Burning Man 98 - Black Rock City
Mini-metropolis, study case

What is the burning man?

It's a chaotic event, it's festival-time, it's a new-magi ritual, it's a
radical social experience, it's art, it's an art museum without walls,
it's art's death, its like reporting from within a dream, it's creative,
it's destructive, it's a rave in the wilderness, it's music, it's a
theme song for technology, it's colorful, it's a show, it's a form of
disappearance, it's an unknown tribe, it's ridicules, it's a game, it's
a communal camping, it's a temporal freaks shopping mall with no cash,
it's a temporary semi-autonomous zone, it's a spectacle, it's Disneyland
not for the whole family, it's all real.

Most burning man tourism is difficult to be described in writing. We
guess that is why people come there and are not satisfied with
"official" videos. Imagine an inverted Disneyland. Instead of fabricated
family oriented fun, pre-designed by brilliant "Disney imagines," you
will find real-time theme parks and lounging activity for the rest of
us. Unlike the imagined escapist fantasy that is produced by engineers
and controlled by computer expert systems and technicians, here
everything is immediate and unmediated. You can touch it. It has smell.
The park is not cleaned by an army of worker every night. A theme park
of shapes, colors, and people spreads in front of us above the desert
background. Now, we become part of it.

Once a year, a location for the temporary city is selected. A city for
one week. Once the event is done, the city is taken apart and away from
the desert plateau. In the geometric center of its semi-circle counter
stands the Man, it is a historical landmark, a concentric center of
meaning, a unifying mythological totem of the camp people. Just before
the city crumbles and falls the man is burnt down in a full moon night
of pagan festivities and dance parties…

September 3rd, 1998, Black Rock City

Black Rock Desert, 120-Miles northeast of Reno, Nevada. It is very hot
beyond the automated glass doors of the air-conditioned Reno
international Airport. We cramped about a 60 gallons of drinking water,
food, a beach ball and a pinkish used girls bicycles we bought for about
20$ in a local thrift store into our rented Van. We reached the desert
by sun down, we spotted the Man from the highway: a glowing purple site,
out there, apparent through numerous geodesic structures. We turned on
the Van's radio and scanned the FM for an intro. The scan hit one of the
city's temporary pirate radio stations that went on and off the air
during the next week. The DJ welcomed us on our arrival to the plateau.
It seems that this year, about 15,000 people immigrated to celebrate the
burning. The City is huge. They say it grows more each year, but we do
not care. Fireworks and flares in rainbow colors and wild sound rage
above our van as one of the City's "police force"–a "Ranger"–greets us
and gives us some directions. Our Danish campsite neighbor fondly calls
them "the f***en art police" as they approach him daily in an attempt to
make him move out his camping vehicle from his campsite. We receive a
map and an impossible event list from the art police. We did not use
both. You do not need the map cause you simple navigate by using the Man
as a lighthouse.

Events happen all around you, if you are not too sun stricken to walk
the miles needed to get to them. The whole city is a big party, art
museum without walls, so there is no reason to follow the written words.
People who play it square and try to follow the list find themselves
waiting until 03:00 AM for the evening opera. We cruised town with the
van and found out that several thousand burn-heads have already set
camps in various "theme villages," so we built our house in the southern
edge, on the outer perimeter, far from the northern villages of Trance.
After setting up our house, decorating it and having a short house
warming, we hit town again.

It seems that here, time is meaningless. The only temporal focal point
is the Man's burning event that suppose to happen sometime in the far
future, on Sunday night. You do not need a watch since the moon will
tell you when this happens–it will happen when it will be full. Until
then, you will find that art installations and/or parties appear and
disappear at random hours throughout the festival duration. Some
installations are nightly in nature. They burn through the night and
sometimes getting set up again during the day. Some are daytime
installations. You have to be careful not to stumble on them in the
dusky dark hours before the moonshine. We attended noon house parties
and post midnight lectures and breakfasts. It is also quite impossible
to use your own "natural clock" since unless you camped like us in the
outer perimeter of the madhouse, it is difficult to catch a decent night
sleep. As the festival times reaches the burning point, thousands of
fresh party people continue to pour into the settlement. Arbitrary bits,
bass, drums and shouting sounds are caught carried in the night breeze
throughout the campground. A temporal tower of Babel is the man.

The Burning Man 98 Ticket

"YOU VOLUNTRILY ASSUME THE RISK OF SERIOUS INJURY OR DEATH BYATTENDING.

"You mast bring enough food, water, shelter, and first aid to survive
one week in a harsh desert environment. Commercial vending, firearms,
fireworks, rockets, and all other explosives prohibited. Your image may
be captured without compensation. Commercial use of images taken at
Burning Man is prohibited without the prior written consent of BM. A
Survival Guide will be made available thirty days prior to the event,
which you must read before attending. You agree to abide by all rules in
the SG. This is not a consumer event. Leave nothing behind when you
leave the site.

***PARTICIPANTS ONLY, NO SPECTATORS***"

The 60$ ticket for the event and the "official" web site
(http://www.burningman.com) tells us that there shall be spectators
"Participants only, no spectators" but this is (of course) bullshit
since Art cannot exist in a vacuum, and in the society of the spectacle
there is nothing but spectacle. No matter how you define art, Artists
live and create installations for others to experience. There is no
installation without a social space for the installation to happen in.

So how can art happen at the burningman if there are no spectators?
Maybe the "Artists" suppose to also play the role of the "spectators."
But when one stops to be creative (participate in an event) and starts
to consume (be a spectator to an event)? Where is the line? We will look
for it at the man.

TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE–Fight for the right to party

A made-by-order city. A moon crescent shaped perimeter filled with semi
open geodesic structures, castles, satellite dishes, tents, trucks,
art-cars, flags, and blinking lights. The unimagined community that
inhabits this place during the event inhabits the web throughout the
year. The citizens share common experiences and similar daily needs.
Myth, History, genealogy, songs, and stories are spoken and written
during the week. Many web designers and computer programmers do not miss
a photo opportunity with their digital cameras. Two weeks after the
Burn, after most participants have recuperated and regained their web
server passwords scores of burning man photos web sites go online. The
city is divided into temporary streets, it has temporary street signs,
street lights, a daily magazine, several radio stations, a coffee shop,
a post office and a (functional?) bell-burn phone. The Artists republic
of Fremont, WA is issuing art-passwords for the dwellers that wish to
establish citizenship. From the borderline, The mini-metropolis floats
above the enormous desert ground as if it was a mobile space exploration
station. Is with the Mars Rover, people are constantly busy beaming
images to remote web servers through satellite phones. The desert
backdrop functions as a screen on which a city is projected. It
functions as the background desktop for spontaneities human encounters
and it allows art to take happen.

+ + +

From the Burning Man after party bbs, message #116, By Shirly Shor,
07:22pm Sep 11, 1998

Burning Man as Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ)

"The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the
State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time,
of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/else
when, before the State can crush it. Because the State is concerned
primarily with Simulation rather than substance, the TAZ can "occupy"
these areas clandestinely and carry on its festal purposes for quite a
while in relative peace. "Perhaps certain small TAZs have lasted whole
lifetimes because they went unnoticed, like hillbilly enclaves–because
they never intersected with the Spectacle, never appeared outside that
real life which is invisible to the agents of Simulation… Getting the
TAZ started may involve tactics of violence and defense, but its
greatest strength lies in its invisibility–the State cannot recognize
it because History has no definition of it. As soon as the TAZ is named
(represented, mediated), it must vanish, it will vanish, leaving behind
it an empty husk, only to spring up again somewhere else, once again
invisible because undefinable in terms of the Spectacle. The TAZ is thus
a perfect tactic for an era in which the State is omnipresent,
all-powerful, and yet simultaneously riddled with cracks and vacancies.

And because the TAZ is a microcosm of that "anarchist dream" of a free
culture, I can think of no better tactic by which to work toward that
goal while at the same time experiencing some of its benefits here and
now… The TAZ as festival…"Fight for the right to party"… the party
is always "open" because it is not "ordered"; it may be planned, but
unless it "happens" it is a failure. The element of spontaneity is
crucial. The essence of the party: face-to-face, a group of humans
synergies their efforts to realize mutual desires, whether for good food
and cheer, dance, conversation, the arts of life; perhaps even for
erotic pleasure, or to create a communal artwork… "

Reply by: Shady Backflash - 10:06pm Sep 11, 1998, Message #119, Lord of
Misrule

Re: Burning Man as Temporary Autonomous Zone

Re: Post #116 Now that Burning Man has been "discovered" and is no
longer invisible on the social landscape, can it still truly be
considered a TAZ? Now that the event has become increasingly mediated,
does that mean that it is also increasingly engulfed by the society of
the Spectacle? Is there a way around this or is that the nature of the
beast? The more a TAZ is discovered, the less autonomy it has. It
becomes engulfed by insurance claims, bureaucracy, social demands, etc.
Yet I totally dig Hakim Bey's perspective and appreciate the notion that
such zones can and do occupy physical space within the Combine even
while slipping under its radars.

Is it too late for BM to be a TAZ or is it already treading the tight
rope walk of cooptation into the society of the Spectacle? And, more to
the point, is there the possibility of transforming our experience of
Burning Man as a Temporary Autonomous Zone into that of it being one of
a Permanent Autonomous Zone? If so, HOW?