The Digital Naturalisms Conference brings people together to make things with community and nature. This year it was held June 22 - July 22, 2025 in Desa Les, Bali, Indonesia, and I was honored to be one of the co-organizers. Here are a few windows into the many things that happened at Dinacon. (If you want windows into the 🐠 🫧 🪸 underwater world, see here.)
I wanted to start by thanking everyone that made Dinacon possible: thank you to the Les community, who shared their knowledge and space and time with us. Thank you to all the super cool Node Leaders and participants. Thank you to my fellow co-organizers and special thanks to our co-hosts, Sea Communities! Sea Communities is an organization focused on coral conservation and sustainability in Les – their innovations and research into reef restoration deserve all the recognition and support, not to mention their operations team keeping everything running smoothly.
Dinacon’s been around since 2018, and my first Dinacon was in 2022, in Sri Lanka. I had such an enriching time there that I volunteered to help organize the next one in Indonesia. Serendipitously, Harold Tay (one of the veteran Dinasaurs) was connected to Sea Communities and introduced us to them.
Born in the US to immigrants of Indonesian-Chinese origin, I’ve always been lured back to Indonesia to better understand my family’s history and roots. Dinacon 2025 was a way for me to be with people and places that I care about, working in a context that is meaningful to me.
The romantic notion of “finding my roots” is always met with a tension – what does it mean for me to be able to return to a country my family left? It’s both a question of what I’m hoping to find, and of how I wield my privilege.
I have been thinking about what the impact of this conference has been so far. In the short term, there’s been an influx of resources and wealth shared with the community. In the longer term, I hope we’re able to maintain these connections and networks of resource- and information-sharing. And yet, I wish I had more conversations about topics like this when I was at Dinacon: everywhere I look in Bali, tourism appears as a form of neo-colonialism – are we, too, despite our best intentions of practicing cultural ‘sensitivity’ and treating community and nature with respect, perpetuating a hierarchy of power?
One thing I know for certain – if I had asked this question during Dinacon, people would have taken it seriously, and we’d all have come away with a better shared understanding of potential answers, or even have made something together in response to the question.
In Dinacon, I see the development of what Audre Lorde calls a “connection-making consciousness” (Turner, 2020, via Higgins-Desbiolles, 2022) through actually making things together. Dinacon offers a meeting point for people, ideas, and curiosity about the natural world – and in many cases, the connections and creations then extend beyond the conference into bigger collaborations and projects.
This is one cool example of connections made during Dinacon.
Arka Kinari is a crew of artists and musicians. They sail to the farthest reaches of the world to share their stories of culture and climate change. It’s a profound statement that their response to the urgent message of rising sea levels is to travel slow, powered by wind and solar, and to share their message with communities that will be most impacted. Arka Kinari is a beautiful example of bridging cross-cultural connections through the arts and through nature. And their path serendipitously intersected with Dinacon.
The ship arrives at Desa Les for a hot two hours; then, deciding that mooring on the open water near beds of coral restoration projects would be too dangerous for the creatures and the boat, they set sail again for a safer landing spot. Arka Kinari vows to be back.
The landlubbers watch as Arka Kinari sets their anchor down, while Pak Eka and Pak Gombal from Sea Communities greet the crew and inspect the mooring by raft.
We end up meeting with members of Lintas Batas, partners of Arka Kinari, and community organizers that also share narratives of nature and climate change through making art.
Seto, Levi & Saif collaborate with the Les team to run an edible plant tour. Cassava, butterfly pea, ruby leaf, moringa, squash, papaya, and many more edible plants grow wild here.
What’s more are the plethora of folk games that arise from just playing with plants: a plant whose stem oozes bubble formula, a plant whose leaves have tiny velcro hooks that you can stick to other people’s shirts (useful as pins for poesies, and negative points in the Plant Olympics). Humans are remarkably apt at learning about the world around them through play. I, sadly, grew up where the urban and the wilderness have explicit boundaries; there’s a time for interacting with nature, and then there’s not. This is only made possible by an incredible human effort to curate the built environment, but maybe we can let go a bit? In Desa Les, the boundaries are blurred. I can imagine a young Wira, bored at home and venturing outside, finding a leaf that will leave a white chalky imprint if you slap it on your friend’s arm.
Anyway, the culmination of the edible plant tour is a cooking session, where with the help of Wira’s mother, we make a traditional soup local to Desa Les, called Belo’ok.
Credit: Putu
Credit: Jay
The traditional topping for the soup is popcorn. I love this. Corn is a new world crop, though - I wonder how long ago this tradition started?
Both Lintas Batas (along with Arka Kinari) and Sea Communities have an amazing mission, working to fight climate change with community from unique angles; their meeting and collaboration at Dinacon is just the beginning of hopefully a much longer relationship.