Glossary

The terms used across this guide, the manifesto and the gallery. Each entry is also published as structured data so that search and answer engines can quote the definitions directly.

Ambient interface: Information shown in the environment rather than on a device: a label floating beside a plant, a capacity reading above a walkway. The aesthetic's preferred way to show that technology is present.
Arcology: Paolo Soleri's term for a dense, self-contained habitat designed as one ecological whole. The ancestor of the aesthetic's coherent enclave.
Atoll: A ring-shaped island enclosing a lagoon. Used in the gallery for any ring-shaped enclave at sea.
Biomimicry: Design that learns its forms and processes from living systems, after Janine Benyus. Behind the branching, helical and grown-looking structures in the shape vocabulary.
Breakaway civilization: A small group living with technology a step ahead of the wider world, in a place of its own choosing. The default inhabitants of a Cyberparadist enclave.
Closed loop: A system in which energy, water, waste and food circulate with little loss. Rarely drawn, usually implied by the absence of smoke, pipes and refuse.
Cyber Paradise, Cybergenesis, Neogenesis: Alternative names for the aesthetic, used in different communities. This site uses Cyberparadism throughout.
Cyberprep: A neighbouring aesthetic of affluent, frictionless, clean futures. Shares Cyberparadism's materials; lacks its wilderness.
Enclave: The bounded human habitat at the center of most Cyberparadist images: a campus, garden, dome, crater city or terrace set inside a much larger natural world.
Enclosure: The compositional pattern in which the enclave's boundary is visible: a ring, a shell, a lattice, a shoreline.
Ephemeralization: Buckminster Fuller's term for doing more and more with less and less. The idea behind 'minimalism by sophistication'.
Field guide: This reference. A working description of the aesthetic, maintained in the open.
Folly: The vivid red-pink accent in the palette, used at most once per scene.
Geodesic dome: A dome built from a lattice of triangles, popularized by Buckminster Fuller. The most literal ancestor of the aesthetic's domes and shells.
Junglecore: An aesthetic of dense, saturated tropical nature. Supplies much of Cyberparadism's environmental staging.
Lattice: A repeating structural grid, usually hexagonal or triangular, used for shells, glazing and bridges. The most common way to make a large enclosure look light.
Minimalism by sophistication: The principle that mature technology looks simpler, not more complicated: fewer visible machines, fewer seams, more integration.
Motif: A recurring visual element. In the gallery, pieces are filed by motif (dome, lattice, ring, waterfall) as well as by setting.
Post-scarcity: A condition in which automation and energy abundance make material want optional rather than structural. The economic premise the aesthetic depicts without arguing for.
Post-cyberpunk: Work that keeps cyberpunk's advanced technology but drops its social decay. Cyberparadism is one of its moods.
Provenance: How a piece was made and by whom. Stated on every gallery page: creator, method, tool, date.
Setting: Where a piece takes place. The gallery uses five: coastal, highland, interior, sky and exoplanet.
Signs: In the manifesto, the technologies that point toward a cyberparadise: fusion energy, anti-gravity, synthetic life engineering, terraforming, full automation and open-source collaboration.
Solarpunk: A neighbouring aesthetic of green, communal, hand-maintained futures with an explicit politics. See the distinctions chapter.
Spaceship Earth: The planet understood as one vessel with finite resources and a shared crew. The enclave written large.
Terraforming: Deliberately modifying a planetary environment to make it habitable. One of the aesthetic's settings and one of the manifesto's Signs.