Burning Man Lights Up Desert Sky | Burning Man 1997
September 2, 1997
By Malcolm Maclachlan, TechWire
GERLACH, Nevada -- Eleven years ago, in a personal ceremony, a man seeking spiritual rebirth burned an effigy of himself on a San Francisco beach.
A decade later, the digerati follow him into the Nevada desert each Labor Day weekend, seeking their own renewal in the flickering light of a 40-foot-high flaming man made of wood and neon lights.
The Burning Man festival has become a premier social and artistic event of the West Coast's technology culture. For one week, the technologically hip -- programmers, Web designers, and evangelists -- revel day and night in a forsaken place with no grounded Internet connections, no cellular service, and no midnight Dominos delivery.
Physical Cyberspace
The playa where the festival took place last weekend is much a like a physical manifestation of the Internet -- empty space waiting to be filled. All the attendees are considered participants, encouraged and sometimes forced to interact with the event.
Works of art, centered on "theme camps," stretched out in every direction. Some of these were comparatively low-tech, such as a 20-foot arch of horse bones, supported on a steel frame. Some are interactive, such as the Alien Chess Set featuring glowing 2-foot alien chess pieces. Many passers-by paused to worship a life-sized, gold-colored Venus of Willendorf.
Other works tended toward the technological. The Los Angeles noise techno band Santa Pollo promoted itself with a black-lit booth full of florescent paintings of crucified chickens and blasting computer-generated music. Giant homemade vehicles roamed the playa, spewing flames high in the air.
Pete Kranz of Berkeley, Calif., hosted his own pirate radio station. He said he got the idea at last year's festival.
"There were a lot of creative people and they had no outlet," said Kranz, who generally goes by the DJ name Moebius. "We built the radio station for anyone and everyone to run it."
To demonstrate, Kranz and his group offered the controls to anyone and everyone who walked by. People were free to play music, read poetry, or do anything else with the 91.5 frequency the station had claimed.
Kranz demonstrates the skills and resourcefulness it takes to make something like this happen. In daily life, he is an information technology consultant for Price Waterhouse. He built the broadcast equipment from mail-order components, then tested it by broadcasting in Berkeley in the middle of the night.
But Kranz's was only one of at least five pirate radio stations broadcasting into the mostly void rural Nevada airwaves. The stations were only given one rule: no commercial announcements.
Virtual Community
Burning Man's founder, Larry Harvey, led the activities this past weekend, as he does each year. The festivities culminate on the Sunday before Labor Day, when a 40-foot wood and neon man is burned to the ground. Participants are encouraged to toss into the fire objects representing the things they are trying to leave behind, just as Harvey did on the first burn.
The event takes place on Hualapai Playa, 90 miles north of Reno, 17 miles from the nearest town. The event has moved slightly from last year, from public to private land, and has experienced some legal troubles. Yet it continues to grow each year, attracting an estimated 12,000 people from all over the world. Time magazine and Good Morning America have both featured it.
What is the big deal? Perhaps Harvey has created in real space what people like Howard Rheingold have attempted in cyberspace -- a community based not on geography, but on like values, such as a love of freedom and creativity.
"This is an experiment in community," Harvey told a crowd gathered near the center of camp on Saturday. "The way we live, we're all uprooted. When you drink a Coke, you're not united. Culture is based on communication, not consumption.
"A lot of us are here because we're rootless," he said. "What we are trying to do is re-create culture."
In fact, the Burning Man community stays in touch throughout the year through various E-mail lists, newsgroups, and Websites. Much of this community centers around a San Francisco-based group called CyberBuss, whose efforts center on creating "organic cyberculture."
The group has 230 official members from 17 countries. Cyberbussers travel in an old school bus, painted silver. The group's projects include providing an educational resource for children and others who lack Internet connection, recording events for the Web and promoting cybercommunity.
At Burning Man, the scene around the Buss is organized chaos. The Cyberbuss group is largely identified by the members' silver body paint, which matches the Buss itself. Outside, one Busser ritualistically beats journalists with a pillow in exchange for interviews.
Onboard, the Buss crew, who come from countries including Brazil and Germany, discuss future projects, such as a trip to set up Web connections in rural areas in South America. A journalist borrows the Buss' mobile Internet connection to file a story.
The Buss is largely about creating a mobile technology community, according to founder Sam Frangiamore, known as C y b e r sAM.
"I love what I do," said C y b e r sAM, a Web designer in one of his incarnations. "I don't like doing it in the same four walls, 50 hours a week. If you can work from home, why can't you work from the Grand Canyon or Yosemite?"
C y b e r sAM said he also hopes to fight the perception that computers isolate people. In fact, he said, they provide a unique opportunity to unite and empower.
"People say, 'I don't want to sit and talk to a computer.' But you're talking to people," he said. "Communally, you can do so much more than individually. It's the best way to create."
This Ain't No Dead Show
The spectacle of thousands of free spirits cavorting in an open space inevitably brings to mind comparisons with Grateful Dead shows.
"This is what I started doing when Jerry Garcia died," said Greg, a former Deadhead from Sacramento.
This was Greg's second Burning Man. It's also the first where he's done a theme camp. His Bear's Lair was an enclosed structure with techno and Grateful Dead music pumping inside.
The many people who came to Burning Man through the Dead or through art scenes suggests that it's inaccurate to portray it as a technology festival, Reno-based writer Fiona Essa said. Even so, Essa said the festival has a special attraction for people in technology.
"When you're covered in mud, no one knows you're a geek," she said.
"It's a subset of a Dead show," said Doug Barnes of the Oakland, Calif.-based cryptography company C2Net. "It's not more of the same."
The difference? Politics, Barnes said. He was out with some colleagues promoting the company and showing off the latest issue of Forbes, which contains an article on C2Net founder Sameer Parekh. In the piece, the 22- year-old Parekh speaks frankly about his hopes that his cryptography software will undermine the government.
Last year's festival had another feature that would never fly at a Dead show -- a drive-by shooting range, where shooters could take out targets from their cars. Guns were outlawed on the playa this year for safety reasons, but remained a popular topic of conversation.
Or perhaps the difference between Burning Man and a Dead show was best summed up in a button being handed out by festival organizers that read "Eat. F---. Kill."
According to a Seattle-based chemist who asked to be identified simply as Beck, the problem with Burning Man participants is that they're too darn smart. When people hear he works with lasers, they start asking questions. Unlike at a Dead show, they understand the answers and ask 50 more questions.
"So I get stuck talking about work all the time," he said.
Among Beck's bag of tricks that he can pack in his RV for Burning Man was a pinpoint ultraviolet laser that lights up objects up to 2 miles away, making them glow as if lit by a blacklight.
The Future
The festival's future is unclear. It had to leave its original location, a spot a few miles east in another county, because of the costs associated with medical emergencies last year. The current festival barely managed to file all the necessary permits in time, and got hit up for a $250,000 bill by the new host county. Going into the final day of the festival, Burning Man was reportedly $200,000 in the hole.
But none of these troubles are going to stop what has been created here, according to most. As the 4-story-tall neon and wood man burned on the last night, talk focused on next year's festival and the season of events coming up.
"These are the rule-makers of the future," said Paul Whiting, a 54- year-old, California-based investor who rode technology stocks to an early retirement. "They're young and they're smart and they're taking over the direction of the culture."
Whiting said he attends the events partially for fun, and partially to keep his finger on the pulse of the culture.
"If you can figure out where the culture is going, you can figure out how to make all the money," he said.
Others had more personal reasons for wanting the Burn to go on.
"I sit in front of a computer all day," said Jamie Ronan, an independent network engineer consultant from Laverne, Calif. "That makes you weird. Here, 10,000 people can be weird together."
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