Tweets illuminated from inside the tent, and iPod chargers sparked the campfires. None of this took place in the woods, but rather at the Kellen Gallery, thanks to the Basecamp mobile app.
Available for iPod, Android, and Windows Phone, Basecamp fuses environmental imagery with techie-urban life. Users can plug in a destination and the app will present imagined “scenic vistas” on the mobile screen.
“Environmentalism located in our backyards and mobile devices in our back pockets,” said Leila Nadir, who co-founded Ecoarttech, a mixed-media environmental art collaborative, with artist Cary Peppermint in 2005.
Nadir and Peppermint sought a way for city pedestrians to slow down and notice their surroundings, an infamous struggle in urban environments.
Yerang Choi, a freshman at Parsons who moved to New York from India, is already overwhelmed with the city.
“We moved so slowly and lived slowly there,” she said. “And when I came here everything was so fast.”
But through Basecamp, city walks become nature hikes and streets turn into trails. Blue dots on the roads, insides of garbage cans, and sidewalk corners prompt imagery considered anything but urban.
The app also assigns users tasks to perform, such as photographing a street-side item or introducing oneself to a nearby object that might not be there for long.
“This makes you stop and look at things that you do not normally look at,” said Anthony Principato, an architecture student at City College.
This heavy strange presence of mobile devices is intertwined within this experiment, but Nadir and Peppermint find that the merging of the two should no longer be a contradiction.
“We want you to take these wilderness ideas and put it into the city,” said Peppermint. “This app will tell you to look for things like falling water. It will allow you to slow down, as you would in an environmental space.”