What began as an impulse one afternoon in 1986 with the burning of an effigy on San Francisco beach, has turned into the biggest interactive art exhibition in the world. Harvey remembers that first burn on the beach and how the fire compelled all the people there that day to gather and watch, and how this blossomed into the idea for the Burning Man Festival.
Originally it was just a group of freethinkers from California, but there are now Burning Man communities on five continents and nearly 70 000 “burners” attended the flagship festival in August last year. Large numbers of tech designers from Silicon Valley attend. In fact, the first Google doodle was produced in 1998 when the (then small) staff of Google went to Burning Man: it was effectively an out-of-office sign.
Burning Man takes place in the Nevada desert, on a dry lake that becomes Black Rock City. For the duration of the festival the desert location becomes a pseudo-town with named roads, neighbourhoods, daily newspapers and radio stations. Constituting the temporary town are the guiding principles of Burning Man: radical self-expression, self-reliance, participation and, central to its culture, decommodification.
For every artist in attendance, the desert landscape is a blank canvas onto which they can project their wildest imaginations during the weekend-long experiential festival. But no artist in Black Rock City has ever signed an artwork. One of the aims is to move art from the position of commodified object to an interactive, shared creative experience. Many of the pieces go up in flames during the course of the festival. However, over the last decade a number of the artworks have been finding new homes in urban settings.
The Temple
Currently Burning Man Arts is collaborating with UK-based charity Artichoke, who specialise in large-scale interactive public art installations, to bring David Best (who built the Temple of Grace at Burning Man in 2014) to Derry, Northern Ireland, to build a temple for the local community in March 2015. The temple will serve as a source of healing in a city long split by religious and political divisions, uniting people as they come together to build. Derry also has a long tradition of building extreme bonfires.
Homourorboros
Homourorboros by Peter Hudson is an interactive artwork that first appeared at the Burning Man festival in 2007 and has since been exhibited in San Jose and on Pier 15 in San Francisco. The piece is 24 feet tall, tree-like in shape, with 18 human-sized monkeys dangling from its branches. The piece requires the interaction of the public in order to move and when visitors pound the drums at the base of the tree the top begins to spin. With the addition of strobe lights at night and special goggles during the day, the piece appears as a single monkey grabbing at an apple.
Big Art for Small Towns
“Big Art for Small Towns” was an initiative launched in 2012 in Fernley, Nevada. Fernley is a small, poor, rural town. The idea with the “Big Art for Small Towns” project is to bring tourists and visitors to Fernley with a central piece of art. Three pieces of art were curated and produced by the community: The Bottlecap Gazebo by Max Poynton, Rockspinner 6 by Zachary Coffin, and Desert Tortoise by Pan Patoja and the children of Fernley.
