You non-burner blog readers are probably sick of the flood of Burning Man stuff this time of year, but I need to tell a few remarkable stories from the Playa this year about how sometimes, it all works out in amazing ways.  read more »

I have generated several of my panoramas for this year’s Burning Man.

This year featured a double rainbow, and of course much of the week with no man on his pedestal.

As you know, I took photos of the burning man arson and put them up very quickly, so we did not yet know it was arson, or the reason.

Like most people, even before knowing it was arson was shock. Would this cancel the Saturday burn? Even to the jaded, the burn remains the climax of the event. It is the one time the whole city gets together and has a common experience. (This year the Crude Awakenings burn also did that.) My photos last year are Burning Man’s only “group portrait” I would expect. It has, however, become very much a spectator rather than participatory event. The days of volunteers helping to raise the man are long gone.

The burn has also become overdone, under the burden of having to be the climax of an already extravagant week. Each year they feel they have to outdo prior years, and that’s a slope that can’t be maintained. New burners (virgins) would be impressed by any level of burn, I think, so I presume they do it for themselves and a perception of impressing the old-timers. Still, it was disturbing to think the climax of the event would be removed, and good when it was clear the fire was not so bad as to stop a restoration or rebuilding.

But then I was surprised to see how positive the reaction was. Aside from the team that had their work destroyed (and would now have to give up several days of their event to rebuild) I would even judge the overall perception of the arson to be quite positive. Addis claims it was done with care to assure nobody was under the Man. Having had my own art vandalized (not nearly this badly) at Burning Man, I know how deeply that wounds. So I can’t approve of how it was done. But there was a large amount of support for what it meant. (Reportedly even from Larry Harvey.) In fact, since I didn’t talk to the rebuilding crew, I can’t say I met more than a handful of people who expressed any particular disapproval (or even non-approval) of it. And that surprised me, at first.  read more »

I have to judge the recent Burning Man theme “The Green Man” and the associated “pavilion” a failure. I don’t think this is particularly damning — something like Burning Man should be trying new ideas, and some should do better than others, and if none fail it means no risks are being taken. However, it’s worth examining the reasons for it.

The burning man organizers, who I count as friends (so don’t take this too hard if you’re reading,) took a lot of flack for even the quasi-commercialization found in the pavilion beneath the man. While the companies didn’t pay to be there, and could not put their names or logos on the exhibits, it could not avoid looking like a cross between commercial exhibits and, to be frank, bad science fair. It could not be avoided that people were coming to Burning Man for commercial reasons, that some people (aside from staff) were coming there as part of their jobs and being given center stage for it. In an event so devoted to non-commercial expression, there was no way this could not be seen as an incursion. And alas, the exhibits were not particularly interesting, somewhat heavy-handed and very sparsely attended. Due to the arson, the area was only open on Monday and Friday, and yet it had few people in it on Friday. In the past, the stuff around the Man has been a constant throng of activity week-long.

When I saw it, I could not help but say, “All that controversy and trouble for this?” Demonstration of interesting new technology is not a bad thing, but I think it has to be more natural, such as at the Alternative Energy Zone village, or implicit in an art car driving by showing off the technology for an artistic reason.

There was other, non-official commercialization as well. One Esplanade dome, rather than covering up the corporate logo as people have been encouraged to do, proudly declared it self to be “(Dome company)’s Earthdome.” This dome company, which I am not naming, did a number of promotional moves, trying to showcase their domes. They even asked one of the larger domes to be smaller so they could be the biggest! For the first time, I also had a Bayer rep (or so he claimed) hand me a packet of a Bayer stomach remedy after I ate some food being given away on the street. I have heard this has happened for several years.

I wrote early on in the year about how it was very difficult to have a green event because over 95% of the footprint of the event is involved in just getting there. Going solar or biodiesel (as we did) is just in the noise. Carpooling was the only way to be truly green at Burning Man, and there was a little of that, but not too much.

The theme of the Green Man was only taken as a “nature” theme by a few, and as an environmentalist theme by most. Little of the non-funded theme art pieces left much impression on me. And it seemed that the problem with environmentalist art is that it is likely to be “negative” art that is protesting something, rather than positive art exalting something. I have no problem with protest art, it is a vital form of art, but you don’t want the theme to be expressed overwhelmingly in one direction.

In addition, within a community like Burning Man, there is somewhat of an orthodoxy about environmentalism, and this made the art very unlikely to challenge that orthodoxy. Who was going to put up art that spoke to the folly of certain elements of the green movement. Instead, all the art could do was support the motherhood issues of environmentalism. The only controversy came from the event’s inherent ungreen nature — the irony of an art piece about oil worship burning huge amounts of fuel for our entertainment. Otherwise the theme could just as well have been “motherhood.”

There were, of course, impressive pieces, including in the protest art, like Crude Awakenings with its giant fireball. (Alas I missed my chance to take a panorama from the top as it opened late, had long lines and I didn’t think to use my photographer’s “juice” to get past the lines until too late.) Deeper in the playa, the most popular piece was Homouroboros, a strobe zoetrope featuring chimp-like proto-humans being fed an apple by a snake. (Last year everybody called Euchronia “the waffle”, and this year everybody called this piece “the monkeys” even though, lacking tails, they were not monkeys.)

Funding Art

As noted, the best pieces were funded. But this creates a problem of its own. The more that the most notable art on the playa is funded, the more it becomes a corporate exhibit. While the art budget is a small part of the ticket price, it gives the impression that people are buying tickets and this funds the art they will see, curated through a single channel. In the past, Burning Man art curation has been at most a gentle and remote assistance, but it is at risk of being a controlling force which decides, even if with the best of intentions and the highest impartiality, what the most noticed art will be. There is a danger of becoming an art show.

This is a tough problem. The increase in art funding came in part because people were generally disappointed by the level and quality of art in 2004. The Borg2 pushed for independent funding, voted by participants, and lots of it. Borg1 responded by providing even more art funding. We want to see a playa filled with impressive art, but the more we fund it the more it becomes a disneyland of funded artists and spectators. There may be no good solution.

The American Dream

The new theme “The American Dream” (and patriotism) is evoking strong reactions. I think it will produce better, more provocative work than the Green Man. There is a danger of orthodoxy here. As a counterculture, Burning Man inherently represents non-mainstream visions o f the American Dream. Will many artists represent more traditional images of patriotism and the American dream other than to skewer them? I have called Burning Man “the most American thing there is” because it represents the freedom that the USA has. Only the USA, it seems, would engender Burning Man. The ability to be free to do an event like Burning Man, with generally minimal interference, is a great expression of the American Dream.

But I suspect more will focus on the traditional meanings of it — success, buying a home, coming from afar and building a new life — and more cynical versions — conquering the world, making everybody whitebread in a house with a picket fence. Patriotism, I fear will be viewed largely in the negative. The official theme tries to remind people this is not to be about flag-burning, but there is a danger this theme could produce a lot of art that’s negative, and in line with counterculture orthodoxy. (And yes, there are orthodoxies in counterculture.)

But there is the chance for more, and I welcome it.

I’ve created a new blog category “Burning Man” to track my posts on the event. I was using a simpler tag before.

Today I want to talk about the Burning Man Exodus problem, a problem you might find interesting even if you don’t come to Burning Man. This year, even at 8pm Monday there was a long line and a 2 hour wait to get off the playa. Normally by about 5pm there is no wait. With 45,000 or more this year, and I presume at least 15,000 to 20,000 vehicles, and various chokepoints limiting traffic to 450 cars/hour, how do you drain the playa when everybody wants to go Sunday and Monday. (In addition, with so many now leaving Sunday, it makes Monday less interesting driving some who could leave Monday to leave earlier.)

It has now been routine to see waits of 5 hours or more at the peak times. I believe a solution should be possible involving some sort of appointment system, where cars are given a set time to leave, and they leave then. If they want to go at a peak time, instead of waiting 5 hours in line, they spend 5 hours in the city, or doing more cleanup, instead of idling their car in a giant line. Not that the line doesn’t become a little bit of a party, but it’s still not like being in camp. And for my exodus on Monday night there as the worst dust storm ever for Exodus, you could not see the car in front of you, or the fence beside you.

However, a good system to hand out appointments is hard to design. First of all, we have a mostly volunteer crew, and they don’t have much law enforcement power to stop violators or ticket them. (More participation by the police in this, when the city truly needs them, instead of having them be there for pot busts that nobody wants would be a great thing.)

Here are some of the constraints:  read more »

Update: I now have a whole Burning Man area on the blog!

I’ve not been blogging of late because I’m at Burning Man, and while normally I don’t report breaking news in this blog, we just witnessed a strange event. Through accident or arson, the Man was set alight this evening shortly after totality began in the eclipse of the moon.

The man was not loaded with explosives or fireworks as he is before his planned burn, so it was a more sedate affair, and soon fire crews arrived to “save the man” — something we have been asking for in mock protests for years. They did put him out, and he still stands, a bit worse for wear.

I managed to get some photos of the burn….

Efforts to save the man…

The injured man, missing a hand and burnt, under the eclipsed moon…

It’s way late, but I finally put captions on my gallery of regular-aspect photos from Burning Man 2006.

Some time ago I put together the 2006 Panoramas but just never got around to doing the regulars. There are many fun ones here, an particular novel are the ones of the burn taken from above it on a boomlift.

I also did another aerial survey, but that remains unfinished. Way too much processing to do, and Google did a decent one in google maps. I did put up a few such photos there.

Enjoy the 2006 Burning Man Photos.

This year’s theme for Burning Man is “the Green Man.” It represents a lot of things. For many it just is an inspiration for art centered on nature or the environment. Others are taking it as a signal to try to be better environmentally. That’s going to be a very tough road for a festival centered on building a temporary city far from everything and pyrotechnic art.

So I wrote up some thoughts on the challenges involved. The toughest problem is that transporting an entire city to the desert and then taking it back is a great personal and artistic endeavour, but not one that can be considered green. All efforts to reduce the pollution at the event are dwarfed by the fuel burned to get there. So what can be done?

Read about the problems of having a green man.

While it will be a while before I get the time to build all my panoramas of this year’s Burning Man, I did do some quick versions of some of those I shot of the burn itself. This year, I arranged to be on a cherry picker above the burn. I wish I had spent more time actually looking at the spectacle, but I wanted to capture panoramas of Burning Man’s climactic moment. The entire city gathers, along with all the art cars for one shared experience. A large chunk of the experience is the mood and the sound which I can’t capture in a photo, but I can try to capture the scope.

This thumbnail shows the man going up, shooting fireworks and most of the crowd around him. I will later rebuild it from the raw files for the best quality.

Shooting panoramas at night is always hard. You want time exposures, but if any exposure goes wrong (such as vibration) the whole panorama can be ruined by a blurry frame in the middle. On a boomlift, if anybody moves — and the other photographer was always adjusting his body for different angles — a time exposure won’t be possible. It’s also cramped and if you drop something (as I did my clamp knob near the end) you won’t get it back for a while. In addition, you can’t have everybody else duck every time you do a sweep without really annoying them, and if you do you have to wait a while for things to stabilize.

It was also an interesting experience riding to the burn with DPW, the group of staff and volunteers who do city infrastructure. They do work hard, in rough conditions, but it gives them an attitude that crosses the line some of the time regarding the other participants. When we came to each parked cherry picker, people had leaned bikes against them, and in one case locked a bike on one. Though we would not actually move the bases, the crew quickly grabbed all the bikes and tossed them on top of one another, tangling pedal in spoke, probably damaging some and certainly making some hard to find. The locked bike had its lock smashed quickly with a mallet. Now the people who put their bikes on the pickers weren’t thinking very well, I agree, and the DPW crew did have to get us around quickly but I couldn’t help but cringe with guilt at being part of the cause of this, especially when we didn’t move the pickers. (Though I understand safety concerns of needing to be able to.)

Anyway, things “picked up” quickly and the view was indeed spectacular. Tune in later for more and better pictures, and in the meantime you can see the first set of trial burn panoramas for a view of the burn you haven’t seen.

Hot on the heels of the regular photos the gallery of 2005 Burning Man Panoramas is now up. This year, I got to borrow a cherry picker at sunset on Friday for some interesting perspectives. The long ones are around 3400 by 52000 at full res (180 megapixels) and even the ones on the web are larger than before. Use F11 to put your browser into full screen mode.

This year I switched most of my generation to Panorama Factory, which in its latest verions has allowed fine control of the blending zone, so I can finally use it to deal with moving people in scenes.

Here’s a view of the temple, mostly because it has the narrowest thumbnail.

I’ve gotten way behind on putting up my photographs, and I realized I had never put my Burning Man 2005 shots up. We’re already planning for 2006.

So I got them up this weekend. Of particular interest to burners this year will be the aerial survey I did of the city, over 200 close-up photos of just about every camp in the city from the sky.

And yes, I shot plenty of panoramas, and I have built most of them, but still don’t have the panorama page up.

So take a visit to my 2005 Burning Man Photos.

If you noticed a long break in the blogging, it’s because I was at Burning Man. And while people do blog from Burning Man, it’s not what you want to spend your time doing. I will have more entries in the future, but let me relate some stories of the network and the phone booth first.

Last year, we erected a free phone booth in the desert to great results. This year, it was going to be even better because of a plan for a new internet connection. In the past, John Gilmore had brought his satellite dish, which had all the latency and bandwidth limits of satellite. This year he splurged on getting a microwave link in, which will be even faster next year. Sadly, much of that money was wasted because we never got the “first mile” — the on-playa 802.11 network — operating at a satisfactory level. There was huge packet loss and jitter in most places, when it was up at all. Next time some of the money will go into better equipment and planning for the local network.

As such, the phone booth, located in our camp on 7:30, only worked intermittently and rarely with great voice quality. We eventually decided to sacrifice the aesthetic purity of a booth sitting in the desert, connected to nothing, and moved it on its wagon by trike to the center camp, home of the incoming microwave link. The we set it up on the street, with an ethernet wire snaking in. We were no longer wireless, but the voice quality was top notch. I wasn’t able to spend much time with it but reports were that the line got very long at times.

In our own camp, you could tell if it was working or not based on whether there was a line. Even waiting for it to work was better than the 2-3 hour time investment of taking the bus to the phone booth in Gerlach.

Last year, I recounted the emotional experience people had using an unexpected and impossible phone to hear the voices of loved ones. This year, this was magnified by Katrina. I learned of Katrina, in fact, when people came to ask to use the phone to contact their relatives in NOLA. (Read on…)  read more »

Last year at Burning Man, I built a free phone booth out on the desert. Using VoIP, 802.11, batteries and a satellite uplink, it sat there on the playa floor and let you make free calls anywhere in the world. I blogged about that story, but there was an untold part of the story.

The phone had a number that outsiders could call, and they did, and sometimes people there answered. If not they left voice mail. The voice mail told them to describe the target of their message and offer a bribe to the listener to deliver it. Alas, due to technical problems, we never really got an active system in place to deliver the voice mails, but people still left some. Recently I pulled them out and listend, and they are great fun, especially if you know Burning Man.

Within the mails are calls of love from moms, little kids, dads, lovers and friends. There’s a joke (I hope) firing from a boss and a proposal of marriage. There’s a hurricane warning and many descriptions that could never have found their target in our giant city (“She’s a blonde camped along 4:30 I think.”) Also fun are the offered bribes to deliver the messages.

Since everybody knew they were leaving a message for any random stranger to hear, I think it’s fine to have them on the web.

I don’t think you have to be an ember to enjoy these. Just imagine the context of an entire city of 40,000 people with one phone, one voice mail, and people trying to get messages in.

They can be heard at this page of Burning man voice mails. You can either read the short summaries to pick the best voicemails, or like me, just listen to them raw from the combined file or ZIP archive.

Well, a couple of weeks ago when I announced the phone project at Burning Man, I implicitly was linking to my new galleries for Burning Man 2004. However, let me officially announce those galleries now, plus the addition of a new gallery today.

• The Giant Panoramas for 2004, this year from a cherry picker.

• The Regular Burning Man photos, with a popular new gallery of aerial shots.
• The new gallery with photos of the Burning Man Decompression party, a micro-Burning-Man that took place yesterday in San Francisco.
• A new Burning Man Index Page with links to all my Burning Man pages and photos.

Enjoy

One core reason I haven't blogged much in the last while is the flurry of activity regarding my annual trip to Burning Man. I've prepared a page about one of my too-many projects this year, which was to build an incongruous phone kiosk in the middle of the desert which worked and let you call anybody in the world for free. It was battery powered, and used 802.11 and Voice over IP combined with a satellite internet connection.

The reaction was remarkable and I have made a set of pages about phone booth and reaction to it. including pages on the building of it, galleries of photos of people using it (including, of course, naked people) and maps of all the places people called.

(I will probably submit this to slashdot next week to test my server!)

Now my goal was to take some highly familiar technology and put it in a place where it seemed impossible. And indeed, most people refused to believe it was "real" since there are other joke phone booths at Burning Man. Their disbelief and shock were what made it fun, as well as the emotional experiences and gratitude that came when people heard distant voices. It was a taste, in a small way, of what the phone meant when it was new.

I have much more stuff about Burning Man to blog in the days to come.

First entry in a while due to trip to Burning Man ... more on that later. This time I returned to RV rental, after 2 years in a tent, so I thought I would make some notes on that.

It amazes me how little attention mainstream RVs pay to what is called "dry camping" -- away from electrical and water connections. Yes, they have batteries, tanks and generators, but it's very rare to see an RV use fluorescent lights, for example, even though they are available in 12v form and take 15% or less of the power of the incandescent lights they currently use. If running off batteries this is a no-brainer.

Inverters are also cheap these days, and more efficient. Some draw almost nothing now when not loaded, so a built in inverter to run 110v gear efficiently off the batteries also makes sense. As noted, a 1kw inverter is today quite cheap, and could even run the microwave, though you would not want to do that much. An automatic system to run mostly from battery but start the generator on-demand during daytime hours if it gets low could make sense.

Solar kits are sold for RVs but are rare and rarely standard. It also amazes me that they don't come standard with built in liquid soap dispensers, paper towel racks and other things to keep the commonly used stuff secure.

We have found it handy to use the rubbermaid (or similar) plastic storage boxes to put multiple boxes in the overhead storage. Pull out drawers would also make sense here. Each time you move you have to "rig for silent running" and some RVs we have rented come with metal blinds that will clank and clank unless you stuff towels into them.

The latest RVs only fill their water tank from a standard pressurized hose. Turns out that's a curse at burning man because the water truck is not allowed to have such a fixture due to the risk of backflow from an unknown tank. Doubt we will see a fix for that as it is an unusual problem.

RVs come with very low precision monitor guages, from before the digital age. They show you that your tanks are at 0, 1/3, 2/3 and full, for example, and likewise for your battery. On the fresh water tank they could measure flow through the water pump to get a much more accurate figure, and if they detected if the toilet was the use, they could also know how much was likely in the gray tanks. The black tank (sewage) sensors have been broken on every RV I have ever encountered, they gum up with toilet paper. You would think after decades of having unusable sensors they would devise some other method, such as a pressure sensor under a heavy membrane, or bouncing sound waves or light off the top of the sewage. You can of course shine a flashlight down the toilet, but that's harder to judge than you might think and of course not very pleasant.

Measuring the battery accurately is of course a much easier task, and I use my voltmeter to do it. You could also do a full coulomb counter like laptops do to really accurately measure charge level and the condition of the battery to find out when it's time to replace. None of this stuff is expensive in the modern digital world, but RV designers still think in 80s technology, I surmise.

It's also common to find just one 12v jack in an RV and at most 2, usually where TVs will go. They assume RV owners will not be using much 12v equipment even though it's quite common nowadays.

In order to protect the batteries when camping off-grid, there should be timers or automatic shut-offs of lights if voltage goes below certain limits. Many an RV camper has left a light on and found their battery drained. If they are there and the timer trips, they can just manually turn it on again.

Not really an invention, but I wrote up a nice article on living on 12 volt power without much generator use off the grid at Burning Man. Nothing really new, just some experience and advice, but I'm blogging it for those interested in the topic.