Art Basel in Miami is coming up in a couple of weeks (Dec 3-6). Many Burners love to attend this event, and more and more Burner artists are exhibiting their work there. In 2015, there will be 267 galleries from 32 countries in the official show.

This year things are going to the next level for glowy- blinky- flamey- mobile- popup- UV- trippy- art (or whatever you want to call this genre…), with more than a dozen Burner artists teaming up to display their works in an air-conditioned warehouse filled with art cars.

Burner Stoke says:

Edge Art Fair is open to the public from 12:00 pm – 12:00 am each day. Its located in an air conditioned warehouse located at 1584 NW 29th St, Miami, 33142 just on the Edge of Wynwood.

Although this is our first year our artists have spent over 100 years combined at the Burning Man arts festival in Nevada and we are bringing that look and feel to Basel.

Yarrow Mazzetti (cofounder of the fair)  is the most prolific mutant vehicle builder in the world having transformed 26 cars into mutant vehicles. Our ladybuggies (type of mutant vehicle but consider it mobile street art) will be at the fair. Yarrow will also be unveiling two new pieces for the first time. The first are his series of Jellyfish which are 3 – 10 foot tall fiberglass shell jellyfish embedded with LEDs and Fiberoptics that change color to the music… He is also unveiling his “Nails” piece which are 8 foot long nails which will eventually form a major part of his street art.

JROC will be unveiling his 9 foot tall stainless steel dragon head.

Kenny Ferron – will be installing two LED music sensitive palm trees.

Samantha Scott – will be live painting models in blacklight paint. As she dresses all in black all you will be see from afar is a paintbrush glowing in blacklight paint – painting the model. Her photographs of models she has painted are for sale. If someone want to prebuy their piece they can participate in the painting of the model.

Richie Driscoll will be coming from LA to install his Chain Man piece. Chain man lives in an interactive chain land which the artist will build. Think adult version of a playground.

Peter Ruprecht and Tomas Loewy are two of the most successful photographers who amongs other areas have consistently shot Burning Man and so the entire walls of the warehouse will be covered in black material – with spot lights illuminating Tomas and Peter’s photographs.

Jeff Silver will be unveiling his light sandbox – which is an interactive sandbox built five feet of the ground. When you move your hand through the sand the lines you created illuminate by the LED lights which have been placed underneath.

When Hurricane Sandy took out power to Lower Manhattan, the Lady Buggies were one of the few things still glowing off in the Meatpacking District

I also hear that crowd favorite Rob Buchholz will be exhibiting some of his work in Miami this year.

We support Burner art getting out into the wider world. It seems this sort of thing is how we take Burner culture to millions of people – more so than going on Dr Phil and Oprah with the message “hey, are you grieving? Come to our Temple, and be sure to make a non-deductible $419 donation to our tax-exempt corporate structure on the way in” – like some sort of Discordian televangelist. Or going on The Simpsons with “hey you can drop acid blue-haired Mom like it’s the 60s all over again and rekindle the romance with your husband”. This is bringing a caricaturized view of our culture to people who really could care less about the art and participation, and just want to be spectators. They may or may not have a good time, but how is it changing the world? Meanwhile, art is changing the world, always has been, always will be.

Bringing Burner art into the mainstream and high end of the art world is ultimately going to impact many, many more people than the Burning Man Project’s plans of panel discussions and preaching to the converted. What’s it all about, the art? Or the preaching? We need to be kicking down the doors for these artists, helping elevate them to the highest levels possible, and supporting them when public controversy is stirred – as with Marco Cochrane’s recent installation of Truth Is Beauty which has been causing disquiet on a $200 million tech campus.

If Burning Man is the Special Olympics of art, Art Basel is the Olympics. The association with the Burner world may not be the same stamp of credibility in Miami as it is in San Francisco’s Mission District. Regardless, sold out shows send a strong message, so please help support these Burner artists. If you’re anywhere near Art Basel this year, check this out, tell your friends.

Here is their flyer:

Check out Kenny Ferron’s SubSqwad at the Alchemy Burn in Georgia:

2014 Life Cube in Vegas. Image: Aluminarium

Scott Cohen asked us to share this.

It’s official. The Life Cube Project will be coming back to Las Vegas. The metal and glass Life Cube will be coming from Reno if we can arrange transportation and then we will be creating a 24 foot Life Cube on Fremont Street between 8 & 9th. The Cube will be up and open to the public in mid-March and burn on April 2. The journey from Burning Man to the default world continues. We will be looking for artists, builders, people with positive energy to teach yoga, dance, spin fire, play music, DJ, and help assemble 200 satellite Cubes for schools throughout the Las Vegas valley. This is going to be epic. If interested in helping, please email lifecubedtlv@gmail.com and we will get you info. #lifecube #burningman — Please feel free to post your favorite Life Cube memories and photos. Documentary by H. Andrews Joven.

If you thought this year’s theme of “Da Vinci’s Workshop” and the corresponding shift of Propaganda Minister Will Chase over to the Maker Movement meant that 2016 was going to be all about 3d printing, laser cutting, computer-controlled manufacturing, nanomaterials, and all of the exciting things going on in Silicon Valley with the built environment…think again.

So far, it seems, it’s all about money.

We’re not quite 10 weeks into the year, and already we’ve had:

Art, Money and the Renaissance: Re-imagining the Relationship

What Powered the Renaissance? (Could it Have Happened Without Cash?)

The Renaissance’s $ecret Weapon for Arts Funding

How Burners are Re-Inventing the Artists Workshop (answer: “fronted by a master and funded by a relatively small group of wealthy clients”)

And now, Larry Harvey’s latest post “Following the Money: the Florentine Renaissance and Black Rock City”

Is it just me, or is there a bit of a “theme within a theme” starting to emerge here?

In the new post, Larry likens BMOrg spending $1.2 million in art grants to Lorenzo de Medici taking notice of the young man Michelangelo and moving him into his palace to get intimate, or Peggy Guggenheim sponsoring Jackson Pollack.

When Lorenzo de’ Medici adopted the young Michelangelo into his family, he did much more than hire on a hand to serve his needs. Private patronage is personal; it is immediate and intimate, and what is true of Florence and our temporary city is also true of every celebrated art scene ever known. One example is the relationship of a famous heiress, Peggy Guggenheim, and Jackson Pollack, a struggling painter. Peggy paid the painter’s daily bills, bought his work when no one else would, and organized his first art show. At a soirée held in her home, she even let him pee in her fireplace (though not on the carpet)…

…Money sluiced through the streets and piazzas of Renaissance Florence, and yet the sheer hydraulic force of capital did not determine every outcome. Money was a means, but not an end. What mattered most was social interaction in the context of a networked culture driven by ideals, and Burning Man may be regarded in a similar light. One way to fathom this phenomenon is to follow the money. In 2016, Black Rock City will distribute 1.2 million dollars to artists in the form of honoraria.

It is around 3% of revenues – almost exactly half this year’s $2,349,000 Vehicle Pass take.

Artists have been asking for a fair and equitable contract. Here at Burners.Me, we have been suggesting more should be spent on art than on lawyers. It doesn’t sound like Larry & Co are listening to either of these groups, so we wonder where the feedback he’s getting is coming from – and if his information diet is being distorted and propagandized as it moves up the food chain.

In the case of Burning Man, such quasi-governmental patronage does not exhaust resources that are devoted to art. As with competitions sponsored by the Wool Guild, Black Rock City’s honoraria are awarded by a small committee, but this curatorship, as practiced by a few, is counter-balanced by a radically populist patronage. Each year many artist groups will subsidize their projects through community fundraising events and crowd-sourced campaigns on the Internet. Some critics say that Burning Man should shoulder all of these expenses, but we have found that self-initiated efforts create constituencies, loyal networks that support these artists on and off the playa.

This has produced a flow of art that’s issued out of Black Rock City in the form of privately commissioned work, civic installations, and exhibitions subsidized by festivals. Now this surge of money in support of art is going global.

[Source: Burningman Journal]

Radically populist patronage? Sounds like Sanders and Trump voters.

I would love to see a link to somewhere on the Internet where somebody said that BMOrg should pay all the costs of all the art at Burning Man. I think the general consensus here has been that they should pay more of the costs than a third of the pieces they promote the crap out of and claim credit for – and they should probably pay for The Temple, the same way they do for The Man.  Let us spend our artist funding budget supporting pieces that wouldn’t otherwise get there, rather than mega-works you can promote with Oprah and Dr Phil and sell tickets to for $1207+ for spectators to come and behold.

Here is a recent link to Larry Harvey repeating his oft-told tall tale that “no artist has ever signed their art at Burning Man”. This previously espoused philosophy seems to be the antithesis of his latest claim, that the art at Black Rock City funded by their annual Medici donation of $1.2 million (by year BM30) has enabled outside careers and markets for its artists. Personally, I believe the latter to be closer to the truth, and his earlier claim to be false. Nice to see you coming round, Larry.

Last year, in an interview with Ignite Channel, BMOrg were claiming to have created their own art market.

So instead of trying to cater to the traditional art market, Burning Man has created its own. The Burning Man Project not only funds art projects shown at the festival itself, but supports artists creating interactive projects in cities internationally. 

Many cultural festivals have since followed Burning Man’s example in putting art front and center. With pride, Harvey shares: “Many people come [to Burning Man] for the art and stay for the community. (…) We are making it more possible for artists to sell their art in such a way that they can live off their art.” By supporting artists who would otherwise struggle to gain recognition in the traditional art market, Burning Man and other festivals are giving birth to creative dreams while shining a light on unlikely art.

“Anybody who’s going to take art as a vocation has to endure enough. Artists deserve to make a living.” — Larry Harvey

I would be interested to hear the opinions of some Burner artists about this. Has BMOrg helped them to live off their art? Last we heard, BMOrg’s artist contract specifically forbade artists from paying themselves anything from the art grant. It also said BMOrg take a 10% cut if the art piece is sold off-Playa.

Are they going to claim credit, and a cut of the money, for this? If you ask me, the credit and the money should all go to Marco.

Artist Marco Cochrane with Bliss Dance, now in front of the MGM at Park Las Vegas. Image: MGM Resorts

[Update 3/13/16 11:55pm]

A reader has let us know that the reason the art grants have “increased” from $850k to $1.2m in the last couple of years is that the costs of The Man are now being lumped together with Art Honoraria grants.

[Update 3/13/16 5:42pm]

Here’s what BMOrg said last week:

Burning Man Arts is funding BRC art to the tune of $1.2 million this year, including these Honoraria recipients, as well as the sculptures, the bell towers, and the 33 Guild Workshops in the Piazza around the Man.

The sculptures? Meaning, The Man and his rotating clock frame? Or other sculptures as well as the Man and the Temple?

The $ are also funding blacksmithing collective Iron Monkeys, linked to BMOrg Board member Kay Morrison, to provide a functioning blacksmith shop in the desert:

There will even be a functioning, participatory blacksmith shop — the Piazza de Ferro — built by the Iron Monkeys. Sparks will fly!

What further indications do we have that the $1.2 million BRC art budget is funding The Man, as well as everything else listed and fractional funding of 60 art projects?

In the most recent financial information we have for the Burning Man Project (2014) the Man and platform can be found at the bottom: $407,055 for Cargo Cult and $237,581 for Fertility 2.0. It’s hard to imagine that 2014’s 120 foot-high Man cost much less than this to construct.

As you can see, in 2014 the Man and Platform are no longer being listed as a separate line item (Donations to Schools and Regionals have also disappeared). Are they office expenses? Contractors has risen $2 million from 2013 to 2014, neatly mirroring a drop in (estimated) profit after all expenses from $4 million to $2 million. Perhaps it could be hidden away in there – but, why?

A Burning Man artist has responded to my request for feedback in yesterday’s post Follow the Money, with a most interesting tale.

From Anonymous Burner:

BMHQ Artists meeting, May 2015

burnersxxx:

Thanks very much for sharing that. The artist raises some good points.

Specifically, from a $3 million budget, the numbers work out to:

$1,290,000 Art (43%)

$570,000 Admin (19%)

$1,140,000 Services (38%)

Heavy Equipment Rental was $2.45 million in 2014.

From a $1.2 million Black Rock City art budget, in 2016 they are paying for:

60 Honoraria art projects. Partial grants, artists have to raise most of the project costs themselves

33 Guild Workshops. Regional projects. Projects required to raise almost all the funding and supply personnel themselves.

The Man

The Piazza

The “Turning Man” contraption

The Temple. Partial grant, artists who “win” the project have to raise most of the funding themselves

4 Belltowers

A blacksmith shop

Possible other sculptures

Is the $90,000 what gets spent on art across Burners Without Borders, Black Rock Arts Foundation, Burning Man Arts, and all the other non-Playa activities?

[Update 3/15/16 5:44pm]

The artist has responded to some of the questions raised in our comments. emphasis ours

Legendary Burners Parts (Plug4) and Bacchus (Disorient, or as it is known this year, D16Orient) have teamed up to bring vinyl and old school beats back to the Inner Playa.

Parts at Plug4 has teamed up with The Mayor of Disorient, Dave ‘Bacchus’ Marglin to create an experiential installation called Plug ‘n’ Play on the playa.

A tribute to the essential power of hip-hop and its five foundational elements: Emceeing (oral) • Deejaying (aural) • Breaking (physical) • Graffiti (visual) • Knowledge (spiritual)

Plug ‘n Play is a countercultural interactive art installation at Burning Man 2016.

Within Plug ‘n Play, we facilitate, teach, and honor our analog past.

Plug ‘n Play is a large orange wooden electrical plug protruding upwards. Passersby can drop in on turntablism demonstrations, live MC cyphers, scratching lessons and sessions, lectures, films, and videos, ‘twerkshops,’ and other interactive moments.

Surrounding the Plug are five Quad Boxes – where you can immerse yourself in a gallery; each Quad Box visually represents one of the five elements of hip-hop.

We plug in; we explore & amplify the almighty vinyl record, the mic, and the crowd. Feel what it’s like to drop the needle on the record and physically engage with music and hip-hop culture at Plug ‘n Play.

While Burning Man has given us an honorarium, we have quite a way to go to cover our projected expenses. Please show your support and contribute so we can get things officially in Play!

To make a larger, tax deductible donation please contact Parts at ninjaneered@gmail.com

[Source]

This promises to be one of the highlights of the year, and the team behind it are some of the best Burners I’ve ever met. For decades they have selflessly given back on the Playa by helping literally thousands of Burners. This is the first time they have done an art project. They are reaching out to the community for help with the installations, volunteers and donations are needed. They did receive an Art Honoraria grant from Burning Man, but this is not enough to cover the cost of the project. With less than a week to go, they’re at 65% on Tilt.

Parts says:

Hello out there! As some of you know, I’ve taken on a sizable art project this year. When asked the age old question “What is Art?”, the great philosopher and millennial-whisperer Tyler Hanson once said, “Art is a conversation.” Yes indeed!

This project has been a social experiment from day one, thus the name Plug ‘n Play. What better thing to burn?!? Let’s talk about the elephant on the playa and figure out how to connect patrons with artists and build bridges while burning old models of experiential consumption, hyper social capitalism, and radical self indulgence.

If you believe “fuck plug and play, let’s take it back to the old school”, support this project. Or if you believe “I’m a Medici, let them snort cake!”, support this project.

And just for the sake of clarity, DISORIENT IS NOT SUPPORTING PLUG AND PLAY CAMPS. Disorient pride themselves on being the sort of camp where everyone participates and everyone gets the Ten Principles, NOT a dreaded “turnkey camp”.

“Take a moment to drop in, and imagine the world that you want to co-create.”

That’s the Burning Man 2.0 message, sent to me today by Social Alchemist Bear Kittay. He’s just given a talk – combined with escalating soothing live backing rhythms of digiridu and Ableton to emphasize his Esalen workshop-honed points – to the techno-hipster elite of Berlin at the 2016 Tech Open Air Inter-disciplinary Technology Festival

No offense to Bear, but the backing music reminds me of the Wayans Brothers movie I’m Gonna Git You Sucka

Bear says:

Creating physical spaces to prototype the design of our new civilization…That’s what we’re doing at these conferences and these festivals. We experience these immersive ways of life and we re-imagine who we are, what’s most important to us, how we should be reallocating our resources – through experience, through art, through participatory culture

Hmmm…so we’re not just tripping out and trying to find Dancetronauts?

BMOrg told us they’d bought Fly Ranch on June 10 2016.

6 weeks later, on July 21, they revealed some of the donor names:

The individuals that contributed funding for the purchase have one thing in common: they have been deeply moved and changed by their involvement in Burning Man, and they are invested in the future of this culture. One of our early supporters and driving forces behind this project is Burning Man Project Board Member Chip Conley (AirBnB), who has shared his motivations for contributing to this project on Fest300. Another is Ping Fu (3D Systems), who, like so many of you, is a dreamer and a maker. Her reasons for giving inspire all of us, and we have been working with Ping, Chip and others to share the reasons they felt called to contribute to this project.

Other donors you may hear from in the coming weeks and months include: Joe Gebbia (AirBnB Chief Product Officer), Bill Linton (ProMega – therapeutic magic mushrooms), Rob and Kristin Goldman (Facebook VP Product), Guy Laliberté (Cirque du Soleil), Farhad Mohit (Flipagram) and Nushin Sabet, Alex Moradi (ICO Group – Real Estate), Graham Schneider (Real Estate)  and Jonathan Teo (Binary Capital: Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat). A handful of donors have asked to remain anonymous, and we absolutely respect that choice. Just like in Black Rock City, we also celebrate and honor anonymous giving.

Thanks to everyone who donated. 12 names. Did they all give half a mil each, leaving 1 slot unaccounted for? Or did they all kick in $100k, and some Anonymous group wrote a check for the remaining $5.3 million?

For all we know, El Chapo, Google or the Rothschilds are funding it.

Who pays the utilities and operating expenses? What’s the business model…or is it all just donation-supported, like public access television and radio? We’re coming up on two months since the big announcement – with Burning Man looming, and now opening earlier than ever – and this is the first we’ve heard of what they actually plan to do with the joint. We’ll probably have to wait til 2017 now for further details.

Bear described the vision:

Image: Facebook

The overall valley is roughly the size of Manhattan – 20 square miles. Our property is 3800 acres, it includes beautiful hot springs, hot lakes that hundreds can swim in, and geysers, and a very very large Playa, this open tabula rasa, this context for re-imagining our civilization.

So now we own this property year round in the non profit organization. It’s really a gift for the community by the community. It’s been funded completely philanthropically by a group of Patrons who believe that the process of us coming together as a community and experimenting with what could happen there isn’t just something that’ll happen at this site at Fly Ranch, but ultimately that having these semi-permanent locations that are owned by community groups so that year round iterations in the same template much as we develop these technology tools that we can get one step closer, bringing more and more people into the experience of co-creating and manifesting what will work as we re-imagine and re-invent our civilization. Welcome to Fly Ranch. This is a new era for Burning Man. This is a gift from the Burning Man community as a social experiment for humankind in the 21st century.

I have to say I’m not really enlightened much further about what exactly will be going on out there in one of the most remote parts of the United States. OK, some rich people bought the pitch and ponied up the $6.5 million. Now what? Will there be art cars? DJs?

As fun as Burning Man is, I am still waiting for them to explain how living in the desert with porta-potties but no showers or clean drinking water on tap, no money and no trashcans is the new model for humanity. There are already billions on the planet living in those conditions, and I think we would be better served directing our energies towards helping them rise out of it, instead of turning our civilization backwards so we can join them!

What are the gifts that the Burning Man Project will bestow upon humankind from their desert base? Neo-feudalism? Blowjob Workshops? Group masturbation to childrens cartoons? Black Lives Matter?

Some of the many events on offer in the 2016 Playa Events Guide

Image: Parker; from a prior year. Is she doing the devil horns? What’s up with that extra hand?

I mean, I’m sure this is fun and all…but is this really the next evolutionary step for civilization? Humanity depends on this? The future of Burning Man is to have all this sort of thing going on year round?

Today I was also lucky enough today to attend – if only for a short time – WIlliam Binzen’s exhibition at the Smith Andersen gallery in San Anselmo.

Marin County is old timers like me (43). The Mission and 666 Alabama is where the young hipsters like Bear and the BMOrg 2.0 coterie hang out network. Tonight’s crowd skewed more towards hip replacement than:

…but having said that, we were among the last to arrive and first to leave. Anyway, I managed to catch an equivalent segment of the talks in length to Bear’s presentation. It felt like the guts of it, if anyone who was there has a better video or recording please share. [Aside: As always at these things, like with my shaky phone recording of Eric Schmidt at Further Future 2016, there are dozens of professional looking cameras filming it but nobody ever shares, even on commercial videos. So who are all these people? And why are they recording?]

I couldn’t see the stage but I believe this is William Binzen talking and then John Law. They mention Chris Radcliff “imposing fellow with an SKS”…a name that has been erased from the official Burning Man history. You will hear about Cris(tina) in a future Shadow History episode. Part 4 is being edited now, Part 5 is coming soon, here’s Parts One, Two, and Three and my debunking of the first challenge to my research.

It is interesting to hear the similar words and themes between the Burning Man 2016 future vision and what was going on at the Playa before Black Rock City LLC and The Burning Man Project ™ showed up. One of the many tributary streams that flowed into the city that was created for BMOrg to take over and steer toward the future. A future of ever increasing ticket prices, vehicle permits and monetizable transactions. It’s not just the future of Burning Man…it’s the future of civilization itself. That’s what these people are going to be designing at Flysalen. No votes. No transparency. No details. No plans. No vision. Anonymous donors giving untold millions. Unknown names making the list of items to check off. Details and vision not made up as we go, but “coming soon” once they’ve been cleared by the suits…

I wish I could have stayed longer tonight and mingled with what looked to be an amazing crowd. The real people who built Burning Man. I wish it was that crowd that was steering our culture towards the future, not a bunch of starry eyed Millenials with 3 Burns under their belt. Maybe I’m just getting old…

SK8 camp are coming back to the Playa for the 6th year, bringing free skateboarding for everyone. Support their Kickstarter, let’s bring more stoke. Look out for them at 7 & Esplanade, Dustfish Village.

Post by Marcus (Playa Wood, Founder of SK8 KAMP)

HISTORY OF SK8 KAMP STOKE – YEAR 1 – 2011- The BEST Alarm Clock Ever!!!

As we get amped up for SK8 KAMP 2016, we wanted to give everyone a little glimpse of the magic that is SK8 KAMP, we are going to post a series of posts about the memories of each of the 5 years of SK8 KAMP. Here goes Year 1…

Getting awoken out of a deep sleep by cheering, I think to myself for a moment, ‘What is going on? I think I need more sleep, so let me just ignore it.’ Then, the sound of skateboard wheels rolling on a wooden ramp shakes the moving truck that I’m sleeping on the floor of and another roaring cheer reverberates…30 seconds later, the truck shakes even more and an even louder cheer erupts. Time to get up and see what is happening out there. I crawl out to find 3 or 4 skaters (who I later found out were an awesome crew from Santa Cruz) riding the ramps and about 20 people and an art car huddled around the front of our small camp at 9 & H. That was the moment I realized what we had created, a magical space where people from all over the world, all ages, races, genders, and even in any attire or none could come together and skateboard freely for the first time or the millionth time and have tens if not hundreds of people cheering on their accomplishments of landing skateboard maneuvers. This was like no other skatepark, it was only about positive encouragement of anyone who wanted to skateboard.

Many would call it a bad idea for trying to get sleep on the Playa to have a wall ride against the truck you were sleeping in (which may be true), but we surprisingly realized that this is what I’ll called the ‘Best Alarm Clock Ever’. Whenever there was incredible shredding going on at SK8 KAMP, it would wake me up and I could either lay there and simply enjoy the sounds or I could wake up and join the excitement. Since SK8 KAMP is a 24/7 skatepark, this way I could lay down and get some rest when the park was quiet and whenever things were going off I could choose to wake up if I wanted to join the action. Not completely rational logic, but made sense to me and that was all that mattered. The sounds of the skateboarding was music to my ears knowing that I created something that not only skaters but the many spectators could experience joy out of, as well. TRY IT OUT YOURSELF WITH OUR ‘NIGHT OF SWEET DREAMS UNDER THE RAMP’ REWARD.

This iconic (and tallest) part of our installation of our first year of SK8 KAMP was the 10’ tall, 4’ wide wall ride (we actually made a 8’ radius transition cut off at 6’ so it could fit into our moving truck, and it had 4’ of vert) that used the moving truck that we slept in as the supporting wall and this had a opposing 6’ tall roll-in to gain speed to ride the wall.

This first year of SK8 KAMP had a pretty small park with having a relatively small committed build crew and being a little unsure if everything would fit in the 24’ box truck that we rented. We staged and built the ramps before the burn at Mission Motors parking lot in San Francisco where Derek worked. We had a few late night builds with Derek, Jameson, Ilya, a couple others, and Myself. The pre-built ramps included the 2’ tall, 8’ wide half pipe and a 4’ tall, 8’ wide half pipe (purchased from two local families for $100 for the 2’ and $200 for the 4’ because the parents wanted to get rid of the ramps since the kids no longer rode them) that were separated by 2 opposing 4’ wide banks we made out of a couple manual pads that Jameson had. In the other direction of the flat bottom, we built a 6’ tall (3’ radius with 3’ of vert to re-create the Berkeley Banks) wall ride that was 8’ wide with a DJ booth behind it. And, opposing the wall ride, we had a mellow 4’ tall, 4’ wide quarter pipe. This formed a corner less bowl that we could ride around. A few great artists including Jameson, and Taylor Reinhold and others blessed the ramps with amazing artwork.

We went out to Burning Man without a plan of what we would do with the ramps afterwards. Would we burn them all or bring them back? We decided on Playa that we wanted to keep most of the ramp, but would be willing to burn a few pieces. We spent a couple days asking around if there was an ‘approved’ way to burn the ramps at Burning Man. We asked around BMORG and got the general response that if we wanted to burn them that it had to be pre-arranged as part of the burn plan for one of the organized burns, so ‘NO’. The temple in 2011 was an incredible sight (as most years are) and we decided that we wanted to do a skate session out by the temple before the temple burns and hopefully burn that ramp section with the Temple. Jameson had a pickup truck so he said, let’s load up the 10’ wall ride and roll-in and burn them with the temple. I thought there was no way it would work, but he said that he would figure it out, so I helped him load it into his truck with a little crew and went with it. No more than 15 minutes later he drove back to Kamp and said, grab your boards, and he threw on a couch with the Grandmas (from Smile for Grandma Camp that was across H street from us). Jameson said he was able to get it arranged by telling rather than asking. He drove out and said, where should we place these ramps so that they can be burned with the temple. The crew around the temple was stoked at the idea of a skate session and burning the ramp with the temple, so they in fact helped unload and set-up the ramp and carry it into the burn pile they were prepping. We re set-up the entire 10’ tall wall-ride and roll in out at the perimeter of the Temple. This turned out to be the most magical morning with amazing blue skies with puffy white clouds, a scene that almost could have only existed in our dreams. We did a session for about 45 minutes with Captain Booya, Jameson, Velly Vel, Loren Thompson, James Bones, and me that was a great farewell and thank you to the ramp before burning it.

So, we asked around to see if anyone was interested in taking them home or knew of a skatepark that could benefit from having them. Jameson who lived in West Oakland at the time said that K-Dubs who organized a community skatepark at West Oakland’s Town Park would probably be interested so I got his number so I could call him on our drive back. It did work out to put some ramps at Town Park. The 4’ half pipe and the 2 bank ramps were re-installed in West Oakland’s Town Park Skatepark that lasted for about a year before we replaced it with the 3/4 bowl from SK8 KAMP 2012.

Kool Karlo who we met on the Playa and was at SK8 KAMP almost 23 hours a day the whole burn had a warehouse in San Francisco that he installed the 2′ mini ramp in that was there until July 2016 and we hope to bring it back out the the Playa this year.

LETS BRING MORE STOKE to SK8 KAMP 2016 and 2016 BURNING MAN!

Please donate to help us build the SK8 KASTLE 2016 and share with everyone you know!

It seems the upside down, headless Man – first spotted by yours truly on our Facebook page in the wee hours of Monday morning…

… was not intentional. But it was news-worthy, for USA Today at least.

Image: Andy Barron, Reno Gazette-Journal

Jenny Kane reports that Burning Man wasn’t quite ready for opening, people were still working on the workshop and not in the workshop:

The main attraction at Burning Man is stuck — upside-down…

Crews raised the man above the Renaissance-style piazza Sunday but discovered that the gear designed to rotate the man like a Ferris wheel was broken. He still is without a wooden head as well.

The “man” site, including the piazza, is planned to open Tuesday morning since crews are expected to work through the night on a project.

Usually the man is hoisted upright by Sunday, the opening day of the event, but various large-scale projects on the playa have been delayed and are behind after sporadic dust storms and rainfall before the event. The Catacomb of Veils and the Temple also have yet to open.

The “man” is expected to burn Sept. 3, and the temple is set to burn Sept. 4. Other art installations will burn throughout the week beginning as early as Thursday night.

Check out their whole story which has 6 dozen photos from the Playa. Or, check out my screenshots from the video feed, below.

Is this a message from DPW, that Burning Man is now turned upside down with its head up its ass in the sand? Or is it the same message..but from the Rulers, showing us what the event will be like once they all leave for the retirement village hot springs?

Anyway, I thought the whole point was that people would push something and rotate The Man. Another Burning Man dream that fizzled? Or just “coming soon”?

The hilarious Burning Man hate week is back:

In other good news, Paris Hilton has lost her Burginity:

Paris Hilton is excited for her first trip to the Playa! #BurningMan 🔥✨ So many Magical moments out there. https://t.co/FlKhqwC7hA—
Paris Hilton Online (@OnlineHilton) August 30, 2016

America’s Next Top Model winner Adrianne Curry is staying well away from the smelly and salty event:

I’ve had the live stream on in the background most of the day. The Man was fine from this morning. It looks like The Temple is open now. Not sure yet about The Piazza, the Workshops of “Da Vinci’s workshop”.

Realism seems to be the order of the day. Whale, gorilla, bear, boar, bull, pyramids, 747, @, #  – all look a lot like larger-than-life imitations of their real-world inspiration.

Australia has a lot of this sort of stuff, Big Banana, Big Sheep, etc. The tourists love it, it’s great for Instagram.

[For those who’ve been to Byron Bay, the Big Prawn in a Ballina gas station was saved by a Big Box hardware store, who bought the site and built around the prawn]

Perhaps we will see all these “Big Things of Burning Man” trotted out each year now, providing a comforting familiarity like Disneyland and Las Vegas. They can mix it up a bit; maybe one year the 747 has a wing, maybe one year they bring part of the tail section. With enough fundraising from the community, we may even get to see a wheel or an inflatable slide…or a coat of paint.

Plug-n-Play looks amazing, the Space Whale looks amazing at night. I’m sure it’s incredible up close too. I like the Converse art car, and Icarus.

For every mutant vehicle you see driving around, you see 3-4 non-mutant ones. Vans, trucks, driving all over the Playa. I would say 70-80% of the non-mutant vehicles are speeding.

The Magical Realism certainly applies to the HD video feed as well.

Kudos to @motorbikematt for a major upgrade on what we’ve previously had. GoPro exceeding the capabilities of NASA and JPL?  The resolution, stability, panning speed, and zoom have all greatly improved from last year. I am watching via YouTube and a 4 year old iMac, and I can clearly identify people and read signs. I bet they could read license plates if they want. If this is what us in the public get to see on YouTube, I can only imagine what Google, DARPA and the Sheriffs are looking at, combining drones, low and high orbit satellites, radar, infrared, geospatial and electromagnetic intelligence…I bet they know where all the Pokemons are

Here’s some Playa video from Mark Day:

We’ll let artist Otto von Danger have the last word:

A year ago psychedelic luminary Daniel Pinchbeck published a widely discussed article “Why I Am Not Going To Burning Man This Year”. He bashed the event’s destructive waste and hypocrisy about environmental values, and made it OK for some of the cool kids to take a year off:

Burning Man has accomplished amazing things, opening up whole new realms of individual freedom and culture expression. At the same time the festival has become a bit of a victim of its own success. It has become a massive entertainment complex, a bit like Disney World for a contingent made up mostly of the wealthy elite. It always had this vibe, to some extent, but it seems more pronounced in recent years. It feels like there is more and more of less and less. The potential for some kind of authentic liberation or awakening seems increasingly obscure and remote.

Well, Mad Max must have pulled a handbrake turn, because now he’s charging off in the opposite direction: “Why I Consider Burning Man the Greatest Cultural Movement of Our Time”.

The festival expanded my sense of what art was and could be. It rewired my sense of what human beings are capable of. The shock has been permanent—my desire for more of it remains addictive.

Did somebody get to Daniel?

His previous article caused some problems at BMHQ. It triggered Ryan Kushner to petition Burning Man to live up to its “Leave No Trace” ethic. Only 1138 people cared. BMorg responded with a December 2015 post entitled Sustainability: The Next Chapter , which followed their classic propaganda template: 1. blame others, 2. say you’re taking the concerns very seriously, 3. promise something “coming soon”:

The Change.org petition incorrectly claimed that Cooling Man (2007) was the last time an emissions analysis was done for Burning Man…The 2012-2016 Burning Man EA, which considers a BRC population of 58,000-70,000 participants, conducted a thorough analysis of air quality emissions. You can read it here. It’s a public document...an extensive quantitative analysis was deemed unnecessary and not conducted…

There are choices to make about how we burn, and how we get to and from Black Rock City that will determine our future carbon footprint. So what happens now? Black Rock Solar and Burning Man staff are exploring ways we can help our organization and our participants learn about and invest in both decarbonized or carbon-neutral power solutions and meaningful offsets for carbon emissions we cannot reduce.

We look forward to working together with participants on this important issue. Stay tuned for more to come.

[Source]

We’ve stayed tuned the whole year, but BMorg don’t seem to have done much about it. They seem more concerned about determining which gender and race Burners identify with and if they swing, than they are about reducing our environmental footprint. I haven’t heard any plans for a trash incinerator or recycling depot at Flysalen. Black Rock Solar was a noble effort, but seems to have gone very quiet since being re-assimilated into the Borg. They reduced the number of vehicle passes, but doubled their price. Exodus times didn’t get any shorter, the roads didn’t get any better, and there are still piles of trash on highways. BMOrg made a definitive choice about our carbon footprint: to start their own airline, with a goal of larger aircraft landing every 7 minutes full of new tourists passengers.

What happened to cause Daniel Pinchbeck’s about-face? Did self-transforming machine elves put in a good word for the Playa?

Perhaps a couple of Exclusive Da Vinci Tickets [Face Value $1200 each] and a naked dip in the VIP pond at Flysalen were all it took.

[Note: to all the Plug-N-Players enticed to the offsite hotsprings for special treatment – beware paparazzi! Black Rock City has strict camera and intellectual property policies, but Flysalen has nothing of the sort:

They get you naked, take photos, then threaten you if you say something They don’t like. We’re making the world a better place!]

Daniel Pinchbeck tried to launch Burning Man into the commercial art world in 2003.

For a long time, the critical establishment and tastemakers of the mainstream art world in New York and Europe refused to take Burning Man seriously as an art movement. They still tend to scoff at it, dismissing the works created for the event as a kind of folk art. Seeking to bridge this gap in understanding, I wrote a feature for Artforum on Burning Man back in 2003……At the time it was published, my Artforum piece seemingly ruffled some feathers in the art world. I was friends with the magazine’s editor at the time, Tim Griffin. We used to play basketball together on weekends. He was enthusiastic about my article when I wrote it. After it came out, silence. I can only assume that critics, dealers, and collectors had filed complaints; perhaps it wasn’t okay to give Burning Man the credence of a place in the art world’s own monthly bible.

[Source]

As it turns out, he still loves Burning Man…he just needed to find a way to tie it into his latest book:

Last year when I skipped Burning Man, I wrote a controversial piece considering how the event has changed as it keeps growing, becoming ever-more successful and attractive to wealthy influencers and the global jet set. The focus of that piece is also the focus of my forthcoming book, How Soon Is Now?

[Source]

Now, perhaps with another book on the way, Artsy sent him back to re-investigate:

In last year’s piece (or petulant outburst), I wrote: “Burning Man has become another spectacle—another cultural phenomenon, in a sense, a cult—and one that sucks a huge amount of energy and time from people who could re-focus their talents and genius on what we must do to escape ecological collapse (building a resilient or regenerative society)”…

This year…I intend to deepen my exploration of the impact of the event as a global art movement and a transformative cultural force. My deeper curiosity continues to focus on the question of whether Burning Man is part of a shift toward a more compassionate, equitable, generous, and ecologically sane planetary culture—or if it is a last gasp of hedonistic abandon before we wipe ourselves out.

[Source]

His new focus seems remarkably aligned to the Templeton Foundation-funded Transformation study, not to mention Esalen and the Human Potential Movement.

Radicals Self-Expressing?

These days the Burning Man 2.0 narrative is tightly controlled with confidentiality agreements. We really don’t know much about what’s been going on with the year-round organization. Less talk, no action. Why haven’t we heard about the wonderful accomplishments of The Burning Man Project? It’s 3 years and $100 million+ since the transition to a non-profit became official. How are we changing the world after all the tax savings and profit re-distribution? The Project employs 100+ people year round, to produce a crowd-sourced event one week every year with no entertainment, catering, or marketing. The Minister of Propaganda has not been publicly replaced – has anybody heard anything about Maker Faire, BTW? We know that Burners Without Borders gifted $4000 to help 8 projects in the Philippines – a  generous 6 vehicle passes per project.

Check their site and you’ll see that they’re still going on with the White Ocean bollocks, all based on a Facebook claim debunked by the police who said a report was not even filed. Apparently a board member’s camp got trashed too. Shouldn’t they be talking about the guy from Utah with the attempted murder, or the report of a man trying to kidnap a 10 year old boy? We need to keep violent criminals and pedophiles out of our community. Not ravers with international DJs, supermodels and fleets of private jets – they are not the enemy.

The full spectrum media putsch petered out once $6.5 million in donations were raised and a bunch of rich tech dudes bought Flysalen for Them us. We have to rely on flowery talks and speculation from outsiders to glean clues about what They’re we’re doing there. It seems like the plan of no plan.

The style of no style…it worked for this guy. Until he mysteriously dropped dead.

It’s gone from A Big Farce to A Big Mystery. Lucky we get the occasional quasi-celebrity counter-cultural guru to tell the media about how Transformational™ Burning Man is.

The spokesperson selected to deliver this pro-Burning Man message 10 days after our Census post is quite interesting. Daniel interviewed Bear Kittay on the streets of New York in 2012 (see Sesame Street Cred). He spoke out against Jan Irvin’s research into the Magic Mushrooms Project and the Grateful Dead in 2013; on Facebook, and on his Reality Sandwich site via Simon Powell. Their argument that “Gordon Wasson did not know he was being duped by the CIA” is hilarious. Good try guys, but we have the documents.

Buckle up, ’cause we’re gonna take a long, strange, shadowy trip.

Let’s talk about this Artsy article first.

Artwork That Celebrates Our High-EST Potential

Mr Pinchbeck was quick to brush off his prior disdain for the event:

Despite some concerns about the future direction of the gathering, I still consider Burning Man the greatest cultural movement of our time. This may seem like a strange thing to say about an event that routinely gets dismissed as a hedonistic, drug-saturated, glorified rave. Wagner talked about the “great United Art-work” as “the instinctive and associate product of the Manhood of the Future.” There was—and still is—something peculiarly futuristic, as well as operatic, about Burning Man. It reveals how permeable human nature is and how quickly people will transform when given the opportunity to be part of something new and better. The total context of an environment where people are liberated from commercial transactions, and given license to share their gifts, express their full individuality, and be inclusive toward others has a transformative impact. It also creates a unique context for artwork that celebrates our highest potential—at the cost, perhaps, of some critical distance and discernment.

 I could see “The Manhood of the Future” being a popular art car in Black Rock City. Artwork that celebrates our highest potential? He’s talking about the same Burning Man, right?

This 2013 interactive mobile art installation entitled “Grabbing 100 Boobs at Burning Man” created controversy after the event, although it appears that there were plenty of willing participants at the time. Life changing? Transformative? Making the world a better place? You be the judge.

The Mysteries of Burning Man

The Burning Man party line being pushed by Mr Pinchbeck was also the theme of the Beats and the Merry Pranksters, the Happenings and Situations and Be-Ins from be-fore.

The focus of Burning Man art is collective enjoyment, rather than removed aesthetic judgment. But the pedigree of Burning Man art does, however, encompass ’60s Happenings—performed by artists like Allan Kaprow, John Cage, and Carolee Schneeman—Dada, Surrealism, and Pop Art. It is also informed by the human-potential movement, which is centered in Northern California. Many of the early founders of Burning Man belonged to the San Francisco-based Cacophony Society, which mingled post-punk aesthetics and prankster humor, with a tinge of hipster nihilism. The Bay Area is a haven for experiments with personal identity and sexuality, including transgender identities, queerness, BDSM, and kink. These areas remain a focus for many in the Burner community.

The success of Burning Man reveals a familiar pattern of cultural assimilation. As with Beat poetry in the 1950s or punk rock in the 1970s, what was once the expression of a small group of outsider artists and provocateurs gets integrated into the cultural mainstream. In the end, countercultures tend to prop up and support the commercial society, creating new styles and trends that can be sold to the masses even as they influence the mass consciousness.

In its own way, Burning Man threatens to become something of a countercultural Walt Disney World, albeit one with anti-authoritarian values that inspires people to step into the frame as artists and participants.

Disney again; not exactly an original insight:

As we noted in Shadow History Part 2, Disneyland was a project of the Stanford Research Institute.

It is not clear how “influencing the mass consciousness” occurs at an event limited to 70,000 people for one week in a remote location. It’s not like the 70,000 people all meet each other – Burning Man is cosy microcosms and random convergences, rather than one big stage with a few break-out sessions. The bazaar, not the cathedral.

Like Larry Harvey Darryl van Rhey before him, Daniel Pinchbeck connects Burning Man to the Eleusian mysteries.

Burning Man also represents a cultural edge-space where art, entertainment, and spectacle cross back over toward their original roots in ritual, ceremony, and religion. This is something that is difficult to talk about without inviting ridicule. As a unified artwork or social sculpture defined by a set of 10 principles (“Leave no trace,” “radical inclusion,” “gifting,” “decommodification,” and so on), Burning Man functions in the lives of its regular visitors as a ritual, an annual pilgrimage—a ceremony that celebrates the turning of the year, the recreation and transformation of the self, and the mystery of existence itself. Such events were known throughout the ancient world. Most famously, the Eleusinian Mysteries in Ancient Greece was an annual gathering for all of the luminaries of the Classical World that lasted for 1,500 or more years, only coming to an end in the 4th century A.D. at the behest of Christian Roman emperor Theodosius. Burning Man seems an organic return to these archaic mystery traditions, but in an American grain.

Since when were fossil fuels, LSD and designer chemicals considered organic? By which calendar is the end of August the Turning of the Year?

As for entertainment’s original roots in religion and ritual ceremony: has he not heard of the world’s oldest profession? We had entertainers before we had wizards.

If we are placing Burning Man in an historical ritual and cultural context, then the Wicker Man part of the ceremony needs mentioning. Such events were definitely known throughout the ancient world, Julius Caesar wrote about the Druids in 54 BC. Nicholas Cage starred in a recent movie The Wicker Man, so this is known in modern times too. Is Mr Pinchbeck ignorant of this, despite 15 burns? What are we there for: the lamplighters and Crimson Rose’s fire magick, or burning a giant effigy of The Man? It’s not called “Crimson Dance”.

In considering Burning Man as a cultural movement, we should talk about St Bartholomew’s fair, a festival of a jester that took place in London at the same time of year as Burning Man for more than 700 years. Its mixture of art, activities, debauchery, and a freak show “rhymes with Burning Man” much more than the highly controlled Eleusinian rites, which most people only got to experience once in a lifetime.

For some reason it is always this Ancient Mystery cult that They want to link Burning Man to. Population control with drugs and mysticism by an un-elected ruling group. That’s the important heritage that makes this the greatest cultural movement of our time. Not the ritual burning of a wooden effigy inside a pentagram, or an annual experiment in new forms of civilization.

The recreation of the Rites of Eleusis was a specific goal of the bankster promoter of suggestogens Gordon Wasson, and Warburg banking empire chemist Albert Hofmann. It was also the title of a controversial play put on by arch-Satanist intelligence agent Aleister Crowley in London before World War I.

The thinking behind this is covered in more depth in our Shadow History series; basically, the idea of Eleusis was to dose the whole population to make them docile. It worked for more than 2000 years in Ancient Greece.

the Mysteries were intended “to elevate man above the human sphere into the divine and to assure his redemption by making him a god and so conferring immortality upon him…

Such cults include the mysteries of Isis“

[Source: Wikipedia]

This idea of creating our own gods is preached at the Church of Satan, as well as Burning Man’s leadership conferences:

God made Man in His image. Then Man Google made Pokemons, in the image of Demons. And invited us to merge our brains with Them, while Burning Man offered us contracts to sell Them our souls…ah, transhumanism. Gotta love it. Just see the Terminator! The Singularity’s gonna be swell. All those military robots are out there hunting for the last remnants of humans, who did not connect their brains into the Google Matrix to live forever chasing Pokemons. But I digress…

A Pleasure Based Society

Like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, Daniel Pinchbeck became famous for his hedonistic sexual exploits. At least, that’s how I heard of the guy…

For the last few years, I have been exploring the nature of sexuality, love, and relationships, both personally and philosophically. When I separated from my last partner, I realized that I did not feel that monogamy was working for me as a model. Yet I also knew that I craved long-lasting, deep, and sustainable relationships. Since then, I have sought to reconcile my conflicting yearnings, and wondered if other models of relationships are possible or desirable.

Just as we are undergoing a second stage of the process of shamanic initiation that was curtailed at the end of the 1960s, we have entered a wiser and more integrated phase of the Sexual Revolution that crested thirty-five years ago. A more conscious approach to erotic relationships requires a sympathetic awareness of the differences between men and women, and an acceptance of individual distinctions as well. In the 1950s, the scandalous Kinsey Report on human sexuality revealed the vast variety of human sexual experience, and showed that a huge number of people sought intimate contact outside of the confines of their marital relationships. The opening of sexuality in the 1960s led to deflationary decadence in the disco culture of the 1970s, and a pop cultural ambience of constant stimulation and insatiation that the philosopher Herbert Marcuse called “repressive desublimation.”

[Source: Facebook]

Kinsey was a pedophile disciple of Aleister Crowley…but let’s not get sidetracked.

Before Quetzlcoatl’s 2012 return, Daniel Pinchbeck went on a long Facebook rant about how we are descended from apes (despite no missing link to validate Darwin’s theories) and that means that the women should fuck everyone in the tribe and may the best sperm win:

I don’t believe that the system of conscripted monogamy as it exists now will be part of our future condition – some people will naturally choose it or gravitate toward it, but it will not be imposed on us or accepted as the norm. There won’t be any stigma to it, of course, and some people will be so constructed that it is deeply satisfying and good for them – or for many of us to explore during long periods of our lives. In general, when you look at the origin of human sexuality, it seems in all likelihood it was communal, much like we find with the bonobos.

[Source: Facebook]

Everyone screws everyone. Good luck with that, from a social, evolutionary, and public health perspective. Did he come up with this on an acid trip at the Orgy Dome?

This is the Officially Sanctioned Voice of Burning Man, perhaps doing damage control after our Census post. Promoting sexual degeneracy, shamanism, psychedelics, and the 2012 return of an Aztec god does seem to fit right into the Templeton Project’s Transformation Study…YMMV.

Tom Swiss at unreasonable.org warned in 2006: “Daniel Pinchbeck’s Psychedelic Shamanist Apocalyptic Vision”. He sounded the alarm again in 2010, Why Daniel Pinchbeck Needs a Smack Upside His Head,

Daniel Pinchbeck is the guy probably most responsible for kicking off the idea that some great transformation is going to occur in 2012. In his book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, he claims to have received “transmissions” from the Mayan deity Quetzalcoatl telling him about this momentous event. An excerpt from these transmissions:

The writer of this work [i.e., Pinchbeck] is the vehicle of my arrival — my return — to this realm. He certainly did not expect this to be the case. What began as a quest to understand prophecy has become the fulfillment of prophecy. The vehicle of my arrival has been brought to an awareness of his situation in sometimes painful increments and stages of resistance — and this books follows the evolution of his learning process, as an aid to the reader’s understanding.

The vehicle of my arrival had to learn to follow synchonicities, embrace paradoxes, and solve puzzles. He had to enter into a new way of thinking about time and space and consciousness.

Almost apologetically, the vehicle notes that his birthday fell in June 1966 — 6/66 — “count the number of the Beast: for it is the number of the man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.”

The Beast prophesied is the “feathered serpent,” Quetzalcoatl. [Pinchbeck, 2012 p. 370]

Because these “revelations” came after many years of heavy experimentation with substances like psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, ayahuasca, iboga, and DPT, [Grigoriadis] Pinchbeck is sometimes described as a modern-day Timothy Leary or Terence McKenna. But from the evidence above, a modern-day Aleister Crowley seems a better comparison — complete with voices “channeled” from “higher powers” which name him as their special agent on Earth, identification with “the Beast”, and a wonderful degree of apophenia.[*]

[Source]

Swiss was a member of Pinchbeck’s Baltimore, MD meetup “spore” for Evolver, the social network built around the Reality Sandwich blog and tied into Burning Man. Social networks aren’t cheap – Rupert Murdoch paid $600 million for Myspace, then sold it for $35 million a few years later. Myspace is now part of TIME Inc monitoring 1 billion users sharing data about their households and devices.

Your average Psychonaut doesn’t have the resources or self-discipline to create social network technology as well as writing books, blogging, giving TED talks and partying all over the world. Perhaps Mr Pinchbeck is a super-blogger with beaucoup bucks behind his hobby; or perhaps he has some sub rosa help with these projects. If there was ever a place for secret agencies funding secret projects, it’s Virginia-Maryland, with the special Permanent Autonomous Zone the District of Columbia in between.

Daniel Pinchbeck’s Mom is another active public critic of “family values”, likening them to the dreaded “Fifties”. This oppressive time of nuclear families and white picket fences was all shook up by Chuck Berry and “Elvis the Pelvis”. This was reconstructed in the UK as  Mods and Rockers, which morphed into the Beat-les and the Rolling Stones, two weapons of mass cultural debasement launched upon the world in what was openly called The British Invasion. Britain has a long history of ruling its far flung empire through Drug Wars and social engineering, as it showed in both India and China through the privately held British East India Company and its state-sanctioned piracy, slavery, and drug trafficking. If you think this operation shut down with the Sixties, scan the radio and see how long it is before you hear a song from any of these bands. Go to Burning Man and see if you can find anyone on LSD or magic mushrooms. Sex drugs and rock-n-roll – the Crowleyan counter-culture, designed by Satanists to turn others into Satanists – is in full swing.

History repeats. We had the orgiastic decadence of Caligula, leading to Nero fiddling while Rome burned. We had the Weimar Republic, leather and bondage and burlesque and bisexuality and promiscuity. Berlin had opium, amphetamines, cocaine, ecstasy, heroin, marijuana, mescaline, peyote…even LSD. The elite members of secret societies and the wealthy set were doing it all. And then we got the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler and the National Socialists, the ghettos and the concentration camps.

This is the model throughout history. They build a civilization up, lurking behind the scenes, pushing the window of tolerance as far as They can. Then the Satanists come out, showing their hand in all their disgusting glory. The world revolts, and it all burns up in flames. Civilization is destroyed; feudalism prevails. Liberty takes centuries to restore. Eat, sleep, rave, repeat.

A New Dark Age is the goal of the eugenicists and social engineers. Merge with computers and you no longer need your organic body. We don’t need to take up space on the earth, since it is all just an illusion anyway. The real world is a computer simulation, so you might as well just join virtual reality. You might have noticed this meme being promoted lately, from Billionaire Burner Elon Musk to Stephen Hawking. Last year, both those guys were saying “we should be afraid of artificial intelligence”. Musk likened it to summoning a demon in a pentagram.

Nothing to worry about, it’s all just software. Nothing is real, everything is illusion, even truth. You will hear this message a lot from the Satanists and Social Engineers that are using Burning Man as a tool to transform society in their desired image.

Burning With The Beats

The Artsy editorial links Burning Man to the occultist Beat Generation and the Great Work of Man, a major concept in Freemasonry.

This is not a casual connection, and nor is Mr Pinchbeck a casual connector. As a young boy in New York, he grew up with Allen Ginsberg and CIA Assassin William S Burroughs dropping by the house. His mother, Joyce Glassman Johnson, was a member of the New York Beat Scene. She had a love affair with Jack Kerouac right when he was becoming famous for On The Road, after being set up on a blind date with him by Ginsberg. She wrote a bestseller about the 2-year relationship:

Pinchbeck has deep personal roots in the New York counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s. His father, Peter Pinchbeck, was an abstract painter, and his mother, the writer Joyce Johnson, was a member of the Beat Generation and dated Jack Kerouac as On the Road hit the bestseller lists in 1957 (chronicled in Johnson’s bestselling book, Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir).^[2]

[Source: Wikipedia]

Like Mr Pinchbeck, the Beats were bi-coastal. The West Coast scene was based in the Bay Area, particularly around Bohemian book stores City Lights in North Beach and Kepler’s in Palo Alto. City Lights owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg were frequent guests at Esalen. Ginsberg and Trans-Continental Kool Aid bus driver Neal Cassady became part of the Merry Prankster scene that emerged at Camp Fremont, the military sub-section of Stanford – Perry Avenue, or as it is more commonly known “Perry Lane”. The Beats gave some “street cred” to the mixture of decorated soldiers and defense contractors getting drugs and equipment from the Stanford Research Institute that spawned the Pranksters, The Grateful Dead, and more recently, Burning Man and Google.

Burning Man itself is directly connected to the Beats. City planner the late Rod Garrett was a member, friends with poet Gary Snyder and comedian Lenny Bruce.

In 2010 Daniel Pinchbeck promoted Aldous Huxley at Colorado’s Naropa University, beloved of Ginsberg and the Beats.

Joyce Glassman Pinchbeck Johnson taught at the New School for Social Research – also known as the Frankfurt School. This is ground zero for social engineering, so it’s no wonder that the Social Engineers of BMOrg want Daniel speaking for them, not against them.

Progressive economist Thorsten Verblen was part of the New School. He was also one of the original Bohemians at Perry Lane, known at Stanford as The Naughty Professor. Veblen is one of several characters who  pop up in both the New York scene (centered around Columbia University and Greenwich Village), and the Perry Lane scene (Stanford).

Neal Cassady. Image: Pinterest

A key cross-generational bridge between the Beats and the Pranksters was bus driver Neal Cassady. He was one of Brierly’s boys, as was Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine. Denver educator Justin Brierly helped Judge Benjamin Barr Lindsey burn the personal letters and records of thousands of troubled young children in the 1920’s, officially to keep them out of the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. Lindsey was a “sexual reformer” and promoter of promiscuity, who created the Juvenile Court System then got chased out of Colorado for California. The never-married Brierly took promising (and, coincidentally, handsome) young men under his wing, and recommended them for Ivy League futures. He met Cassady at 15, and later introduced him at Columbia to Allen Ginsberg and William S Burroughs, of the Burroughs Computers family.

Cassady just showed up in the Perry Lane courtyard one day in a Jeep with a blown transmission. This was enough to make him one of the key members of the Merry Pranksters, driving them all around the country while completely out of his mind on high doses of hallucinogens. He was Dean Moriarty in On The Road (Brierly was Denver D Doll).

Another guy popping up in both West and East Coast Beat scenes is the Pentagon’s Stewart Burrows Brand, the Army’s most senior photographer, who we find running around the Acid Tests with a military strobe light. He left Stanford’s ROTC program with a degree in biology and anthropology, and headed to Fort Dix New Jersey to train recruits. He used to hang out in the New York scene on the weekend, visiting Timothy Leary at the Millbrook Castle where CIA director Richard Helms reported every week to international financier Billy Mellon Hitchcock. 19-year old student in comparative religion John Perry Barlow was a regular at Millbrook too, when not seducing co-eds with poetry and a motorbike.

Stewart Brand learned his pioneering innovation of projection and trippy lights from the New York USCO team, who were in cahoots with both the Bauhaus and Frankfurt School Germans relocated before World War 2 broke out. They were connected to the scene around Black Mountain College in North Carolina. The infamous composer John Cage shows up there, and also in the Bay Area as music teacher at Mills College, Stanford’s women-only sister school in the East Bay . He was succeeded there by Phil Lesh, before the latter’s recruitment into the Grateful Dead as a bass player – an instrument he had never played before, but taught himself in an hour.

Brand sees a clear connection between the Beats, the Pranksters, and the Burners:

“Probably the most visible and influential continuation of counterculture is Burning Man. It has all sorts of remarkable qualities, one of which continues the premise of Ken Kesey’s acid tests: put together a bunch of creative people and a minimum of rules, and everybody generates as nifty a party as they possibly can.”

Image: Inhabitat

Err, you forgot the LSD, Stewart. The Kool Aid was spiked. The thousands of hippies at the Trips Festival were not taking actual trips. It’s a metaphor. Surely a guy who can build a clock that runs for tens of thousands of years and is bringing back the Woolly Mammoth is aware that these people were on drugs!!! Brand himself claims to have invented the signature “earth from space” image on the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog while on an acid trip in SF.

Stewart Brand also said:

“Burning Man, they have surpassed in every way the various things we were attempting with the Acid Tests and the Trips Festival, Burning Man has realized with such depth and thoroughness and ongoing originality and ability to scale and minimalist rules, but enough rules that you can function, and all the things we were farting around with, Larry Harvey has really pulled off. I don’t think that would have come to pass without going through whatever that spectrum of the ’60s was, the prism of the ’60s, the spectrum of bright colors that we espoused for a while. It all got exacerbated by the Internet and sequence of computer-related booms, but I think it flavored a whole lot of the basic nature of Burning Man. Its Hellenism was replaced by Hellenistic Period, driven out by Alexandria and that was basically better. I think that’s to some extent true in this case.” 

[Source: SFGate]

At the Macy Conferences in New York pioneers of computers and mind control, hypnotists, psychiatrists, and anthropologists got together to design the modern electronic control grid and “painless concentration camp for the mind” that was described in Brave New World (1932) and 1984 (1948)…and the books they plagiarized We (1924) and The Scientific Outlook (1931).

The Frankfurt School and the American Jewish Committee were heavily represented in the Macy Conferences. Members of the core team like OSS black propaganda specialist Gregory Bateson (former husband of Samoan sex hoaxer Margaret Mead) showed up at Stanford as the preparations for the Summer of Love psy-op began.

Eric Trist was a leader of the Tavistock Institute who developed psychiatric profiling tests for the military. In 1961 he spent a year as a Fellow at Stanford’s Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences (an offshoot of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study).

“Think, Drink , and Be Merry” was Stanford CASBS’s theme the year Eric Trist was there

Dr Eric Trist’s son Alan, who grew up on J P Morgan’s country estate, came straight from the Beat Hotel in Paris to Kepler’s in Palo Alto. He arrived at exactly the right time to drive Jerry Garcia (Army) and Robert Hunter (National Guard, Scientology) to see Animal Farm. Hunter had advised his stepfather on publishing the children’s edition.

They never made it to the movie. Instead Trist helped them put the Grateful Dead together, then gave Daddy anthropological reports on their progress.

In the official version of Grateful Dead history, Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter, and Phil Lesh were all hanging out in Palo Alto one day smoking DMT and trying to come up with a name for their band. They had played at the Acid tests as “the Warlocks”, with another band at the opposite side of the room “The Witches”. But the Warlocks was taken.

“It was a grey stormy blowy day in old Palo Alto, and we were hanging out at Phil’s house, smoking DMT, and we had just found out there was another band called the Warlocks so we couldn’t use that name, and we were trying to figure out names and we came out with about a million of ’em and none of them quite got it. We decided to thumb through the Oxford dictionary, so Jerry got up and walked over and spun the dictionary and put his finger in, and it came out Grateful Dead. It’s an ethnological term; it has to do with a guy named Childs who went around and catalogued a lot of folk ballads from northern Ireland and Scotland back before the turn of the century. There was a whole section that he did on what were the Grateful Dead ballads; the Grateful Dead ballads being visitations and stuff like that, generally having to do with people that had died and come back and been kind of glad.” – Bob Weir

The dictionary was Funk & Wagnalls by other accounts. Jerry Garcia told a different tale entirely:

     “Let’s see, the classic story is the one where somebody dies, but there’s some dishonor connected with the death, so they can’t really rest until this matter is settled, and then when it’s settled that puts them in the category of being Grateful Dead. It’s just what it sounds like . . . Grateful Dead.” – Garcia

In May this year, former Special Forces Lieutenant Chalmers Wood, Jr revealed yet another story. His dad Chalmers Wood, Sr ran the Vietnam war for the State Department from 1959-1963. Merry Prankster founder Ken Babbs was over there during this time, he won 5 medals for his service as a chopper pilot before returning to join Uncle Sam’s Acid Tests project.

Wood claims that he designed all the artwork and the spiritual philosophy related to the Grateful Dead, and entrusted it to John Perry Barlow and Bob Weir in 1963. The purpose of this project was to start a “cultural movement” based on sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll – a social engineering operation.

Thanks to Matt Carney for providing this lead

In 1963, Barlow, Weir and Wood were at the 1100-acre Fountain Valley prep school in Colorado Springs. Aldous Huxley’s son also went there. The symbology and cosmology of the Grateful Dead seems taken from Theosophy, co-ed Freemasonry. So far in dozens of books telling the official history of the Beats, the Pranksters, and the Grateful Dead, the connections to the military-industrial-intelligence complex are ignored or dismissed as irrelevant. Maybe American Messiah will be different.

Cyberspace – a Greater Cultural Movement than Burning Man?

John Perry Barlow, left, on stage with Larry Harvey at Black Rock City

John Perry Barlow is another connection between the New York and Bay Area counter-cultural scenes. According to Grateful Dead biographer Dennis McNally, Barlow was “living in New York, dealing cocaine, and carrying a gun” when he was recruited to write songs for his childhood buddy, Bohemian Grover Bob Weir.

Source: The Long Strange Trip, by Dennis McNally

Barlow founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation with Burning Man super-lawyer Terry Gross. He is a promoter of LSD, and disclosed some CIA work in “Why Spy?” in Forbes in 2002. In a 2013 interview with cult member Julian Assange from inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, he said “I personally know almost all the top people at the NSA”. Barlow wrote more than 50 songs for the Grateful Dead, which you can find out about at the Grateful Dead lyric and song finder – created by the head of British Intelligence.

Burning the Man at Bohemian Grove – the Cremation of Care

Sir Alex Allan, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, is one of the world’s top experts on the Grateful Dead

Barlow is a devotee of Jesuit thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who described the merging of culture and minds of humans in the electronic domain as the Noosphere.

Daniel Pinchbeck is into the Noosphere too. In fact he’s got a book he can sell you about it:

I believe we are on the cusp of transitioning into a psychic level of species existence, what some have called a “noospheric” (from the Greek word nous, meaning mind) or “supramental” condition. I recently published a book by the late Jose Arguelles, Manifesto for the Noosphere, which explores this idea in depth

[Source: Facebook, March 2012]

John Perry Barlow was the first to use the word “cyberspace” (credited to William Gibson in Neuromancer) in its modern sense. In 1997, when Burning Man was being marketed on the front cover of WIRED magazine as “the New American Holiday”, it was bombarded by TV crews. A clip from ABC Nightline in 1997 called it “the physical manifestation of the Internet”.

Larry Harvey picked up on this theme in a 1997 speech at the MacWorld Digital Be-In about “Burning Man and cyberspace”, in which he says the Internet doesn’t have any value.

The Controlled Media

Daniel Pinchbeck is by no means the first to crow about the cultural significance of Burning Man. TIME magazine recently put Burning Man on the front cover – at least, the hardcover special edition “Civilization’s 100 Most Important Sites”. Burning Man is #100.

Mr Pinchbeck’s story references Robert Hughes and “The Shock of the New”. Hughes was TIME’s resident art critic for more than three decades.

Events in the recent election have woken millions of people up from the Trance, and exposed the fraudulent nature of the mainstream media as a one-to-many propaganda tool for population control. This has been known for a long time in Shadow History. Operation MOCKINGBIRD was exposed by Carl Bernstein (of the dynamic duo Woodward & Bernstein, All the President’s Men) in 1977, and previously in Ramparts magazine in 1967. Intelligence infiltrated media, academia and modern art.

“By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.”
– Carl Bernstein The CIA and the Media
Rolling Stone cover story 1977

The founders and senior managers of TIME and Life magazine were mostly members of the Skull and Bones and Century Club secret societies. Miles Mathis has exposed Ramparts as a likely front. Why would Intelligence agencies rat themselves out? It is a psyop technique known as “Limited Hangout”, where a large amount of truth is mixed in with a few details that they want to remain fuzzy, in order to control the narrative.

This information has been out in the public since 1967. It has never been debunked, there is no need since it is all true. The CIA’s involvement in culture creation is so well known that there is now an entire podcast series about it – check out Tom Secker’s Spy Culture. He uses FOIA requests to document things like why George Clooney makes so many CIA-related movies. He has proved CIA involvement in vital National Security-related shows like Cupcake Wars, Master Chef, the Golf Channel, and American Idol.

American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert got the idea to enter the contest while on mushrooms at Burning Man

The Man and the Counter Culture

The Macy Conferences led to MKULTRA in all of its various forms, such as Subproject 58 in which JP Morgan’s VP of Propaganda “discovered” magic mushrooms one day on a CIA-funded expedition to Mexico.

The Merry Pranksters got in their Day-Glo bus and drove around the country, LSD mysteriously following them wherever they went. Luckily hotshot writer Tom Wolfe was there to document everything in The Electric Kool Aid acid test. Kesey’s book became a bestseller, Wolfe’s book became a bestseller…Actually, almost every person on the bus wrote a book – quite remarkable for a drugged out entertainment group, less so when you look at their education and military backgrounds. The publishing world saw to it that this message got out.

After LSD was made illegal, the Merry Pranksters threw the “acid test graduation party”

The MKULTRA program was officially shut down in 1973, but in reality just continued under other names. Never trust a Prankster! LSD was made illegal in 1966, which led to manufacturing being set up in the Bay Area under Bear Owsley, Nick Sand and Tim Scully – all under the tutelage of Bohemian Grove saxophonist-chemist, Burner Sasha Shulgin. The distribution of acid was controlled via various cultural “scenes”. Three of the biggest distribution networks were Timothy Leary’s Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the aptly named Hell’s Angels and the Grateful Dead.

Source: FBI Vault

Banning acid – something CIA agent Timothy Leary advocated in the 1966 Senate Narcotics Hearings – certainly did nothing to stop its production. It just made it easier for the guys at the top to control the distribution of their technology.

After becoming illegal in 6/66, LSD was then studied by the CIA, DARPA, the Navy, the Army Chemical Warfare division, the Stanford Research Institute, the Church of Scientology, big pharma, and 44 Universities – just to name a few. Nobody thought to inform the government that illegal activity was going on in the many research projects they were funding.

Operation Midnight Climax was active in Greenwich Village as well as San Francisco. Beautiful prostitutes would meet men in bars, bring them back to their specially equipped fancy pads nearby, and dose them with LSD before having their way with them. Video cameras behind 2-way mirrors would record the action. Maybe this was for acid tests deemed too juicy for the “Free Love” students of the Sixties; more likely, CIA agent George Hunter White was gathering HUMINT for blackmail purposes. Whatever the (still classified) purpose of these XXX Acid Tests, follow the money: the Federal Government was paying for drugs and hookers.

CIA Director Richard Helms destroyed most of the MKULTRA documents when the project was exposed. Some survived and are in the public domain thanks to FOIA requests.

Conclusion

Daniel Pinchbeck is right that there are a lot of connections between New York, San Francisco, Burning Man, the Beats, the Merry Pranksters, the Great Work, and the Ancient Mysteries.

It seems now the Burning Man machine is to be aimed at the art world. It’s not fine art, it’s not street art, it’s not modern art.

Is this art?

Image: SFist, Big Imagination (Facebook)

It’s certainly a form of movement!

Are the Regionals still Burning Man if they don’t have this sort of thing? If the art makes Burning Man the Greatest Cultural Movement Of Our Time, then what sort of cultural movement is there without the art?

Burning Man art cars roam the streets of Art Basel Miami, and many jet-setting Burners attend both events. But it’s not easy to buy the art you see at Burning Man, and I have yet to hear of any profits being made from re-sale. BMorg wants their cut. The artists behind the La Contessa pirate ship art car valued it at more than $1 million. They lost their lawsuit against the landowner who burned it down on his ranch; the judge agreed with him that it was abandoned junk.

So: is Burning Man “the greatest cultural movement of our time”?

I’m not sold. The global rave scene is a much larger and more powerful movement than Burners. The parties are bigger, there are more of them, the music is everywhere. Electronic Dance Music has changed the world much more since 1986 than Burning Man. So has the Internet. Molly and LSD have changed the world – including the art world – much more than Burning Man has. Where did they come from? Where does it all come from now? Why is all this going on at the largest event on Federal Land?

Image: This is Lancashire

Black Rock City was designed by Rod Garrett, a member of the Beat Generation. His apprentice Andrew Johnstone from American Steel took over Rod’s role when he passed away, becoming Design Steward of the Man. He designs The Man Base every year with Larry Harvey.

His side project is to address the $20 billion a  year in the US ($100 billion worldwide) being spent wasted removing graffiti. Give the kids paintbrushes, and save on aerosol cans; give them permission, and turn them into artists. This is art literally transforming peoples’ lives.

An amazing project, Mr Johnstone deserves to be commended. This seems to be exactly the type of thing that the Burning Man Project was granted a tax exemption for. Andrew has a @burningman.org address, he’s definitely an insider. So why haven’t we heard anything about this at burningman.org? Why no glowing stories in the BJ?

Perhaps it is because the last thing anyone would want to do with at-risk teenagers is bring them to Burning Man, and expose them to the world’s biggest market of temptation, where everything is free including sex, drugs, and EDM.

Or perhaps the project doesn’t need support, since the Tides Foundation is behind it. Tides is a notorious George Soros front, with further financial muscle from the Rockefeller, Ford, and Heinz Foundations.

The New York Times has a story about the Bombay Beach Bienalle at the Salton Sea in California.

They just had the first one, seems like it was a hit. Art, opera, and weirdness: sign me up.

[Source]

Forget Leave No Trace. These artists want to leave it better:

Mr. Ruspoli partnered with two friends, Stefan Ashkenazy, an art lover and hotelier, and Lily Johnson White, a philanthropist and member of the Johnson & Johnson family.

Last year, the trio self-funded the inaugural festival, under the theme “Decay,” and invited artists, philosophers, writers and other assorted merrymakers from their network of friends to join. It was a hit.

But rather than simply clear out once the fun was over, the festival has aimed to reinvent some of the abandoned buildings in town as permanent art spaces.

“The ethos is to be playful but also leave a lasting impact to the town,” Mr. Ruspoli said.

[Source]

The Johnson (and Johnson) family are full of interesting characters, to put it mildly.

Stefan Ashkenazy is the owner of La Petit Ermitage, one of the commercial hotels doing pop-ups at Burning Man VIP camps.

And as for the third player in this trinity, the description of “film maker” doesn’t quite do him justice:

Tao Ruspoli is an Italian American filmmaker, photographer, and musician. Ruspoli is the second son of occasional actor and aristocrat Prince Alessandro Ruspoli, 9th Prince of Cerveteri and Austrian-American actress Debra Berger. He is the older brother of Bartolomeo dei Principi Ruspoli, second husband of oil heiress Aileen Getty.

A prince(ling), whose sister-in-law is a Getty. No big deal. Oh and he got engaged to Olivia Wilde at Burning Man and married her at 18 on a school bus

The Salton Sea is a seriously trippy place.

This year the Biennale theme was The Way The Future Used To Be. There were more than 100 artists and performers, with attendance “in the hundreds rather than thousands”.

Carmiel Banasky in LA Weekly described the psychedelic space station and other accoutrements:

My first stop at the fest was a Mad Hatter-esque tea party, where cake pops (made by a local family), joints and edibles were passed around while fairy women made bondage art in the branches. Along the beach was a lifeguard stand turned into a psychedelic space station. Colorful smoke bombs set off at sunset through large sea creature cut-outs asked us to remember where we were, while the outdoor bar next door (tended by men in yellow bikini briefs) asked us to forget it.

Read the full story at the New York Times

Read the LA Weekly Story

See more photos on Instagram

Photo

Photo

In 2013 we had aliens. In 2014 it was camels. In 2015, clowns. 2016 was Medici. In 2017 we had temples.

I guess Larry and Stuart were trying to figure out how more people could have a transformational experience, and they came up with…

transformers.

Robots burning The Man. Or do we burn the robots?

From the Reno Gazette-Journal:

Burning Man announced its 2018 theme on Wednesday, “I, Robot,” a theme inspired by the 1950 collection of short stories published by author Isaac Asimov. The stories tell the fictional history of robots…

“This year’s art theme will focus on the many forms of artificial intelligence that permeate our lives; from the humble algorithm and its subroutines that sift us, sort us and surveil us, to automated forms of labor that supplant us. Are we entering a Golden Age that frees us all from mindless labor? Everything, it seems, depends on HMI, the Human-Machine Interface. In a world increasingly controlled by smart machines, who will be master and who will be the slave?” …

The theme seems appropriate given the increasing reliance Burners have on technology at the week-long event

Read the full story here.

The robots surveil us.

If you wonder what that means, especially in the context of Burning Man, start here.

You can read more of the philosophy of I, Robot at the BJ.

The allure of immortality and god-like powers is as old as god. The Greeks, who more or less invented humanism, had a word for this ― they called it hubris, making it the basis of all tragedy. This enduring fantasy is lately clothed in cyber-togs. It is said that computational power is increasing exponentially, much like the singularity that created the universe, and charts and numbers are employed to predict the point in time at which this supra-intelligence will take over.

This is a millenarian idea, sometimes called the Rapture of the Techies, and like all such schemes, it is essentially a religious concept now dressed in the trappings of science. In this scenario, the future rule of one vast integrated Robot will exceed all human comprehension. This notion also contains an ingenious escape clause, a sort of intellectual insurance policy. When pressed to pinpoint exactly when this event will occur, its acolytes reply that it may have already happened — its advent will elude the grasp of slimy brains. This is a contest between wet intelligence, something that we barely understand that has evolved on earth over a span of billions of years, and dry intelligence, which in its digital form was invented in 1936

[Source: burningman.org]

Burning Man is a contest? I guess they started the themes with Good vs Evil, and now it’s humans vs robots.

Image: Tyler FuQua

I agree with them that the Singularity has already happened, and Google and the NSA are already inside our heads. We live in a Sentient World Simulation, operated by the Deep State. The Defense Department, defending The Man against the humans that might question him with armies of always on, always faithful robots.

Will Smith loved Burning Man so much they named their theme after him?

As I pointed out in Shadow History Part 3, robots are a specific vision of the Church of Satan (as is the “allure of immortality and god-like powers” that are also part of this theme).

Will Google and Tesla be debuting new walking robots at Burning Man 2018?

In 2004, the DARPA Grand Challenge was launched: for a car able to navigate through an obstacle course by itself. It was a complete failure. By 2007, half a dozen cars successfully completed the course. In 2014, Tesla announced Auto-Pilot – and self-driving cars hit the mainstream. Tesla expects to have completely self-driving cars by the end of this year.

In 2013, the DARPA Robotics Challenge was for humanoid robots to walk, climb over rubble and stairs, open doors and use tools.

They’ve come a long way since then.

As if all that wasn’t trippy enough, check out this little guy:

So what’s it going to take to bring Androids into everyday life? Burning Man?

People have been fucking machines [NSFW] for quite some time. Now there are robot brothels springing up, and by all accounts doing a cracking trade. So to speak. In Barcelona one all-robot brothel was run out of town by angry human prostitutes.

Will there be sex bots at Robot Heart?

People who think there should be less technology at Burning Man should probably just give up at this point. DARPA has to test somewhere!

If it was up to BMorg, Burning Man would have no music and would be 100% transformational blowjob workshops. Fortunately we have about 1000 stages, 10,000+ DJs, and RockStar Librarian to help us ignore their foolish ideals.

This year, Rockstar Librarian wants to make the world a better place with music. Support her – if you like music at Burning Man, you will appreciate her guide which comes from a team of volunteers every year. Thank you so much to Rockstar Librarian and her team, and thank you from the bottom of our hearts to all the DJs, art cars, and sound stages that have ever played at Burning Man – it’s you who makes the party.

If you’re going to support any art project this year, support the music.

Check out our collection of mixes from previous Burning Mans at our Music page.

It’s the Temple of Promise. In the midst of a carnival of chumps, suckers, and rubes. Nestled within the 100-foot high Temple structure will be a very Bohemian grove of trees.

Looks like it should provide great shelter in a dust storm, especially with that copper cowling. I think it will sound amazing from the inside.

From the Temple of Promise Facebook page:

The Dreamers Guild is a new collective of builders, artists, caretakers, and dreamers. We are honored that our first project as a team will be to build the Temple for Burning Man in 2015. Temple of Promise is brought to you by dreamers including:

• Jazz Tigan: Artist/Designer
  Dan Swain: Architect
  Jason DeCook “Woodshop”: Build Lead
  Todd Evans: Project Manager
  April M. Jones: Communications Lead
  Gloria Beck: Volunteer Lead
  Douglas Smith and Jordan Rose: Architect Design Team
  Mark Day: Documentarian/Videographer
  Leori Gill: Bookkeeper, Photographer
  Scooter Wilson: Lighting Team
  Dylan Modell: Crew Support
  Communications and Fundraising Team: Dave Slater, Elaine Noble, Melissa Kirk, Sharma Hendel, more.
  Kevin Byall: Grove Lead
  Kenji Aragaki: Fire Pits Lead—————————————————————The Temple is a Journey
  Everyone who comes to Black Rock City is on a journey. We were inspired by the idea that the Temple could support, enrich, and deepen this journey through its very design. To this end, our offering first presents an immense skyward reaching spire but immediately invites you deeper, offering a transformative path as it gradually twists and tapers to an imminently human scale.

  The Temple Serves
  Our offering provides solemn spaces for individual contemplation as well as the
  capacity to accommodate larger gatherings of both remembrance and celebration. Traditions and rituals make the Temples of Burning Man truly singular – they are secular, ephemeral, and defined by the participation of their visitors. Our offering recognizes and cherishes these elements while seeking to interpret in a unique way.

  The Temple Listens
  The Burning Man community engages deeply with its Temple, coming to this place of sanctity with many different needs, carrying many different burdens. We view the Temple experience as a conversation with the space and feel the primary role of the Temple is not to speak but to listen. This guiding principle has been a touchstone informing every aspect of our design process.

 From Voices of Burning Man:

For four years in a row, the temples of Black Rock City have been palatial, romantic, classical in design. Time’s up. Some members of the 2015 Temple crew worked on the enchantingly abstract, boundary-pushing Temple of Flux five years ago, and they have brought that same fluid, organic inspiration to this year’s design: the Temple of Promise.

The Temple of Promise is a guide. It’s a calming hand, and it’s a listening ear. Nestled in its center is a grove of trees. It’s no tower or pyramid or other such shape dictated by logic alone. It is no less a temple for its lifelike forms. It is more.

Scattered amidst the flow of the Temple area, wooden sculptures shaped like stones form a soft boundary. The tapering spiral of the main structure provides shelter and quiet. The lobed spire at its opening will tower 97 feet high. The tail of the building curls into a circle around the open-air grove, a container well suited for gatherings. The trees will be bare at the beginning of the week, but participants will leave their messages on strips of white cloth, which they will hang from the trees like the leaves of a weeping willow.

Here’s some of the previous work of this Temple Crew that members of this Temple Crew have participated in as part of other crews:

Temple of Flux, 2010. Image: Neil Girling/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Trojan Horse, 2011. Image: Sharona Gott/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Anubis, 2012. Image: The Tablehopper/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Alien Siege Machine, 2014. Image: John Tock/Flickr (Creative Commons)