What does it cost—materially, ethically, psychologically—to make digital art about the climate crisis?

I brought together two artists who are building things inside the very systems they're critiquing. Kara Stone is a game designer based in Calgary who runs Solar Server, a solar-powered web server hosting low-carbon games from her apartment balcony. Her latest game, Known Mysteries, is set in a near-future Alberta where oil and tech have fused into something indistinguishable. Joshua Ashish Dawson is a speculative designer and filmmaker who builds fictional climate futures from CGI and live action — ghost towns in the Atacama Desert, deregulated water systems, server farms built from the copper that destroyed the communities they replaced.

In this conversation, we get into what geography gives you that abstraction doesn't, whether the medium is complicit in what it critiques, and how both of them stay sane while making work about catastrophe.

• (00:00) - Welcome and Format
• (00:51) - Tech Supply Chains and Climate
• (02:29) - Meet Kara and Her Path
• (05:08) - Solar Server Explained
• (09:15) - Designing Known Mysteries
• (15:59) - Aesthetics and Constraints
• (18:42) - Meet Joshua and Next Steps

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