The many possibilities of how to experiment with, learn about, and make more clear the impact of large scale infrastructure are explored in real time and physical place at an annual convening called Earth Camp, which is located at Deurendis in New York, with future places to come.
In between annual convenings we meet online to share updates on independent projects, discuss ideas on our collective efforts, and respond to resources offered from group members. These meetings happen seasonally with whomever has the capacity to join.
These collective practices emerge from a recognition that values, beliefs, emotions, attitudes, and habits can emerge from infrastructures, can affect their use, and together constitute a kind of cultural infrastructure worthy of equal consideration to technical, engineering, legal, or policy approaches. When imposed technological infrastructure is so embedded it’s impossible to see, we are urgently hoping to step outside and look at it.
Earth Camp is a non-academic space that exists in many relations to the academy, relations which could be described with multiple prepositions—under and beside, across and beyond, or that shopworn position of “within and against”. Let there be as many ways to be (in relation to the) academic as there are ways to be non-academic.
Earth Camp is a time to practice the work of care and maintenance. We seek to increase the visibility, recognition, and valuation of the labors that sustain social, ecological, and technological infrastructures.
At Earth Camp we embrace periodicity, seasonality, and the properties of pattern, repetition, non-linearity, and continuity that are inherent to cyclical systems.