New Wilderness Society

Founded by Joshua Levi Ian and Kathryn Ian, New Wilderness Society (NWS) is a collective that experimentally explores concepts of wilderness through music, scholarship, imagery, text, and film. Taking the duality embedded in the term as our guiding light - wilderness is etymologically connected to waste and destitution as well as freedom in the vocabulary of late American mythology - we are interested in mobilizing diverse media and scholarship as both a philosophical and practical response to the current cultural crisis.

New Wilderness Society’s work has been presented at the SFMoMA by San Francisco Cinematheque during the Crossroads Film Festival, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art’s live performance series ICALive, and other venues in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Our inaugural project - New Wilderness Gospel Vol. 1 - explores concepts of time, loss, and redemption against the backdrop of the American landscape through an interlocking album, book, and experimental film that will be released in 2020.

As we believe that innovative ideas are best seeded in dialogue between varied modes of expression, NWS aims to foster collaborations between artists, musicians, scholars, writers, poets, and activists that seed a new imaginal ecology of existential and environmental experience.

To learn more about New Wilderness Society, please visit www.newwildernesssociety.org.