Burning Man, 2011

This year at Burning Man, I was one of that small, select group of people who took photographs with old school photographic film. Whereas everyone else on the playa got instantaneous feedback which each click of the shutter, I had to wait two full weeks to see whether I'd remembered to remove the lens cap!

As it happened, I'm pretty damn proud of the photos I took.Out of the roughly 180 shots that were developed, there were around 90 that I liked well enough to want to show to people--not bad! However, I do realize that just dumping a hundred-odd photos on the web and making a slide show is a little unpleasant, so I've divided them up into sections based on subject matter, and posted them all here. With the exception of the two photos of me, I took all of these--please click on the images to see a larger view.

I also tried to write a little bit about what each thing meant to me, and to tell some other stories that weren't captured on film. On the other hand, if you'd rather just see a giant, context-less slideshow, click here.

• The Temple--possibly my favorite structure on the playa, this and every year
• The Man--the whole point of the thing--burn him!
• Snowflake Village--my camp, the place I call Home in Black Rock City
• Charon--my favorite piece of art this year
• Toyzilla--another really cool art piece
• Art--some other amazing pieces that I saw this year
• Art Cars--a few of the cool mutant vehicles
• People--portraits of my fellow citizens
• Finally, here are the notes I wrote up from last year's trip to Black Rock.

The Temple

The Temple

This year there were two Temples at burning man. The big Temple, as always, was a place for meditation on change and loss. People left gifts and wrote remembrances on the walls in sharpies, and on Sunday it was burned. I'll say more about it in a bit.

The other Temple, the new one this year, was the Temple of Shame. Sadly I don't have any photographs of it (but Michael Holden does, see above). It was a giant ramp, twisting in on itself like a spiral. All along the walls, the railings, and the floor people had used sharpies to write about shame. Shame as a concept, antidotes to shame and, most importantly, things that shamed them in their lives, things that they were trying to come to terms with. For many, this was the first place they had ever publicly (if anonymously) acknowledged it. 

As usual in Black Rock City, there was a great mix of the commonplace ("I'm ashamed that I live so well, when others in the world live so poorly") the weird ("I'm ashed of how bad horses smell. Fuck they reek!") the smart-arsed ("I'm ashamed of wasting this sharpie!") and the heart-breaking ("I'm ashamed of passing my abuse on to my nephew"). It was incredibly moving, and I saw a number of visitors in tears, a few of them sobbing uncontrollably. On Saturday night a few hours after the Man was burned they burned the Temple of Shame in a smaller ceremony.

The other temple, the big Temple, was the Temple of Transition. It was truly amazing--I still prefer the emply from my first year (it struck me as a little more humble, and more focused on the contributions of the participants) but there's no denying that this year's was quite wonderful. The folks that built it have full info on their website. 

It consisted of a main building, a single room twenty feet across and 130 feet high ("The Temple of Transition"), surrounded by five smaller rooms. 

Each of the side-temples had shaded benches, a central work of art, and plenty of wall space for people to write on, and space for people to leave mementos. They also each had a theme: "The Temple of Love", "The Temple of Death", "The Temple of Birth", "The Temple of Growth", and "The Temple of Decay". The central piece of art varied; in some it was a sculpture, in the temple of decay it was a collection of memento mori:

The Temple complex as a whole was covered with fantastic carvings of theme-appropriate artwork. They were gorgeous, but also made of unpainted plywood--they were intended to be written on. By Saturday, almost every square inch of the Temple was covered in people's memories, dreams, and memorials. Again, these ranged from the heartbreaking to the whimsical. This was one of my favorite ones:

And here are a few of the carvings, click on them to see larger versions:

In addition to the carvings, the Temple was also festooned with gargoyles:

Finally, there was a large, open courtyard on the center-facing side, where a sixth side-temple might have gone. I noticed at the time that there were a number of wires strong across it, high in the air, but simply assumed that they were guy wires for extra stability. The thing was over 130 feet tall, after all! I found out later that they were actually the strings of an enormous harp. I never got a chance to hear it played, but it must have been amazing!

Which brings me to the music, and the most incredible part of the Temple: the central spire. It was a vast, open room--the only ceiling was a hundred feet up--and in addition to the writing that covered the walls, they were also covered in gamelan. Gamelan music is from Indonesia, and is made with an ensemble of players striking gongs and bells (it can also include other instruments, but it's mainly the gongs that people think of when the think of gamelan).

In this case each gong (and there were forty or fifty, spread throughout the central room) was being played by a robotic striker, controlled by a computer program. At times a human would take control, but most of the time it ran on its own. I was never able to figure out whether it was a pre-programmed composition or an aleatoric one, but it was beautiful. Gamelan music is played in a non-Western key, giving it an eerie quality that is also highly conducive (at least in the case of this particular performance) to meditation. 

And, indeed, the main room of the temple was packed with tranced-out people. Every time I went there was no room to lie on the ground, and little space to sit along the walls--people were praying, meditating, relaxing or simply sleeping there. Eventually a few folks would get up and move along, and someone else would take there place. The Temple has always been a peaceful place, each year I've gone, but the continual chime of the gamelan music made this year's Temple especially soothing. As always, it was burned to the ground in a solemn ceremony on Sunday night. This year, sadly, I had to miss the event.

 

The Man

The Man means different things to different people, of course, and even then the meaning varies with the day of the week. For those lucky enough to be there the Friday and Saturday before the Gate opens (a select group, given pre-admission tickets to help set up the larger camps--I was lucky enough to do this my first year) the Man is one of the only pieces of Great Art around. Folks come out well in advance to construct the piece, and at the beginning it towers over an almost empty desert.

After the gates open competing giant sculpture begins to arrive, and the Man is no longer the only exciting thing on the playa. This year it wasn't even the biggest--this time the Temple was over 130 feet tall. Still, at 104 feet, the Man is pretty easy to see, and it's central location (literally--Black Rock City is laid out in a giant circle with the Man at the precise center) means that it serves as a convenient landmark. No matter how drunk, lost, or confused you are Monday through Wednesday, you can (almost) always find him standing there, in the center of everything. Of course, there are occasionally dust storms that obscure everything outside of a few feet, but this year that only ever happened once or twice. I was actually a little disappointed.

On Wednesday night I made sure to get to bed early, because I wanted to experience dawn on the playa Thursday morning. It was still chilly out, and although there were inevitably a few parties going on in the distance, there were only a few thousand people awake--most of them photographers, with a few yoga practitioners heading towards the Temple. I know that I should just choose my favorite "sunrise at the Man" photo and paste it here, but I'm really proud of these so you're getting three of them. On of the things I wanted to do with these was to try out a few different F-stops and exposure times, which is why the same dawn is three different colors. One of the things I forgot to do was to write down what settings I was using.
Please do click on these images to see larger versions.

By Thursday night, and then increasingly through Saturday, there begin to be so many distractions and so much neon in the dark that the Man is no longer good for finding your way home at the end of the day. One develops a technique of walking towards the mass of light and away from the fields of darkness--eventually you're bound to find something you recognize, and it's usually the Man. Until Saturday, of course, when they burn the whole thing to the ground.
This year, literally half an hour after the Man was burnt, I tried to get my bearings my looking for it--it's amazing how quickly one acquires these habits!

He was different this year: for the first time he was depicted in motion, striding from one peak to another. At least he was from most angels--from certain angles it just looked like his legs were crossed, standing in line for the porta-potties like the rest of us.

The peaks represent, among other things, the transition of the festival from a privately owned LLC to a not-for-profit. The whole thing started with a handful of people on the beach, but now it's grown to such a huge size that private ownership just feels wrong.


When it was just that handful of people the Man simply stood on a few bales of hay. Legend has it that during the first event, a women walked up and held his hand as he burned--it is not advisable to attempt this today. In point of fact the Rangers, Burning Man's elite group of tough-as-nails, all volunteer veteran Burner security force, will firmly escort you away if you try to get within fifty feet. And for good reason! After everyone has gathered, and the dust storms have died down, and the incredible fire shows have ended, there's the most amazing fireworks display you've ever seen. No, really--I don't care where you saw the Fourth of July, Black Rock City does it better.

I was sitting next to another three-year veteran, who smugly leaned over and said, "All these first-timers think that the show started with the fireworks, but you and I know that it's the explosions that really blow your mind!" I'm sure he was, in part, referring to the seventy-foot-high fireball that set last year's Man ablaze. It was one of the most impressive things I'd seen in my life. And, sure enough, three or four huge columns of fire exploded from the base, each one in a different color! My friend had just enough time to share a smug, "See, I knew it was coming" look with me before *WHOOM* there was a tremendous explosion of flame! I'm not sure how far back we where, but it must have been fifty or sixty feet at least. The heat was so intense that we all started seriously considering taking a few steps back, even still.

It burned for just the right amount of time to be satisfying, but not so long as to get boring (and yes, even sitting in a crowd of forty-thousand people watching a hundred-foot-tall effigy burn to ash can get boring after half an hour or more, especially if you need to pee). Finally, the right-hand peak collapsed, and the man seemed to jump head first into the desert. At that point the fire crew verified that all of the free standing structures had fallen and the crowd raced towards the flames for the traditional running-thrice-around-the-fire ritual. I did this my first year, and again last year. This year, feeling the full weight of the crowd, I decided that I could come back later.

When I did return, the next afternoon around 1:00, parts of the man were still on fire. Ash that had smoldered all night long would get exposed to oxygen and burst back into flame. For the most part, however, if had cooled enough to explore and I joined a bunch of folks looking for mementos and relics. To this day the soles of my shoes remain half melted.


Liquefied neon was the most prized relic, especially the more rare purple neon, but people were also happy to find bolts and washers. One fellow donned a full firefighter uniform, gloves and all, and waded into the midst of the embers to twist off pieces for the crowd. Another fellow cooked popcorn on the ashes.


At that point I was well and truly out of film, but just imagine a group of dust- and soot-colored squatters sifting the ruins of a giant sculpture like survivors of an epic tragedy or a Viking raid. Except that everyone was also smiling, and occasionally someone yelled out, "Hey, I found a bunch of neon shards over here!"

Snowflake Village

Last year I spent a lot of time hanging out at Camp Vulcan, with the jugglers. They were a cool group of people (although not enough of them could pass clubs!) and for a while I considered joining their camp in 2011. Unlike Snowflake Village, where I stayed in 2009 and 2010, Camp Vulcan charged a fee, but included in the fee was a meal plan and water for the week. 

It seemed like a great idea, and I was ready to jump ship up until Thursday night, when Snowflake had its yearly camp-wide potluck formal dress dinner. There was such a sense of community and family there, and there were so many cool, fascinating people, that I realized that joining the jugglers would have been a terrible mistake, and that what I really wanted was to come stay with Snowflake Village again.

This was my third year with Snowflake Village, and it really is a great community. This year it had 260 people, divided into ten or fifteen smaller sub-camps. These included the Burning Band, a full-scale marching band; Videogasm, which shows short films, experimental films, and Friday night Rocky Horror; and the Vegemite Appreciation Society, a group of Aussies who spent their time distributing Vegemite on buttered bread.

One of the new camps this year was the Blue Crew, a group of folks that drove down in a giant blue school bus and set up a lively game of 3D Twister:

I arrived in Black Rock City about an hour or two before dawn this year (we pulled up to the line at 12:30am, and made it through the gate by 3:30--not a terribly long line at all, for Burning Man). That early in the week there weren't very many landmarks. Nor where there many lights yet, so it was also quite dark. At one point I stumbled across a giant, ten-foot-high sculpture that sort of looked like a snowflake, and was right next to a huge, walled camp with icicle LED lights and assumed that Snowflake Village had grown enormously since last year! As it turned out, by the light of dawn it was actually a sculpture of a gear, and the walled camp was really First Camp, where all the big shots* live. Eventually I just dropped my gear in a little pile by Center Camp and trudged aimlessly around the esplanade hoping to find my way. That was the worst part of the trip this year--that very first hour, walking around in the dark.

But it was soon over! When I did find my camp, dawn was breaking and the Blue Craw had just pulled up in their big blue school bus. It seemed silly to go to sleep then, so I helped them set up their sleeping area. As a result, they invited me to join them, and I got a lovely spot in the corner. They had used their bus to form one wall, and a trailer to form another. Then they pulled a series of tarps over the top, creating a luxuriously shady area. It still got a bit hot during the day, but it was almost like sleeping indoors.

(There's my tent in the back right of this photo)

I spent most of my down time this year hanging out with the Mensa camp. This is partly because they are all awesome (and, by definition, smart) people, and partly because they have not one but two great hang-out spaces. The first one is Starbutt's Café, run by Flossie Starbutts III. He's a wonderfully kind fellow that greets everyone by rubbing noses, and each year he and his wife, Your Fly is Open, fill their vintage Airstream with enough ground coffee, soy milk, honey, sweetener, and Bailey's to keep everyone caffeinated for a week. He always has a big shade structure with plenty of chairs, and it's a really good spot to hang out and chat to people.

The other great space Mensa provides is their big public gift, the "Shack of Sit" (where sit happens). It's a large, shaded structure right by the Esplanade full of chairs and ice water. Everyone on the playa is encouraged to stop by, grab a seat, and watch the parade of people go by. The Esplanade is Black Rock City's Main Street--it's the innermost ring, right between the outer section (with all the camps) and the interior (which is nothing bu Art and desert). Needless to say, there is some fantastic people-watching to be had!

One day in the Shack of Sit one of my camp-mates invented a new game, or perhaps just an interesting new way to mess with people's heads. It took advantage of the fact that Burners are, and I certainly include myself in this, hyper-sensitive to two things: litter and commercialism. 

Burning Man is a "leave no trace" event, which means that at the end of the week every piece of litter, every cigarette butt, and every single feather gets picked up and carried away, to be thrown out back in civilization. The only way that this is really practical is if all 50,000 burners remain vigilant about noticing and grabbing litter--"Matter Out Of Place", or MOOP, as it's known. If you see something on the ground that shouldn't be there, it's second nature to grab it before it blows away.

Burning Man is also a rabidly non-commercial event. With a few small exceptions** selling things for money is absolutely prohibited. Some things get bartered, but the vast majority of transactions are part of the "gift economy". For example, people spend the whole year saving up so that they can buy a ton of booze in order to open a bar in Black Rock City that "sells" free liquor. A young woman set up a stall near my camp where she had a bunch of jewelry, buttons, and mix tapes that she had made. It was just like something you might see at a tourist stop by the road, except that she wasn't charging money for any of it. It was a beautiful thing. 

So anyway, this game that we were playing was very simple. Take a dollar bill, write "MOOP" on it in marker, and throw it out to the playa. First of all, a number of people were so out of it that they didn't even see the money, or their costume was too cumbersome for them to pick it up if they wanted to. But for the others, there was a great shock of cognitive dissonance between the impulse of  "ooh, free money" followed immediately by, "but I'm at Burning Man and money is bad here!" followed by, "but it's also litter!!! Aaagh!"

(This fellow did not reach down to pick up anything)

We had our Thursday night potluck extravaganza again this year, and it was fantastic as usual. This year, instead of a costume contest, we had an Epic Pinata Event. The pinata in question was named Tony the Pony, and it started life as a fairly innocuous white pony with a hot pink mane. Before long, however, someone had stuck a cigarette in its mouth, and by the time it was full of candy someone else had strapped on an enormous rubber phallus. So when the time came, Tony was hanging in the middle of geodesic dome, half smoked cigarette and large pink cock both dangling in the wind.

The first contestant was handed a large metal pole and then blindfolded, at which point the large poll was removed and a small wooded paddle substituted. The penis and the cigarette flew off after the first couple of good whacks, but in general Tony proved to be a surprisingly tough little pony. He made it more or less intact through three blindfolded participants, and then I stepped up to bat. I won.

(Photo by BKos)

A few days later, when the time came to burn the Man, I found myself in the midst of a group of strangers who soon became friends. As I passed around my flask of absinthe I first ensured that the recipient was a fan of black licorice (otherwise it's a real waste of absinthe!). As it happened, the person in front of me was such a fan that he had brought a pack of black licorice with him! Now, one of the cool prizes that had popped out of Tony's stomach was a mini kaleidoscope. It was pocket sized, and mirrored whatever you were looking at eight times. So after we'd passed the absinthe and the licorice back and forth for a bit, I handed him the kaleidoscope and said, "Here, try some poor man's acid". He thanked me, but said he didn't do drugs, and then got the widest grin on his face when I showed him what it really was. I eventually just told him to pass it along to the person to his right--I have no idea how far it made it around the circle.

My first time at Burning Man I simply staggered around, mouth agape. There was just too much too process--a phenomenon that I find delightful, but that others can find exhausting. For my second year, 2010,  I felt more comfortable. I got out the "Who What Where?" guide and marked off every event that I wanted to see from every camp in the place, and then raced around as fast as possible trying to do them all. That was fun too.

This time, however, I was much more relaxed. I didn't even open up the guide book, and I spent more time in my own camp than I did in other camps. In addition to Starbutts and the Shack of Sit, I also visited the Australians (although I didn't get to hang out with them as much as I would have liked this year) and Pleasure Garden. It turned out that one of the members of Pleasure Garden makes his living as a professional brewer, and had brought several kegs of his own work with him!

I spent more time in the hanging out with Dreamy and Tickles and Cyclopedia--great people, that I had already gotten to know from my previous years. I got to know them better this year, however. In fact, Tickles (who is a costume designer in the real world) is currently making me a skirt! I also hung out with Madtown and Rana, and hopefully I'll get to see them more often in Chicago--they both live in Wisconsin, and are Dr. Who fans.

I am, of course, already looking forward to next year. My hope is that by then, my fourth year, I'll have my act together enough to have some participatory event or another (I'm thinking of hosting a Shakespeare reading, perhaps). I'd also like to volunteer more. My first two years it felt like if I slowed down for even a second I'd miss something wonderful! This year I finally realized that it was true, but that there were plenty of wonderful things, and that one could never see all of them, anyway!

*By "big shots" I mean the rangers and Department of Public Works people who arrive weeks in advance and set up the town. They are "big shots" not because of any artificial rank (there's no such thing) or salary (they're all volunteer) but just because of community respect. These folks have been doing this for a long time, and they know what's what.

**As a fund raiser, Center Camp does sell coffee, lemonade, and ice cubes for cash. The proceeds are donated to local schools as a good-will gesture, to thank to local community for letting us party in their back yard, so to speak.

Charon

Charon, by Peter Hudson, was my favorite piece of art in Black Rock City this year, and one of my favorite pieces of art in general. As I was saying in the other art post, it's hard to make great art, and it's hard to make participatory art, but the real trick is to make great, participatory art that also creates a community. The Temple is beautiful as it stands (especially this year!) but the folks who add their memories to its walls make it so much more beautiful--that's collaborative, participatory art!

On the other hand, the Man--it's stupendous, and it's beautiful and it's spectacular and meaningful... but for the vast majority of people, it's a thing you sit and watch. You can climb on it before the Burn, but when you do you aren't really adding to the piece in a meaningful way.

Or this other installation that I saw: a series of metal objects suspended from a rack--pots, pans, bells, gongs, and half of a fire extinguisher. Drum sticks were also hanging from the rack, and folks could create a little percussive concert in the desert! It was nice, but most of the time it was just some metal hanging from a rack. When I hit it, it was just a guy hitting some metal on a rack. It required a really talented participant to make it something special, at which point for the rest of us it became another non-participatory experience--a concert.

But this piece I liked so much, Charon, was both aesthetically and philosophically beautiful, and it became more so with the participation of the crowd. It was a humongous wheel with several near-identical sculptures mounted around the inside. The sculptures depicted a life-sized skeleton, poling his boat: Charon. Each skeleton was minutely different, however, and when the thing was in full swing it the entire wheel would spin, a strobe light would flash, and the skeleton would pull his oar and turn his head to look at you. In short, it was an enormous stroboscopic zoetrope.

When the strobe flashed and the wheel spun at the correct speed, instead of appearing to be several separate sculptures it looked like one moving skeleton--exactly the same effect as with film at a movie theater. The big difference, though, was that the images in movie theaters are all two dimensional and far away, whereas Charon was clearly three dimensional and right in front of me! Seeing this  inanimate-but-moving skeleton turn to look at me was a delightful feeling.

If that had been the sum of the piece--a 3D zoetrope, perhaps powered by an electric motor--then I would have been impressed. But the artist made a series of choices in how to power the piece that elevated it into something much cooler. For one thing, the entire wheel was human powered. There were eight ropes connected to four devices (turbines, I guess?) that converted force pulling the ropes into force turning the wheel. It was pretty difficult to get moving, too--whether the artist deliberately made it challenging, or whether it simply required a lot of work to move that wheel, I'm not sure. But even with eight people on the ropes it was a challenge.

It came to life in stages, too. As I first started pulling at the ropes, it began to rotate. Then, as it got faster and faster, a lurid red light turned on to illuminate the sculpture. Then a bell rang, to announce that it was almost (finally) at optimal speed. And, at last, the strobe light switched on and the full animation effect was in place! This whole thing added drama to the procedure, and made the event feel like a real accomplishment. Even when I wasn't one of the people pulling the ropes, it still felt like I'd really been a part of something when that bell began to ring!

The final part of the sculpture that I adored was the fact that the most efficient way to turn the wheel was with steady, pulling of the rope, maintaining constant tension (and whether this was a mechanical necessity because of the way the motor worked, or an artistic decision, or both I also couldn't say). So when I first got up there, I grabbed a rope and really put my back into it, heaving for all I was worth. Not much happened until someone told me that I needed to make sure that the person on the other end of the rope was keeping up with me. This added a whole new dimension to the piece--not only did you have to physically work to get it to move, but you had to coördinate this work with a stranger, twenty feet away in the dark! Before long it was as if I were talking to my partner through the rope, feeling the tension as they pulled, and the slack and they released. Eventually the crowd understood what was going on, and switched from simply yelling encouragement to singing sea shanties to help us time our efforts! So it wasn't just a bunch of people making a wheel turn, it was a full community effort!

Now that, that is good art!

Art

As usual, the playa was packed with amazing art. If anything, I'd say that this year was the fullest and the best of the three years I've been--a list of all 183 officially registered pieces is here, and there was also plenty of art that didn't get registered. I certainly didn't see all of them, but I did get to see quite a few.

My very favorite piece was Charon, but I'll cover than in a separate post. Second to that, perhaps my favorite pieces small-scale piece wasn't visual, so I have no documentation of it. Come to think of it, I'm not even sure what it was called.

Way out in the back playa, behind the Temple and out past the Zip Line, almost as far as the old movie theater (the Black Rock Bijou!), there was a small collection of posts with loudspeakers attached to them. In front of each post was a dial, and a button. Madtown, Rana and I stumbled across it late one night. It sounded creepy as hell--each speaker was playing a different, disembodied voice and they were all playing at once. Sometimes there'd be a burst of music, too, and none of the voices sounded quite human. Even creepier, none of the things that the voices were saying made any sense--scraps of nursery rhymes, or fragments of conversations, or just a girl saying, "hello, hello, hello" into the night. It gave us the shivers, in a delightful way, but there was more to it than that.

Eventually we figured out (there were no written instructions, to speak of) that you could hold down the button and it would record whatever you said. And you could twist the dial and it would pitch your voice up or down. Then it stored the loop in some sort of memory bank, and played it at random intervals. Which meant that all of the creepy disembodied voices that we heard were all fellow Burners who had come across the piece just like we had!

Some of them were trying to figure it out and accidentally sounding spooky, while some of them had already figured it out and were deliberately trying to screw with future participants. We got to see two other sets of people discover the installation, and go through the same process of figuring out what was happening. One of them pulled out a harmonica and played a happy little tune, which we heard again, shifted way down, five minutes later--it didn't sound all that happy, then. In my opinion, it is hard to make good art, and it is also hard to make collaborative art, where the audience is an integral part of the piece. What's really hard is to make good, collaborative art, where the people who are experiencing the artwork are also the people who are making it!

Another piece of art that I wasn't able to capture on film was Balloon Chain, by Robert Bose. It was one of those stupidly-simple-but-utterly-brilliant things: he took a couple hundred heavy-duty helium balloons, tied them together with strong line, and then put a high-powered LED under each one. The effect was striking, especially at night. Just an impossibly long string of brilliant little lights, reaching up to the stars.

On Saturday night they burned down the Man--an understandable event, but one that left me without my favorite navigational landmark. Lost in a see of neon-covered art cars, and really needing to find the porta-potties, I decided to follow one of those strings of light to its source. I figured that it was probably being monitored so that it wouldn't just fly away, and the artist could maybe give me directions, so I set off like a certain ancient Magus, following the trail of stars. When I finally got to the end of the string of lights, however, it was just a guy, holding onto the handles of the balloon line with both hands. He didn't know where the bathrooms were, and he didn't even know anything about the art piece--he said some stranger had walked up to him and said, "Can I trust you?" and then handed him the balloons and then walked off, and he'd been waiting ever since. He asked if he could trust me, as I headed off, but I just kept walking.

One new thing this year was the Circle of Regional Effigies (C.O.R.E.). 23 art projects created by Burning Man Regional groups around the world. There was a wide range of sculpture in this group, from the Ouroboros (above) from Austin to the the giant whiskey barrel below (from the Kentucky Regional group). Sadly there was no whiskey in the barrel--but the inside was full of smaller pieces of art. On Thursday night all 23 pieces were simultaneously burnt, in a veritable orgy of fire.

The piece below, which was not part of C.O.R.E., was entitled "Is Land". It had an interesting history. Apparently it was a bit bigger (and perhaps looked a bit more like an island) when it was created initially. The artist threw a giant unveiling party when it was completed, with the art floating over the nearby lake as the centerpiece. Apparently a group of vandals snuck out in a rowboat and cut the lines, causing the piece to fly off into the night. The artist worked with the US Meteorological Service to try to track it down, but it was never recovered. It was hastily rebuilt in time for Burning Man, but now it kind of looks like a weird camouflaged duck. It was one of the landmarks we used to find out camp during the day.

Another awesome piece was this fifty-foot-high Trojan Horse that weighed thirty tons. It was covered in neon, and featured a full wet bar on the inside. On Friday night, a team of volunteer slaves pulled it out into the middle of the playa, where a group of archers shot flaming arrows (ingeniously mounted on zip lines, to avoid unwanted conflagration) into it. This set off a massive fireworks show, and it burned to the ground. I watched from camp, so I didn't get any photos of the burning, but here's how it looked previously, at dawn and at night:

Finally, here are a few more pieces that I really enjoyed: