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.)

Thanks

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.

How it started (for me)

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.

Building cross-cultural connection through making together

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.

Connecting with Lintas Batas & Sea Communities

This is one cool example of connections made during Dinacon.

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.

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.

The Arka Kinari crew came back during the third week, putting on a show with the local rindik group Bajra Swara Giri Lestari and DJ Beng Beng. It was a very special night. Thank you to all who performed!

Making & learning together with plastics!

It wouldn’t be a Paula write-up without a story about plastics. But first, a story about kites.

There is a big kite season in Bali during the summer, when kids build all sorts of beautiful, elaborate kites. Kites that buzz and flitter, kites with three-meter tails.

Mister’s high school students come over to teach us how to make kites. They teach us (or, just do it for us, since our knife skills are terrible) to strip the bamboo and then shave off bits to make it flat but bendable. The kite material is a thin tissue paper, although many other kites seem to be made out of plastic, which is a bit more durable and less prone to disintegrating from water. The downside is that the plastic kites end up being plastic trash in the ocean, if an errant wind brings the kite down over the sea. And kites inevitably go down, which is probably half the fun of flying kites – trying to keep the kite up for as long as possible, but then watching helplessly as the kite gets impaled on a tree branch.

Pom and I had a discussion about kites. Do kids think about the plastics waste that’s generated once the kites go down? Systemically, kite trash is one of the least of our worries in terms of plastics pollution, but it’s a visible pollutant; when we saw a plastic kite on the ocean floor, it was clearly not where it was supposed to be.

Pom used the kite recovered from the ocean in her plastics trash artwork. She also rescued a giant metal frame in the shape of a fish from the local trash center, intending to adorn it with plastics trash from Dinacon and the village. It was a big frame, and she got everyone involved in the project (and other trash art projects).

I had lots of interesting conversations with Dinasaurs about the use of plastic waste in art: wasn’t it just going to degrade into tiny flecks of microplastic and pollute the ocean even more? Isn’t it best to bury the plastics in the landfill, where the microplastics won’t go straight into the ocean food chain? But the plastics would still leech into the soil, being problematic in a different way. What is the impact of art made out of plastic trash?

In the act of making the artwork, it already did have an impact on us - we were talking about plastic waste! I was certainly weighing the consequences of One More Pocari Sweat (yay another scale for our fish/oh no we are single-handedly quadrupling the plastic bottle trash generated at Les). It was also a good reminder of what could be done with the resources that we already had; thinking of it not as trash but as raw material.

Eka taught a workshop about 3D printing and upcycling plastic bottles – ways to use the “trash” in very practical ways. The local community put the plastic bottle upcycling techniques to use immediately, teaching others how to use the custom 3D printed cutter tool to turn plastic bottles into strips. The PET strips are very cool - they can be used to lash things together, and when heated, the plastic shrinks, which tightens the lash.

It’s clear that the best way to reduce plastic pollution is to stop producing plastics. Perhaps the next best thing to do is to produce plastics with trash, rather than consuming new materials. At the very least, the plastic art projects at Dinacon brought everyone together, as they were truly an all-Dinasaur effort. The giant plastic fish sculpture was finished on Pom’s last day here, which was the day before Dinacon ended; we all celebrated, and Pom christened the work “Our Fish.”

More making & learning together

Other things I helped with / made

Bugeng

Also

• I taught a few workshops on paper circuits

• Josh and I made a game called Be The Starfish

• I made a Balinese Birthday Finder for a Dinachronicle article:

  🗓️How does this Balinese calendar work?

Vibes

Sunset Dolphin Fisherman Boat Ride

The sunset dolphin fisherman boat ride is not just on one boat – it’s on multiple boats, since we are using the slim boats with wide wings that the fishermen take out to sea, also known as jukung. The jukung fits the fisherman and two people, and we zoom out to sea just as the sun is setting. Looking back, the mountains emerge over the water, hazy and dramatic. Looking to the front, it’s the wide open sea, with nothing else in sight. Not even a dolphin. That’s okay, though - the dolphins would have been an extra delight, but the ride itself was glorious to take in.

Meta-learnings about conferences

• Work with great hosts that can be flexible with your conference style

• People always change plans last minute - in a conference where there’s intentionally minimal structure to keep everything running, navigating accommodating plan changes can be tricky! Being as clear as possible up front is helpful.

• Be clear with what is structured and what is unstructured. Yes, you can make anything, except it can’t be AI slop. (This is a new rule that we discussed setting in stone for the next conference.)

• Sometimes problems aren’t problems. People complain to vent. It’s ok!

More documentation

Dinachronicle

📔  Proceedings (Forthcoming)

Links that I want to save somewhere

• https://soundcloud.com/user-96963122/dinacon

• https://fugitive-radio.net/2025/09/08/fugitive-frequency-season-5-episode-8-learning-from-les/