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.

Mercury News relays this story that “Homouroboros” by Peter Hudson has landed in San Jose for the 01SJ: “a global festival of art on the edge”.

“Camp Hookah”. LOL!

Sunday, September 28, 2008 — Santa Rosa, CA

Erasmus P. Kitty Presents: The Great West End and Railroad Square Handcar Regatta and Exposition of Mechanical Wonders!

A SPLENDID CELEBRATION OF ART, SCIENCE AND INGENUITY, FOR THE DELIGHT AND EDIFICATION OF ALL WHO ATTEND.

A SPECTACLE FOR BOTH YOUNG AND OLD!

The Handcar Regatta invites Builders, Tinkerers and Artists to create and then race a Human Powered Rail Bound Vehicle for the adoring public.

The Handcar Regatta brings Art and Science out of the galleries, studios, and smokey laboratories, out among the People, where everyone can enjoy it and participate!

The Handcar Regatta will delight the senses with Melodious Music, Daring Diversions, Rollicking Games, Delectable Comestibles, and all manner of Adventurous Entertainments!

THE HANDCAR REGATTA IS NOT TO BE MISSED!

Michael Mccarthy of the Vancouver Courier has an in-depth article on the notion of “celebration arts”, or community participation arts in a party or entertainment scene, ala Burning Man style:

Burning Passion

“Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic,” says the festival’s official statement on its website. “We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve through doing. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.”

I’m overjoyed to note that our own progressive town of Santa Rosa, and the Northbay Burner community of Sonoma County in general, has been leading the charge of dragging “art” from the conventional hallowed halls of museums and galleries and out into the streets for all to play with. I’m coining the new term du jour: “Play-ticipation“.

One such upcoming event is “The Great West End & Railroad Square Handcar Regatta & Exposition of Mechanical & Artistic Wonders” or, for short:

“The Handcar Regatta”

As the lengthy title suggests, on Sunday September 28, 2008, we’re bringing a DIY arts and mechanical invention street party to Rail Road Square as an old-timey railcar race with music and refreshment for all. Attendees are encouraged to participate in costume and other forms of creative revelry.

The Arts District of Downtown Santa Rosa, along with other forward-thinking local organizations, are supporting this cause to bring a large dose of “celebratory arts” to a new wave of joining and doing with creativity and fun amongst like-minded folks.

Huzzah!

ITEM! See our railcar crew, Krank-Boom-Clank, hard at work on our 4-man, big wheels, hand-built, recycled, kinetic sculpture thingy-mobile, YEAH! More crews and their picts sure to come!

Along with this concept of creative celebration among peers, play and fun are inherent. I attended the explosion of DIY art at Maker Faire 2008 this weekend. If tens of thousands of ravenous participants are any sign, the wave of doer-hacker-artist movement is well into its lofty crest.

We Make Money Not Art folks, in tandem, recently posted an interesting article highlighting these ideas of play in contemporary society:

The human being used to be regarded as a Homo faber (man the smith or man the maker in latin) for the control they could exert on the environment through tools.

In 1938, however, Dutch historian Johan Huizinga introduced the idea that man is also an Homo Ludens (a “playing man”), a man for whom amusements, humour and leisure played an important role in both culture and society. Philosopher Vilém Flusser went further. For him, we are living in a society which, instead of working, generates information by playing with a technical apparatus, implying a transition from the myth of the creator towards a player. Playing can therefore be regarded as an act of emancipation.

This deep article highlights Jim Mason of the Berkeley Shipyard, the upcoming Escape from Berkeley race, and the Mechabolic fame and how regulatory and electrical power disputes with city officials has led to all kinds of innovations including gasification cars, high-capacity and portable combined heat and power (CHP) and solar power in shipping containers, and other intriguing green ideas.

Power From the People by Brian Doherty

[Jim Mason:] “I wanted to take up power not from a Luddite ‘the world is being destroyed’ mentality that we should all do nothing, sit in a corner, and not consume at all, or since we can’t, just do a little and feel guilty anyway,” Mason says. “I wanted to take it up as a culture of potential abundance, of doing and engagement.”

So he and some of his pals experimented with living large off the grid. Tea, shmea; they needed to operate three-phase industrial power tools. So they scrounged transformers and off-the-shelf generators from junkyards, bought inverter arrays on eBay, assembled solar panels and switching stations. It took them many months and many failures along the way, but they ended up cobbling together a system that successfully supplied their workshop with electricity, controlled by a snazzy computer program that made it possible to trace all operations online. Though it tended to trip out at least once a day, Mason hopes eventually to offer a version of the power system bundled together in one shipping container as a “powertainer” for off-grid use in the Third World and elsewhere.