dWeb Camp

Film a camp in the redwoods so the people who were not there understand why it exists.

The Internet Archive asked the crew to cover dWeb Camp: the retreat it hosts in the redwoods near the Mendocino coast of California, where builders of the decentralised web gather in nature for several days to work, talk and rest. The brief had two halves — a film that carries the camp to the people who were not there, and the sessions themselves, recorded — and it was a field job from the first hour: no stage, no venue, a camp.

A decentralised web deserves a record that is not made by a platform.

The Internet Archive keeps the record of the web; dWeb Camp is where it gathers the people trying to build a better one — a web grounded in trust, human agency, mutual respect and ecological awareness, as the camp describes its own purpose. The Samouraï Coop film crew shares a company with an engineering studio that builds for exactly those ecosystems, and it has filmed their gatherings on both sides of the Atlantic. For this one it crossed it: a Paris crew in a California forest.

A camp is shot on its own terms.

A camp is shot on its own terms: daylight that moves through the trees, sessions that happen where the circle forms rather than where a tripod was set, weather, dust, batteries and distance from anything resembling a power socket. Which of those shaped the days most is the crew’s to say, and this page does not guess.

A small crew and one discipline: be where the circle forms.

Field coverage is the opposite of a conference shoot: there is no programme to point a camera at, only a place where things are about to happen. The crew worked the camp the way it works a documentary — small, mobile, inside the sessions rather than behind them — and shot the camp as a place as much as an event: the redwoods, the circle around the fire this page opens on, the people arriving. The sessions were recorded where they happened, in the spaces they happened in. Everything was cut and finished in-house in Paris.

The film is public, under the Archive’s name.

Experience DWeb Camp is online on the Internet Archive’s channel — the film this page links to at the top and below, a short portrait of the camp under the Archive’s own name. What else was delivered alongside it is not listed here: this page names what it can point at, and nothing from memory.

• Source:Experience DWeb Camp — the film on the Internet Archive’s channel ↗

What the Archive did with it is theirs to tell.

The film has been public since the spring of 2023 under the Archive’s name. What it did for the camp — who it brought, where it was shown — is the organiser’s data, and this page does not borrow an organiser’s figures to stand in for a result. When the Archive’s side of the story is written down, it goes here.