Burning Man 1997 | Burning Man 1997 Press Overview

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Press Overview

Burning Man 1997 Press Overview

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In 1997 Burning Man will recreate itself--this year on the shore of Hualapai Playa deep in the desert of northwestern Nevada. We will build a great cosmopolitan city, a place of spacious boulevards and vast outdoor art galleries, and we will people this instant metropolis with thousands of citizens who come to engage in an "experiment in temporary community." The streets of Black Rock City will be thronged with costumed celebrants and its avenues and byways lined with "theme camps"--living art installations spontaneously contributed by participants. Beyond this city looms the Burning Man. Stationed in the vast and trackless space of the featureless playa, the four-story tall effigy stands atop a pyramidal temple waiting to be burned.

What does this figure mean and why does he burn? We leave this answer up to you. For Burning Man himself is simply the convergent center of a maelstrom of activity that whirls around him. Indeed, the emergent story in 1997 is in many ways not even the event itself, but rather its expanding consequence within the world at large. Burning Man is a phenomenon, a spreading social movement. San Francisco has again produced an alternative culture. Like the Beat movement of the 40' and 50's and the explosion of the Hippie scene in the late 60's and early 70's, the Burning Man phenomenon has arisen from the rich and fertile mulching bed of San Francisco's bohemian underground. Its immediate consequence has been an artist led resurgence of communal public celebration, a non-funded grass roots revival within America's historic capitol of avant garde activity. Groups of artists are performing in the streets, as at the recent celebrations of Defenestration or the Cyberbuss Costume Ball.

Many others are creating similar events and gatherings in lofts, in vacant lots and amid rural settings throughout California and across the nation. None of these actions have been sanctioned or controlled by the Burning Man Project itself, and many all of them have been created, funded and organized by veterans of the Burning Man experience. Communal, interactive, immediate, primally and surreally expressive--they bear its indelible stamp. The meteoric growth of Burning Man is becoming a conflagration--a fire so large that it has generated its own wind. We are witnessing a vastly larger influx of creative inspiration which, in turn, has fueled the spread of further fires in an ever greater landscape. As concrete evidence of this, consult the growing community section of this web site to find the many hundreds of individual web sites that have been generated by participants. They have begun to form a wave, a spreading tsunami of information. In its fast gathering magnitude, it dwarfs any conscious campaign of promotion.

Any large corporate entity, spending millions to develop web sites and commercial advertising campaigns, might well envy the contagious spread of public enthusiasm that Burning Man has produced. Even more ironically, it is precisely because Burning Man is so adamantly and so radically non-commercial, that its peculiar popularity has grown. Burning Man does not produce a product and is not an object that can be consumed. We include no clippings in this press kit, no pre-digested souvenirs of someone else's point of view. Burning Man is an immediate experience. It is about a way of life. As a journalist, we welcome you to the adventure.