Technology Unplugged 1995

Digital Explorers go underground

Carlsbad Caverns DEXpedition

The Digital Explorers Society (DEX) was created in the late 1990’s by Robert Lindstrom, Douglas Filter, and other technologists/outdoorsmen to take digital tools, such as digital cameras, laptop computers, portable modems and other technology to explore and share experiences in wild places. Pioneering early and primitive tools, the members of the society found ways to move images to the web and share experiences with others.

1999 Today

Today’s smartphones contain all of the tools, apps, power and connectivity to connect from nearly anywhere, to take high resolution photos and videos and instantly send them anywhere in the world. Commonplace websites share images and impressions. When the DEX was first started, however, the tools and equipment necessary to complete those connections sometimes filled up the trunk of a small car, and many of the websites necessary to share them were coded from HTML by the innovators at DEX.

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The Carlsbad Caverns Expedition (DEXpedition) was the first joint effort to take a curriculum about cave communications to classrooms in California, Colorado and New Mexico, have students create their own ‘cave art’, and then take those images down below ground to project onto cave walls, photograph them in the natural elements and then paint them on the walls of the World Wide Web for classmates, families and all interested parties to enjoy. We believe that it was the first live web broadcast from 750 feet below ground.

Several hundred original children’s drawings were transformed when they were projected on the cavern walls.

And the students realized what it felt like to leave images on historic walls for future digital archeologists

This DEXpedition was made possible by cooperation between several schools, government agencies; manufacturers who donated the use of vehicles, cameras, computers and projectors, and the volunteer innovators and early adaptors who wanted to stretch the limits of digital tools outdoors.