What’s New?
NEW SMP COMING SOON!
Our new solar-powered modded multiplayer survival server (phew!) is launching soon!
Watch the teaser trailer below, and click the button to learn more.
SunBlock One
SunBlock is a solar powered modded Minecraft server with custom mods that give access to real-time data about the energy consumption and production of the system as a condition of possibility for playing the game. Rather than just playing a game with a message around energy transition, we are endeavoring to provide a direct, tangible and playable experience of the energy infrastructures which make that experience possible.
LEARN MOREWhat is the Fun Palace?
On October 13th, 2023, the Minecraft Bloc research group at the Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) lab brought the avant-garde 1963 “Fun Palace” by Cedric Price, Joan Littlewood, and contributors into the world of MINECRAFT!
LEARN MORELatest Musings
Manufactured Landscapes Part 1 – Firewatch
Where we as individuals and we as members of communities fit into environments and ecologies is crucial to what we’re exploring with this project. In fact, we’ve gone through quite a few different titles for our modpack, many of them touching on the relationship between the player and the trees or the forests that we hope will return to the landscape- “Forest Keepers”, “Forest Wardens”, etc. What kind of relationship to the forest does the tower represent? Is the tower occupant a sentry or a witness? Is it a position of authority or a position of supplication? How does that relationship change once the forest is gone? If the tower were a monument, what would it be for?
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Planting the Seeds of Our New SMP
In For The Trees, real-time energy data from our solar server appears on a HUD in-game, and players have access to a variety of solar powered tools and items to play in a bleak empty world devastated by ecocatastrophe. Using a variety of popular mods with our own custom progression, structures and quests, players will help regenerate the land with the goal of restoring the world’s biomes and regenerating the vast forests on the seemingly lifeless earth.
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Making an Agential World in the Gaia’s Riddle Modpack
It is important to remember that Minecraft worldgen is not natural it is procedural. The natural world is a fiction of computation, and the real agency of the world is the agency of computation. This is why we prefer to work with Minecraft as a platform – one cannot mistake computer generated nature for real nature no matter how photorealistic the textures and shaders might be. I love modded Minecraft for this reason… especially for worldgen. Its sublime and imperfect at the same time.
Read moreWhat do we do?
