Burning Man 2008Burning Man 2008
Each Burning Man is different. 2008's American Dream was "average" in success, ranking it
well ahead of the Green Man, but behind the better themes like The Floating World. Next
year's theme of Evolution looks promising.
This year may be most remembered for its worst-ever playa surface, which was too soft to
bike on (and even difficult to drive on) due to a dry winter. This also resulted in dustier
storms. Since the ability to have a bike and art car city is one of the prime benefits of
the playa, this is no minor issue, and we all hope it doesn't repeat.
New for me this year was my art car, which I write about in the My Camp & Art
section. I also returned the ATM, which I had planned to retire, as theme art. And my group
and I split off from Camp I Am to have our own, smaller camp. We did however still join with
them and many others in the Entheon-driven "power village" sharing a giant generator.
For more information on
Burning Man in general, check out my essays of prior years
such as 2006 and my
Panorama
Intro Page and my 2008 Panorama page
which features a shot of the temple burn, and the city from the tower of Babel.
You can read a recent essay on thoughts on the nature of Burning Man.
Are you in here?
If you're in one of these shots naked and don't want to be, let me know
and I'll see if I can find an alternate or blur you. I wasn't always
able to get permission on group shots.
Photography & The Wall
Photos again were taken mostly with the new Canon 40D and Canon IX 870, plus a few
with the old Canon G5. I brought the 20D to have two bodies but never used it.
Most panos shot with my 50mm prime and the
10-22m super-wide-angle lens designed for the 40D.
With 10 years of Burning Man to represent, even my 288 square feet of wall space could
not handle it. A number of pictures were shrunk down, and for the first time I left
one year off (2001) as it is not a favourite. In the future it will no longer be possible
to present so many large photos, and so a new plan must be made.
Power
Some of you read my essay on
desert power. After moving
to a giant shared power grid, I wrote a
different essay on a giant generator power grid. While this worked well in 2005-7, 2008
saw problems arise, which I will add to the essay.
Neighbours
We joined with several camps to share power with "E" village, a generally very advanced and
well organized camp. E decided not to be on the Esplanade, but instead to take a large block
of the "A" street, while the power grid would cover several camps along the Esplanade.
Since our camps are not loud-music types, this was going to work fine since E had also
decided -- or so they thought -- not to have an amplified music space.
But no battle plan survives contact with the playa, as the ancient wise man Sun Tea has said.
Factions in E both decided to have a loud music space, and also arranged (without our
knowledge) to get a 10' by 150' chunk of Esplanade, taken from our space and our neighbours,
to make a walkway into their space. They had also done this last year, and when I saw it
then, I thought it was an excellent idea. Many camps wish to be on the Esplanade, but some are so
large this is not practical. Having a pathway into such camps and placing them behind other camps
looked like it made sense.
What nobody realized was that vast numbers of visitors would come to visit the large camp
behind us and they would come on bicycles. And so they would constantly pack our front of camp
art area, and other areas, with their bikes, no matter how many signs and barriers that might be
put up. Some would lock their bikes to art installations, and regularly block an art car's path
to the street. There was no stopping it, and people asked to park their bikes in bike racks
built on the other side of the Esplanade or to otherwise move them generally were rude and
uncooperative. There was pointless emotion in what should be a happy space, and much time
wasted trying to move bikes. No doubt those who came out to find their bike moved after
they had parked it in front of a sign saying "no bike parking" were also subject to temporary
panic.
I write this mainly to encourage anybody who wants to plan a walkway into a camp behind
them to consider how to deal with the bike and traffic problems. (For unknown reasons,
E also put up a confusing sign on their walkway, causing people to come in regularly
to all the camps on the block to ask where it was. One camp, not ours, put up a sign
in their camp saying "Don't even ask us where E is.") We contemplated, not too seriously,
putting up a sign saying "Community bike donation station."
I haven't named the camp, though most will figure out who it is, because I don't think these
problems were the intentions of the managers of the camp, but rather the result of the usual
chaos on the playa.
