my strange little home on the internet
halvar.is is the gravitational center of my public creative work. My essays live here. My newsletters are published here. I document projects here – design work, photography, my research interests, and so on. If I someday write a book or sell any of my artwork, those will be available here, as well.
Me
As kids we used to haunt the university 3D graphics lab (they had a T1 line!) while all the adults meditated, playing Bolo on AppleTalk and MUDs on Telnet, jockeying for access to the Quadra 840AV, the best computer in the room, tinkering with Usenet and Gopher, trying to hack our way into government mainframes. That early internet felt unmapped and the infrastructure magical, like moving through a dungeon shrouded in mist in a D&D campaign. I remember a college student showing me some of the first websites when the NCSA Mosaic browser was released in early ’93 and realizing those mists were about to clear.
Traveling through India as a teen in 2001. Moving in the shadows of the beats and hippies and seekers from previous generations while painting blazes on my own hippie trail. Bathing in the sangam at the Kumbha Mela, the largest city on earth for a day. Watching the fires at Manikarnika Ghat at night. Shooting Kodachrome on my beloved Yashica T4 until it was stolen in the Delhi train station. Hitchhiking to Vasishtha’s cave. Riding share jeeps up the gods’ highway to the source of the Ganga.
A university attended, a degree awarded, love affairs and breakups, a business founded and later failed, a secret Kaua’i beach, a San Francisco studio, a Taipei walkup.
In the Chihuahuan Desert. Practicing fieldwork as a form of attention, mindfulness. Often alone, tightening up rainout shelters and irrigating research plots among the black widows and rattlesnakes, taking soil samples to the lab and blasting them in an elemental analyzer. Sunrise dreams, weaving literary worlds, Robinson’s regolith and areophany and McCarthy’s mesquite and caliche landscape. Ecology is the science that most resembles a metaphysics; the desert a landscape that yields least to human will.
Now, after an anonymous decade consulting, researching, and writing in the trenches of renewable energy (a world of pioneers and tinkerers when I began; an “industry” when I left), I find myself on frontiers of my own making. Designing an open-source living wall because none exists. Reverse engineering the nav screen and climate controls on an old Land Cruiser because old things are beautiful, but sometimes you just want to stream music while you drive. Carving woodcuts with a CNC router because I think the Edo-era artisans would’ve done the same if they could. Mounting a serious solo effort at terraforming research because academia ignores it and it seems like it might just be possible.
Name
Halvar is my nom de guerre. My name is Eric Johnson. Halvar was my grandfather’s middle name before he Anglicized it upon arriving in the United States. It means something like “rock guardian,” in the sense of a defender of a fortification (probably). It’s from the Old Norse name Hallvarðr, from hallr (“stone”) and varðr or vǫrðr (“guardian”).
Colophon
The site itself is cobbled together using Hugo (a static site generator), GitHub, CloudFlare Pages for hosting, and Buttondown for email.