B u r n l o g

Yet more from reliable Laughing Squid today:

Paul Addis Pleads Guilty To Burning Man 2007 Arson Charges

Yesterday in a Lovelock, Nevada court Paul Addis plead guilty to felony arson charges for burning the Burning Man sculpture prematurely at last year’s Burning Man event. He was sentenced to 12-48 months in prison and ordered to pay $25,000 in restitution.

Read the comments at Laughing Squid. There’s a lively discussion largely from Chicken John concerning our penal system and responsibilities both he and society plays in this situation.

This via Laughing Squid concerning an upcoming doc centered around the history of Burning Man and the question of the effects of mainstream success: Dust And Illusions.

Once a year, on a vast Nevada lake bed surrounded by mountains, the Burning Man festival brings together tens of thousands of people who are attracted by the festival’s promise of seven days of “decommodification,” “community,” “artwork,” and “revelry.” But increasingly, many question whether Burning Man’s mainstream appeal threatens—or even upends—the festival’s utopian vision. Through a series of in-depth interviews of the festival’s founders, organizers, and participants, DUST AND ILLUSIONS traces the festival’s history, while examining whether the festival is a victim of its own success.

The latest project I’m part of is coming along nicely. What is it…? Well, think a 4-person pedal-power kinetic sculpture on handmade 4ft diameter wheels using cannibalized bikes and metal lawn furniture weighing in at over 13 ft long!

We call our crew Krank-Boom-Clank and the “kinetic conveyance of whimsey” we’re building is known as the “Hennepin Crawler“.

We’re well on schedule for both a Burning Man 2008 appearance and racing the rails at The Great Handcar Regatta on Sept. 28th, 2008 in Santa Rosa, CA.

See the picts on Flickr too.

An article on Slate states that Google’s innovative logo that changes often began as an insider joke when the founders left for Burning Man in ‘98:

It all started with Burning Man. In 1998, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin took time off from coding search algorithms to jump in a car, drive to Nevada, and bake in the desert with circus performers and ecstasy-addled freaks. On a lark, the two men tweaked Google’s logo to tip off hipsters that they were out of the office, planting a Burning Man image inside one of Google’s letters. “They wanted to communicate with the users, in a fun, lighthearted way, that they were going to be away,” says Dennis Hwang, Google’s Web-master manager. “Anyone in the know would know where they were.”

21 Days of Black Rock City

What: Exhibit of time lapse and more than 130 juried, large-format photographic prints of Burning Man.
When: May 30 to Aug. 3. Viewing hours are 1 to 5:30 p.m. Friday through Sunday.
Where: Marin French Cheese Company, 7500 Red Hill Road.
Admission: Free.
Information: www.reichek.org

“The idea for this exhibit came about many years ago when I was hunting for a legitimate excuse for getting into the Burning Man event early,” said Joshua Reichek, president of the exhibit’s sponsor, Creators Equity Foundation. “I had to come up with a project that would be interesting enough for folks to be willing to give up a slot for someone like me to come in. I decided to do a time lapse of the city being built out of the existing desert, through the event and its dismantling. The first frame is of empty desert, the next frames show the city growing and then finally disappearing. The first and last frames are the same.”

The result is the centerpiece of the exhibit, a 180-degree panoramic-view time-lapse of the rise, weeklong event and dissipation of Black Rock City — the Burning Man gathering, presented on three 50 inch, high-resolution plasma displays.

The time-lapse project consists of thousands of high-resolution sequenced images taken over a 21-day period by three cameras arranged in a 180-degree view of the Black Rock Desert of Nevada and captures Black Rock City from start to finish, all in a 40-minute program, synchronized and set to music.