The Mechabolic is a broad collaborative project, bringing together a variety of local provacateurs, who share the goal of artistically recasting the technology and cultural associations of alternative energy scenarios.

Where energy has usually been assumed to be a zero sum game of background "need fulfillment", we intend to recast it as an idiom rich in opportunities for creative self-expression, social discourse, and general sensual pleasure. Where currently we hear of only a massive and unyielding technological problem, a problem that seems to require near impossible "salvatory" gestures from centers of governmental and corporate power, we intend to show there are very compelling human rewards and good leverage over the larger energy problem using the social strategies of participatory creativity, diy improvisation, and general open source doing.

Through the thoughtful application of "participatory creative work" to the larger energy conversation, we hope to clarify the liabilities of the current "central broadcast and distributed consumption" model of energy, as well as demonstrate the multi-modal rewards that will flow in a world where power is reckoned over a "network" model of distributed production and consumption, with bi-directional exchange, learning and play.

Many simple technologies are currently available to make each of us both producers and consumers of power. Those who set out on the path of creative power hacking, usually quickly find themselves more broadly engaged with the larger planetary metabolism as both authors and deep readers. And in doing so, such individuals nearly always find themselves in direct experience with and meaningful relationship to the systems and sensualities of both the natural and synthetic world.

The Mechabolic project will be exploring and exposing the problem and potentials of energy as exactly this sort of sensual and imaginative journey.

(see also, "The Mechabolic Thesis")