Too often “the environment” is regarded as a wild, faraway destination, and we forget the ecological connections in our own homes and backyards, on city sidewalks and interstate highways. The Basecamp.exe workshop-installation adapts the traditional base-campsite, where backpackers recharge before wilderness expeditions, for today’s complex biological-social-cultural-media landscape. Merging digital, natural, and industrial materials—campfires, computers, tents, rocks, salvaged wood, urban debris, the #wilderness twitter feed—Basecamp.exe encourages visitors to rethink assumptions about nature and to interact with, study, and observe the environment around them. Often, together we discover that the world is wild beyond our wildest expectations.

Basecamp.exe begins with a bare campsite structure that participants modify through interactions with social networking sites and the outdoors. Activities include exchanging stories around a computer-campfire built with industrial rubble, tweeting posts that enter a global archive of #wilderness consciousness inside a tent, and collecting found unnatural objects made of natural materials for display on Log Combinators. During a wilderness excursion guided by our Indeterminate Hikes mobile app, hikers produce a series of digital documentary traces in the form of field notes, texts, tweets, and photographs that are projected onto architectural surfaces as part of our Wilderness Collider web app.

Our best buddy Tuffy is often available to help lead some inter-species hikes!