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:
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