Tag: burningman

Burning Man traces

Burning Man bills itself as the biggest “Leave No Trace” event in the world. This means that after revelers have dismantled the geodesic domes, giant duckies, and steampunk ships that form their temporary city in Nevada, they get down on their hands and knees to scour the white alkaline sand for every last cigarette butt and sequin. But in the end, 80k people still leave a mark. “Sure, by October, there’s no trash left on the surface of the Black Rock Desert. But boy, are there a lot of traces.”

BM 6 Degrees of Separation

Our experiment, incubated in Scalable Cooperation in collaboration with computer and network scientists, was a play on the Small World Experiment. We designed it with the same structure of Milgram’s original 1962 study, routing information through Burning Man’s social network with a series of parcels. These parcels, which we named “Vessels” (because everything at Burning Man can and should have a vaguely ritualistic name), were handed out on the first day of Burning Man 2018, containing information about a particular individual at Burning Man. The clearly stated goal of the vessel was to end up in the possession of this individual, so we refer to them as the Terminus. From hand-off to hand-off, these Vessels would collect a variety of information, stories, and data about their journey. We hoped these journeys would allow us to quantitatively map the connectivity of the Burning Man community and qualitatively understand how people engage with Burning Man culture. We hoped not only to count the number of hops of each successful chain, and compare that measure of social connectivity with Milgram’s 6 degrees of separation, but also to see what cultural, geographic, or attitudinal factors affect success rates. These are not questions that can be probed by scientific methods alone, so we enlisted the input of designers and artists in order to better explore the subjectivity of Burning Man’s magic.

Chinese Burner

Although Mr. Miao and Mr. Yang might have been let down by the Burning Man Festival, I trust that this experience opened them up to new ways of thinking. Mr. Miao gradually came to accept the idea that people can walk around naked or make out with strangers if they are willing. Mr. Yang made friends with one neighbor who was sharing marijuana cookies and had a long conversation with another, who happened to be an IT engineer. I also met some founders of leading Chinese tech companies who thought more deeply about these issues after experiencing the festival. “In this utopian community, we can experience cultures or principles that have been discarded or distorted in the civilized world. If you take certain things back with you, they’ll make your daily life more creative and more powerful.”

Burning Man 2017

Each year, Burning Man participants travel to the playa of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert to form a temporary city—a self-reliant community populated by performers, artists, free spirits, and more. 70k people from all over the world came to the 31st annual Burning Man to dance, express themselves, and take in the spectacle, themed this year as “Radical Ritual.”

Trippy Tippy Hippy Van

Why not a vehicle on its side? But, how? You can’t see through a roof. You can’t see through an undercarriage. Most vehicle bodies are much wider than they are tall, which means they will be far too narrow once flipped onto their sides. My first thought was that it needed to be both iconic, and a vehicle prone to rollovers for the visual gag to really work. But with such restrictive design parameters, which vehicle? A typical conversion van would have the longer, raised roof required, but offered nothing in the way of real aesthetic appeal, and most are far too heavy. What van has both a smaller body, a raised roof, and a look that is at once both iconic and desirable? The answer finally popped into my head—it had to be a classic Volkswagen Type 2 Westfalia camper van.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzyS0Zfxa58