the cycle of the year defines our Solstices and Equinoxes, and the transit of the Sun across the surface of Earth each hour defines our Standard Meridians, while the arc of the Sun across our sky dome conveys time at the local level. If we apply the technology of a gnomon and apply our local solar vernacular to read the shadows, voila, we have a solar clock!
Why “Heliotactic”?
Just think of the words light, energy, and solar, and you have inherent perceived meanings for each that are currently shifting quickly in today’s society of climate changing, wireless communications, and localized electric power systems…
Time for Solar Transformation
We are facing an important moment to shift our purpose in solar energy. In the past, if you were to think about “solar” you would tend to equate that word with a technology, like photovoltaics (PV) or solar hot water (SHW), and maybe even concentrating solar power (CSP). The point is, you are thinking of the technology that enables solar energy conversion, not the rivers of light flowing in to our atmosphere, soils, homes, skin, and eyes. There is so much more to solar energy in a vast, connecting way, that brings people together in communities, and connects each community to their special place of living.