For twelve weeks you teach your own work, take other people's courses, and cook dinner with the same eight to twelve people :: and a whole colony of Martians in motion.

In this world of collaborative education and program growth, the scholar who sat through your workshop on Tuesday is washing dishes beside you on Wednesday, presenting their thesis to the campus on Thursday, and repairing a leak in your roof on Saturday.

That arrangement is the whole reason Incubator Camp exists :: to foster an environment where exchanging feedback with someone who is prepping dinner with you afterward is a different substance than feedback from a survey.

You may arrive with something half-built, yet you will leave with something that has been taught, watched, studied, and rebuilt in community with peers and presence to your genius.

Every winter, about a hundred people walk onto an empty desert lake bed near the Salton Sea to build, attend, and co-create a working college out of pallet racks, plywood, and the potency of sunlight. Classes, art, a gallery, a film festival, a kitchen. Three months later the whole thing comes down and the desert is desert again.

At Mars College scholars and visionaries organize into camps. There is a camp that builds the infrastructure, a camp for off-grid AI, a makerspace, a music academy, and a camp researching how a group becomes coherent. Incubator Camp is the camp for practitioners with a program to finish from an idea in progress.

The 2027 Incubator Camp focus is Innerversal Health Evolution.

Innerversal health is the discipline of navigating your own inner universe with awareness, and then building something that helps other people navigate theirs. That half-finished framework you keep returning to and setting down :: that is the program.

The word incubator has three ancestries, and Incubator Camp is where the three meet.

The temple

In the healing sanctuaries of the ancient world you did not book a consultation. You entered, you stayed, you slept in the sanctuary, and the healing arrived through you. Incubation was a health practice long before incubation was anything else. What we borrow: staying long enough for the work to happen to you, rather than scheduling an appointment with it.

The egg

Across Egypt, Greece, Polynesia, Finland and India, the world begins as an egg. The Sanskrit Brahmanda is literally the cosmic egg from which everything unfolds. Long before the egg was breakfast, the egg was the shape people reached for when explaining how something whole comes from something enclosed.

The geometry earns the reverence. An eggshell is roughly three tenths of a millimetre thick, and its double curvature distributes load so completely that the shell survives pressure that would collapse a cylinder many times thicker. Architects have copied that arithmetic for a century to build domes that hold themselves up. Dalí kept eggs on his roofline for the same reason artists keep returning to them: the form is already finished.

Three things we borrow from the egg. A shell strong enough to be thin :: the camp protects the work without adding weight to it. Everything needed is already inside :: we add conditions, not ingredients. Nothing opens from the outside :: the practitioner does the last part alone, and the cohort makes that possible rather than doing it for them.

Setting. Turning. Candling. Lockdown. Hatch. Five stages, borrowed as vocabulary, because each one names a real condition rather than a stretch of calendar.

The cohort

Curation, resource, demo day. The modern incubator understood one true thing: ideas mature swifter in the company of other maturing ideas. What we borrow: the company. What we leave: the pitch.

Applying early earns more than a spot. Applying early earns a hand in who your cohort becomes.

By January, every program in camp has already been considered, questioned and chosen by everyone else in camp. Nobody arrives as a stranger to anybody's work. We are invested in your program because we selected your program, and that is a different kind of attention than an audience gives.

When you are accepted you get more than a patch of desert. You take a seat on the panel that selects the practitioners who come after you. You read the applications. You sit in the curation. You help decide what this cohort becomes.

Attending every course is not required, and not possible. What is required is engagement with the camp intention and practices, in every direction. Decision weight rotates across the cohort on an even meter, so no single person carries the final call across the season. Safety and money stay with the camp lead, permanently. Everything else moves.

CREÅTIVE STEEPING :: a course taught by Kamau during Mars '26 :: is offered. It is the course that inspired Incubator Camp and it returns in the 2027 season. You can learn more at creativesteeping.com, a website designed on Mars to support the emerging creative attunement course.

You are deciding whether to spend three months in a desert basin during a very strong El Niño. Here is what is actually known, so you can decide with real information.

As a being

El Niño is a warming of the eastern tropical Pacific that returns every two to seven years on no schedule anyone can hold. It changes probabilities. It does not determine individual days. A very strong El Niño makes a wet, stormy, cool winter much more likely in Southern California :: it does not guarantee one, and it does not rule out warm dry stretches or an occasional hot spell.

One correction worth making early: a very strong El Niño does not mean another hot winter at Bombay Beach. March 2026 was extraordinary, with Southern California's worst March heat wave on record and Woodland Hills reaching 102°F. Do not use March 2026 as a template for March 2027.

As an operation

As of the August 2026 assessment, NOAA puts the chance of the 2026–27 El Niño becoming very strong during fall and winter at greater than ninety percent. The eastern tropical Pacific is already exceptionally warm.

Strong events push the Pacific storm track further south and aim moisture at Southern California, which raises the risk of heavy rainfall, flash flooding and debris flows. In a NOAA-hosted study covering 1901 to 2010, eight of ten moderate-to-strong El Niño events placed Southern California in the wettest third of winters during late winter. The relationship strengthens as winter goes on.

NOAA is also tracking unusually warm ocean water off Southern California alongside the El Niño, which adds a second source of variability. Anomalous warmth is not off the table.

The forecast sharpens between now and December. By late November we will have a much better picture of January through March. Check it before you commit, and we will publish what we learn on the field notes.

As an elemental system

What that means on the ground, month by month:

What to prepare for, plainly

The Salton Sea basin reacts dramatically when significant rain hits normally dry ground. Prepare for muddy and temporarily unusable campsites, high winds, and sequences of cold rainy days. Structures want elevation, drainage and tie-downs planned in December rather than improvised in February. Vehicles stay off soft ground. Bring more warm and waterproof clothing than a desert usually asks for, and expect to be cold at night.

And the other half, equally true: a wet Colorado Desert winter is the condition that produces a superbloom.

KzA spent thirty years in advertising and strategic consulting, most of it making other people's ideas land. In 2022 he left a Chief Creative Officer job. In January 2023 he opened THE ÅLïEN SCõÖL, a school for creative thinking.

Since then he has built the practices this camp runs on. Creative Steeping is a journaling method for sitting with an idea long enough to hear what it wants. a•i•Contemplation is a practice for moving an idea from thinking into action. He also leads the Neuroarts Fund for Innerversal Health Practitioners, which puts money behind practitioners :: like yourself :: building programs for inner work.

In 2026 he came to Mars College and taught Creative Steeping as a nine-week course. He lived in the camp with his students the whole time, while studying music theory, live coding, pottery and drawing, and building AI infrastructure for his work :: learning from and with the peers and scholars in his course.

He is a father and a photographer.

Why he is running this camp

Eight to twelve practitioners, because in this first year for Incubator Camp, a small cohort will optimize the learning experiences, the educational intimacy, and create real value for the voices shaping the Incubator experience.

Two payments. One goes to Mars College. One goes to Incubator Camp. Nothing is paid to an individual.

Mars College Treasury is paid by every Martian, whatever camp you are in. It covers toilets, internet, shared water and aid. Shelter is a separate cost, and only applies if you arrive without a vehicle. Mars sets both figures, and we will publish the 2027 numbers here as soon as Mars confirms them.

Incubator Camp dues are one figure, paid in three installments across the fall. The dues pool into a single camp budget that the panel stewards together. They cover food, build materials, camp infrastructure, and daily living.

Everyone pays the same camp dues, whether you come for one month or all three. The kitchen, the build, and the Steeping Space cost the same to run either way. Your dues keep the camp whole and keep Mars College supported as the neighborhood that holds us. The archive stays open to you across all nine months regardless of how long you are on the ground.

If money is left over at the end of the season, the panel decides together where it goes.

If cost is the thing standing in your way

Incubator Camp is the annual convening of the Neuroarts Fund for Innerversal Health Practitioners. The Fund intends to cover travel and participation costs for practitioners who need the support, so that geography and finances keep nobody out.

Say so on your application. There is a question for it. Asking does not affect whether you are accepted, and the panel reading your project does not see your answer.

The camp is small on purpose, and the panel fills in the order people arrive.