Late summer brings the Burning Man festival to
the flat sands of northwestern Nevada. This
experimental culture takes form as a city - Black
Rock City - which hosts an impressive array of
cultural factions: hippies, newagers, candy
ravers, punks, the occasional post-apocalyptic
death cult, body-artists, drummers, shamans,
drug gurus, acrobats, fire breathers,
technophiles, nudists, massage therapists,
welders, dogs, metalheads, mechanics, divas,
lost kids, and the occasional bored suburbanite.
The participants, armed with food, water, and
shelter, gather together in a bustling collection of
makeshift outposts with odd missions - New
Year's Day: a group from New York, dedicated to
celebrating New Year's Eve each and every day;
Antarctica: a giant refrigerated cave where people
trade sunstroke for frostbite; Big Puffy Yellow
Camp: dedicated to everything that is big, puffy,
and yellow; the Volunteer Pyro Department:
helping you set things on fire; Camp Dickface,
where gentlemen (or ladies with strapons) can
replace a celebrity’s nose with their very own
phallus; Eggchair: mysteriously centered around
an oval chair; and the Thunderdome: a giant
floating arena of violence.
Perhaps the only thing that holds this eclectic
conglomeration together is a culture of giving,
honesty, acceptance, and experimentation that
has been slowly cultivated as the event has
grown in size (with a population of 30,000, Black
Rock City was the 7th largest city in Nevada).
The keystone of the festival is the philosophy of
participation - if you aren't giving to the festival
than you are a spectator, subject to being heckled,
decorated, entertained, massaged, paraded,
interrupted in any imaginable way. Like all
things at Burning Man, this maxim is not
absolute: the Spectator Camp drives around a
giant set of bleachers encouraging people to
just watch. The act of giving to the community
is a reward in and of itself, and the more per -
sonal and unique the gift, the better. It is this
accelerated sharing that is responsible for the
festival's success - as participants return year
after year with larger and more intricate installations,
vehicles, costumes, games and performances.
As one might expect in such a
diverse sea of experience, there is little concern
for refinement - it is more the contribution
to the overwhelming diversity, the uniqueness
of what someone does that matters.
Burning Man 2002's theme, the floating world,
encouraged attendees to build boats, waves, and fish.
Advice for first-time attendees: get lost
as soon as possible. Leave your
friends from your hometown and wander
across the desert to the nearest
distant blinking light, motorized fuzzy
cat, magic carpet, or equally magic
bus to cross your path. There you will
find crowds of people playing games
that you are advised to go along with.
Have someone throw you through the
floor and ingest whatever they offer. If
you aren't dressed yet, then dress, or
revert to your natural skin. Amongst
these people there is as much love as
hate, flesh puddles trade places with
wrestling and explosions. Attention
hounds with megaphones heckle the
suddenly smitten. Here, where an
evening jaunt across the desert can
transform, there is always something
to do (take a group shower? fix your
bike? have your genitals painted?
burn money? eat fresh tuna? get sold
into slavery? go skydiving?).
Whatever your curiosity, the Burning
Man festival will give you new ways to
explore it.
Participants build elaborate enclosures,
such as this shrine.
Burning Man is an exorbitant party supported by a
rather dramatic social experiment. Privacy, property,
and personal boundaries are scarce. Money is seen as
tacky, bartering petty, and gift is the preferred method
of exchange. Along with these loose notions of possession
come free ideas of personal spaces, both physical
and mental. Conversations at Burning Man are often
collective - spreading across and through groups of
people. Wearing a tacky sweater? You are sure to be
informed of this fact, but it is no reason not to laugh.
Similarly, participant's physical bodies become collectivized
and augmented, moved around and touched,
sometimes without permission, but never with creepy
intentions.
Wandering across the desert: hot, sunny, out of water,
still tripping, looking for the nearest ride, when suddenly
out the corner of my eye - an 8-axle dragon, breathing
fire, came scuttling across the flat sand. Inside, on
the floor, they’re passed out looking at the stars, naked
rolling around, with small light installations, an altar that
serves as an anonymous food exchange, as the vehicle
approaches loud music, a small crowd outside
dancing with fire. Two people on a golf cart roll by
shouting obscenities. The dragon itself is overflowing
with people wearing synthetic furs, toys, and body
paint, joking and screaming. Burning Man, this year, in
fuller swing than ever.
