Geek.com has an article on the solar powered art car which debuted at Maker Faire. You might recognize the legs from previous Burning Mans…
It may look terrifying, but Scott Parenteau’s solar- and wind-powered monstrosity was born of love, rather than Frankenstein madness. Originally envisioned as a vehicle to drive around the Burning Man music festival, this is actually the work of a pair of industrial sheet metal professionals.
The crab, viewable in the video below, is hardly a speedster, but it can charge its surprisingly modest power supply with a single top-mounted solar panel and a wind turbine.
It’s not technically solar-powered, since the panel can only be used to slowly recharge batteries that were probably first filled thanks to a fossil fuel-powered generator, but the addition does help. Also, since the huge robot only carries a single photovoltaic panel at present, there is clearly room for expansion of its green power generation.
The creators showed the robot at Maker Faire 2013, and even in an environment of such inflated expectations, drew significant attention. 12 legs carry the pod forward The sheer scale of the thing is impressive enough, but it’s the small numbers that achieve the greatest impact. It runs roughly 800 watts, or about half that of the average hairdryer. Even more impressive is the fact it can be disassembled and compressed to a pile of metal just over 3 x 3 x 3 feet in size, or less than half the size of the average household refrigerator. The motors that drive its movement are household dishwater gear motors.
Theo Jensen’s StrandBeest design was the inspiration for the legs.
The actual genesis of the design was apparently the geodesic dome that houses the crab driver’s seat. The vehicular aspect comes thanks to the rightly famous StrandBeest designed by Theo Jensen. Upon seeing the simple, beautiful, and functional leg designs of Jensen’s artistic walker, Parenteau knew he could achieve much the same design in his native medium of sheet metal.
The elegance of the design on display here is only half the story, though. To me, the much more interesting part is the fact that the democratization of design, coupled with increasingly approachable means of green power, can empower hobbyists with no more than a keen mind and imagination to realize projects of truly impressive scope.
I mean, just look at this thing. It came from a pair of welders with nothing but passion and some fundamental skills. It uses no particularly revolutionary technologies, but rather stands (and walks) as a reminder that when we share information, we are also sharing inspiration.
Al Ridenour resting comfortably — Photo: Art of Bleeding
As our regular readers will recall, Whatsblem the Pro attended the shenanigans at the Castro Theater in San Francisco, where Chicken John Rinaldi’s Institute of Possibility staged an unauthorized guerrilla book signing to celebrate the release of TALES OF THE SAN FRANCISCO CACOPHONY SOCIETY.
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THE ART OF BLEEDING is Al Ridenour’s brainchild, a dark and surreal parody of elementary school health and safety assemblies. The troupe’s videos and live shows blend a profound sense of innocence with a grimy, paranoiac’s awareness of the Great Darkness of existence, drizzle it with burlesque, and wrap it all up in pubescent body shame and the aesthetics of a medical appliance fetishist. Featuring characters like Abram the Safety Ape, RT the Robot Teacher, a bevy of tantalizing nurses who will apparently do ANYTHING for art’s sake, and sometimes Kim Fowley, the Art of Bleeding puts on jaw-droppingly original shows that often test one’s fortitude even as they entertain and enlighten.
Ridenour is notorious as an old-school member and sometimes leader of the Cacophony Society who, for a time, successfully transplanted the beating heart of that august body into the shambling corpse we call Los Angeles. I had the pleasure of speaking with him backstage at the Castro Theater on May 31st, 2013.
WHATSBLEM THE PRO: Who are you people, what the hell do you think you’re doing, and for God’s sake, why?
AL RIDENOUR: After the LA Cacophony Society burned down in the early 2000s, there were a number of us wandering in a daze, picking at scabs, squinting at reflective surfaces, or straining to make out messages broadcast from our dental fillings. There was much confusion. The desires were still there; we merely lost the structure for effectively processing said impulses. One of the few Cacophony events that survived outside that old, ambitious regimen of two to five monthly events, regular newsletters, planning meetings, and all that, was the Museum of Mental Decay. This was our semi-beloved/feared version of a Halloween haunted house, or as we liked to call it, “a walking tour of a diseased soul.” It was a grotesque living tableau ranging from derelicts gathered around a dumpster trying to sell passersby buckets full of human hair, a Catholic abortion clinic, a clown version of Abu Ghraib, and the like. In particular this was an event that showcased LA Cacophony’s love of horrifying theatrical spectacle. Some serious stagecraft and marvelous performances actually went into this event, and I mention it here because I feel like Cacophony’s vitality in LA was largely due to the city being a magnet for people with creative aspirations. Once those dreams were crushed by the film industry or associated fields of commercialized ‘creativity,’ Cacophony offered an outlet both for their creativity and their newfound misanthropy. Most of the members of the Art of Bleeding were involved with the Cacophony Society, and the Art of Bleeding is sort of a year-round Halloween show, with theatrical manner of presentation and preoccupation with grisly medical scenarios or repellent psychological realities.
It started with an ambulance — Photo: AoB
The exact form that the Art of Bleeding took was largely dictated by my hunt for a truck. In searching the Recycler for used trucks, I stumbled upon an ambulance, and pretty soon my more utilitarian notions of having a pickup that could transport lumber and thrift store furniture began to drift toward art cars. The ambulance I found seemed particularly suited for an interesting interior display with all those compartments that seemed perfect for miniature dioramas. I began imagining a sort of mobile “museum.” By the time I was recording audio tracks for the individual dioramas and designing a costume look for the museum guide, I realized my ambitions were spilling beyond anything that could be contained inside the vehicle. It just grew and grew in fitful bloody spurts, and once my wife gave me a gorilla suit as a birthday present, the idea of a gorilla as a sort of educational kiddy show host for a kid’s show dealing in distasteful subjects just captivated me.
WHATSBLEM THE PRO: When you strip away all the trappings of elementary school health and safety assemblies, what are the real lessons that Art of Bleeding might impart to us?
AL RIDENOUR: Actually, if I would ascribe any seriously satiric intent to the whole mess, the target would in fact, have to do with education. Nothing to do with safety, really, but with socialization, and the notion of inculcating values and such. Even before this thing had taken a solid or at least semi-solid gelatinous current form, I spent quite a while agonizing over the name. There is a subtle (and admittedly failed) joke there, in that bleeding – being a completely autonomous bodily function – can hardly be an art. There is no artifice, craft, or purpose involved when you cut your arm and it begins spurting. So there was a joke there about the absurdity of imposing or pretending there is purpose and intent where there really is none. That’s all very abstract, but if I think back to when I was a kid in school, there are particular experiences that might make it more tangible.
I grew up in the 1970s, when our culture at large was coming to terms with issues of cultural pluralism and philosophical relativism. Maybe our educators were particularly awkward at this cultural stage in conveying these ideas, but I remember sitting in classes where the topic might be “values clarification.” Though it was presented in gentlest and utterly pedantic manner, this relativism was really the sort of gentle grade-school trickle-down version of the screaming meaningless void that existential philosophers had confronted decades before. How could a teacher, an authority figure positioned by centuries of tradition in a classroom, an educational system, and a nested series of sociological and culture structures presume to tell me that my ethical choices are as utterly subjective as my choice of a favorite color? If we are all just merely choosing arbitrary colors, why are we not just having art time instead of sociology? Why can’t we just be painting with our favorite colors? Or why can’t we just paint the room in the teacher’s blood?
So much more than just T&A — PHOTO: AoB
To me the dishonest and oxymoronic “everyone is special” philosophy behind a show like Sesame Street is much more sinisterly insidious than anything produced in the 1950s. There is such a profound laziness in that sort of thought, and it’s particularly well exemplified by the daffy mix-and-match laziness of New Age thought. So, the Art of Bleeding is probably more of a parody of that than anything else. The principle of “True Safety Consciousness” at the core of the Art of Bleeding mindfuck is not about a cautious distinction between ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe,’ but more of a New Age epiphany and experience of the boundlessness of The One.
Anyway, It’s not apparent to everyone, at first, but there was a taste of it in the show at the Castro with the robot’s psychobabble about the disfigured Dr. Sunshine representing the female counterpart to the robot’s masculine presence as part of “psychic unity.” There’s always that sort of nonsense in our shows, and of course there’s generally a 1970s feel to the old educational films I tend to remix for the shows. So, the idea of overlaying an ineffable experience with bunch of pedantic, faux-philosophical chatter is, in that way, like presenting the raw experience of bleeding as an artistic and thoughtful craft.
But that’s all a bit heavy, so I added the nurse T&A. That’s what most people remember anyway.
For those who like their satire more old-fashioned, I’ve also gone after more antiquated value systems with stuff like my coloring book, Crayons for Jesus, and countless churchy Cacophony events associated with my nom de guerre, “Reverend Al.”
WHATSBLEM THE PRO: You’re already in Los Angeles. Why don’t you have a show on Adult Swim or something? Is Hollywood too stupid and slow to pay heed to the Art of Bleeding, or is the Art of Bleeding too canny and agile to be co-opted and cheapened by the meddling ministrations of entertainment industry fools? What does the future hold for the Art of Bleeding?
The Miracle of Birth — PHOTO: AoB
AL RIDENOUR: I have not pursued that, namely because I am very bad at marketing. I would so much rather be making the shows than shopping them around. I’d even rather be making shows than presenting them, and for that reason there are even a few Art of Bleeding shows that have only been presented one or two times. But I’ve always been a fan of what’s presented on Adult Swim, and in particular, I’m a huge admirer of Tim and Eric. They also presented a brief run of a British show called Look Around You, which was much less franticly amusing than Tim and Eric, but brilliant, and eerily close in subject matter to what we do, i.e., a direct parody of educational films of the 1970s and early ‘80s. While we’re at it, a tip of the hat to Wonder Showzen, a PBS kid’s show parody that went to vicious extremes in its satire. Both Wonder Showzen and Look Around You I only discovered once I was well underway with the Art of Bleeding.
Lately, I’ve been moving the Art of Bleeding more toward video production than live shows, not that I ever want to give up the live shows, but it’s so nice to shoot video with the ability to get things exactly the way you want them. I worked ten years in computer animation, and have found myself finally able to go back and enjoy this kind of work again, now that I’m not getting paid. I guess I’ve just never associated making money with doing what you love. That may be a problem too.
WHATSBLEM THE PRO: How did you first get involved with Cacophony? What are your fondest memories of participating in the Society and other, similar groups? What does Cacophony mean to you?
Abram: Safety Ape — PHOTO: AoB
AL RIDENOUR: It’s nice to say that it began with a prank. . . on me. It’s not entirely true, but true enough in a pretty, poetic way. Basically, the Cacophony Society has always been pretty wily in defining itself. It’s kind of an absurd concept to begin with – an insider’s club for self-identified outsiders – and then there’s that paradoxical slogan, “you may already be a member.” So, I suppose I was a member all my life, but became more aware of it back in 1990 when I began seeing these flyers around town announcing that the Cacophony Society “is everywhere.” They’d been distributed by the always enigmatic M2 (one of his more permanent Cacophony aliases, though to the Burners, he would be better known as Danger Ranger). M2 was down from SF working temporarily on some consulting job (for the LA Department of Transportation or something like that) and was eager to sow the seeds of Cacophony down here after having made a “Zone Trip” or two down here with his Society comrades. A “Zone Trip” was what they called Cacophony outings up there when they involved some sort of geographic travel, as with the infamous Zone Trip #4 to the Black Rock Desert. There will always be some confusion with Hakim Bey’s concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone because both notions arose at about the same time and both involve experience of a highly subjective alternate reality, or one of one’s own choosing.
In any case, M2’s flyers announced some semi-fictitious events, which I never attended, and I suppose it’s this sort of shifting sand involved in our foundational myth, but I never attended these. Eventually I managed to contact M2 through the post office box listed on the flyer, and we planned our first collaborative event, an infiltration of the UFO Expo West, where we posed as representatives of “the Brotherhood of Magnetic Light.” It was for that event I chose my alias of “Reverend Al,” as it fell to me to preside as spiritual Poobah over a ritual cleansing of the “saucer landing site” advertised in the literature we distributed. M2 attended to constructing the mylar/candles/dry-cleaning bag construction that served as a saucer. I screamed and ranted to confused onlookers about the coming New Age, and vodka and fireworks were involved.
Bubbles La Blanche — PHOTO: Al Ridenour
Many of my favorite Cacophony memories are a bit smudgy with booze and smoke and the glare of fireworks. It would be hard to recall as well as pick a favorite, but I do have exceedingly fond memories of a particular moment at a particular event involving the disinterment and planned resurrection of a mummified dead stripper, Bubbles La Blanche, buried in my backyard. The mummy I had so carefully constructed is still proudly displayed in my home, near a prize black velvet painting I discovered on a trip to Ensenada. The painting I had purchased years before the event, and it had always been one of my most cherished oddities as it featured a skull-faced Mona Lisa holding a skeletal fetus. It was not the work of some ironic hipster in LA, but an even more mysterious black velvet surrealist of Ensenada. No one who saw it failed to be impressed. . . but the night we dug up Bubbles La Blanche, the picture got knocked from the wall and the velvet was torn. It was at the end of the evening, and the Cramps were blasting on my stereo, and people dancing on Bubbles’ coffin had knocked the painting from the wall. The coffin had also been damaged, and dragged inside by partygoers not aware of or indifferent to the crickets that I had hidden in the coffin before burying it hours before the party. The crickets were everywhere, the coffin was damaged, and my favorite piece of art torn. But I remember laughing that night, and it still gives me pleasure to see that tear in the velvet. Things break, and it was not only fine, but amusing.
Now Cacophony is eager to preserve what it can of its legacy with the museum show, the documentary, and the new book, and I understand that side of the life cycle too, but it was nice back when we were all wild tadpoles.
AL RIDENOUR: It was really a dream show for us. To be surrounded by all that talent, and people I’d admired for years. I was such a huge fan of the Church of the SubGenius and vividly recall shuddering with baffled delight as I flicked the pages of that first book back in 1983. Having our videos on the giant screen was particularly satisfying. But I’m also aware of the friction involved with the authors not being involved. I was housemates with Chicken (John Rinaldi) during his L.A. years when he discovered Cacophony, and from years of experience with him, know that he is perfectly happy to cause friction and make enemies. But he’s also changed a lot too, and probably for the better if you believe in all that good/bad stuff. Other than that, I really don’t want to comment other than to note the obvious and amusing absurdity of an un-author-ized publication party. If only the squabbles themselves were more of an actual prank!
WHATSBLEM THE PRO: Do you have any plans or any desire to bring Art of Bleeding to Burning Man this year?
RT, the Robot Teacher — PHOTO: AoB
AL RIDENOUR: I feel that it’s not monumental enough to be noticed. Don’t you have to do a little more to engage folks up there nowadays? Encase an ocean liner in an iceberg and surround it with a steam-powered army of dancing giraffes, stuff like that?
I enjoyed doing the installations we did with Cacophony back in the smaller days but Art of Bleeding is already of a smaller scale than stuff I did back in 1999. But I’m grateful for the vibrant subculture Burning Man has fostered and happy we can reach those people through online videos and the occasional live show.
Particularly as the Art of Bleeding has moved more toward video, and especially as I spend more hours in isolation with complicated post and animation, I do miss interacting with crowds of weirdos, whether Cacophonistas or Burners (if such distinctions must be made).
My latest project, however, is bringing me back to the “festival arts” of celebrations like Burning Man as well as the guerilla street theater of Cacophony. It’s all about Krampus, a series of Krampus-themed events for December 2013 including an art show, shows with themed performances (hopefully including a Krampus Mass in an old church) and also public Krampus Runs. My wife and I had just visited Austria and Germany, in part to attend Krampus runs there, and when I returned, I learned that old Cacophony comrades-at-arms were interested in staging the same for LA, so we’re all working on suits and carving masks these days. I think it’ll be a big thing. Hopefully big enough to at least justify the mess I’ve made of my house with goat hair and bits of horn everywhere.
WHATSBLEM THE PRO: Can hot nurses and other people get involved with the Art of Bleeding?
You might have heard a lot of the hype about the new documentary about Burning Man, Spark. It’s screening tonight in Reno at 7:30, then playing to 1400 people in Washington DC, heading to New York City, and playing to 500 or so up my way in Santa Rosa on July 9.
There is a plethora of other documentaries about Burning Man. Like, Dust and Illusions – the film Burning Man doesn’t want you to see, or the excellent Emmy-nominated Current TV coverage of a few years back (now seemingly deleted from the Current.TV web site, since its acquisition from Al Gore by the Arabian network Al Jazeera).
So what makes this one different?
Well, for one, the Burning Man founders have been quite prominent in attending its premieres around the country. That certainly wasn’t the case with Dust and Illusions. It debuted at SXSW in Austin this year, to mixed reviews. And the BMOrg have been behind it too, talking it up in the Jacked Rabbit Speaks and the official Burning Man web site. They even went so far as to create an entire online portal called Spark – which at the time I thought was a coincidence, but read on, perhaps not…(I’m not sure I can pin the coincidental name of nearby town Sparks, Nevada on BMOrg but if anyone has any Burnileaks style info on this, please send it in!)
Just like the 7 Scandals besetting Our Prez right now, the leadership of Burning Man has yet another new scandal to contend with, thanks to the hard work of a perceptive Burner investigative journalist. Scribe is the author of The Tribes of Burning Man, probably the best book about Burning Man’s history (although if you want photos, Tomas Loewy’s Radical Burning Desert gets a lot of use on my coffee table).
He’s also a writer for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and their specialist on Burning Man. His recent 5-page cover story raises a lot of questions about the Spark Movie, and how much truth the Burner community is actually getting from the founders and leaders of BMOrg about what is going on.
A documentary called Spark: A Burning Man Story is arriving on the big screen, with dreams of wide distribution, at a pivotal moment for the San Francisco-based corporation that has transformed the annual desert festival into a valuable global brand supported by a growing web of interconnected burner collectives around the world.
Is that a coincidence, or is this interesting and visually spectacular (if slightly hagiographic) film at least partially intended to shore up popular support for the leadership of Burning Man as the founders cash out of Black Rock City LLC and supposedly begin to transfer more control to a new nonprofit entity?
Radical Burning Desert by Tomas Loewy
Filmed during last year’s ticket fiasco — in which high demand and a flawed lottery system created temporary scarcity that left many essential veteran burners without tickets during the busy preparation season — both the filmmakers and leaders of Burning Man say they needed to trust one another.
After all, technology-entrepreneur-turned-director Steve Brown was given extensive, exclusive access to the sometimes difficult and painful internal discussions about how to deal with that crisis. And if he was looking to make a film about the flawed and dysfunctional leadership of the event — ala Olivier Bonin’s Dust & Illusions — he certainly had plenty of footage to make that storyline work.
But that wasn’t going to happen, not this time — for a few reasons. One, Brown is a Burning Man true believer and relative newbie who took its leaders at face value and didn’t want to delve into the details or criticisms of how the event is managed or who will chart its future. As he told us, that just wasn’t the story he wanted to tell.
“We got trusted by the founders of Burning Man to do this story,” he told us. “They were in the process of going into a nonprofit and they wanted to get their message out into the world.”
So, sort of an authorized biography then.
Well, actually, more like a commissioned puff piece corporate story:
the filmmakers and their subjects are essentially in a partnership. Brown and the LLC’s leaders reluctantly admitted to us that there is a financial arrangement between the two entities and that the LLC will receive revenues from the film, although they wouldn’t discuss details with us.
Chris Weitz, an executive producer on the film, is also on the board of directors of the new nonprofit, The Burning Man Project, along with his wife, Mercedes Martinez. Both were personally appointed by the six members of the LLC’s board to help guide Burning Man into a new era.
Usually, if you star in a movie, you get paid. At least, you get a credit. In this case, we’re all the stars, we’re the talent, we pay to go there…and they profit from our images till the cows come home. How much? No-one’s saying, but for $150k you can do a Vogue Magazine Photo Shoot out there!
“We saw it as location fees. We’re making an investment, they’re making an investment,” he said, refusing to provide details of the agreement. “The arrangement we had with Burning Man is similar to the arrangements anyone else has had out there.”
Goodell said the LLC’s standard agreement calls for all filmmakers to either pay a set site fee or a percentage of the profits. “It’s standard in all of the agreements to pay a site fee,” Goodell said, noting that the LLC recently charged Vogue Magazine $150,000 to do a photo shoot during the event.
No wonder BMOrg were so pissed at Krug. They wanted their $150k. Or at least a pallet of champagne! Wonder if Town and Country had to pay similar buck$ too. This sponsorship of Burning Man by magazines, fashion labels etc. could be very lucrative, and could explain the difference between reported gate revenues (around $22 million) and the BLM fee of $1.87m for 3% – which brings us to a total event revenue closer to $62 million. What’s the deal with the missing 40 million dollars? Is the event actually much bigger than the permits, like some have speculated? Or is Burning Man cashing in big time on books, movies, TV shows, photo shoots, merchandising, the whole shebang?
Scribe very perceptively delves into the timing of this movie, with its unprecedented access to the founders and Org; the bizarre ticket lottery scandal, which could be looked at as a “culture jam” that shook the community up and made very clear the divide between veteran Burners (not so welcome any more, time to move on) and the new generation of Burgins (welcomed with open arms). It certainly made a great story thread for them to base a movie around – stirring the petri dish of Burners, creating carefully cultivated controversy amongst their Cargo Cult subjects with strange moves like “70% Virgins”. The other aspect of the timing of note is Larry Harvey’s announcement in 2011 (on April 1, no less) that Burning Man would transition to a non-profit over the next 3 years. We’ve got less than a year to go, and the vision and transition do not seem clear even to the leaders. Indeed, the Burning Man founders seem to be stepping back from their original idea of relinquishing control.
I haven’t seen the movie yet, but Scribe thinks it’s going to bring a few eye-rolling moments to veteran Burners:
More cynical burner veterans may have a few eye-rolling moments with this film and the portrayals of its selfless leadership. While the discussions of the ticket fiasco raised challenging issues within the LLC, its critics came off as angry and unreasonable, as if the new ticket lottery had nothing to do with the temporary, artificial ticket scarcity (which was alleviated by summer’s end and didn’t occur this year under a new and improved distribution system).
And when the film ends by claiming “the organization is transitioning into a nonprofit to ‘gift’ the event back to the community,” it seems to drift from overly sympathetic into downright deceptive, leaving viewers with the impression that the six board members are selflessly relinquishing the tight control they exercise over the event and the culture it has spawned.
Yet our interview with the LLC leadership shows that just isn’t true. If anything, the public portrayals that founder Larry Harvey made two years ago about how this transition would go have been quietly modified to leave these six people in control of Burning Man for the foreseeable future.
So, is there actually a transition going on to a non-profit? Well, apparently, it’s complicated:
As altruistic as Spark makes Burning Man’s transition to nonprofit status sound, Harvey made it clear during the April 1, 2011 speech when he announced it that it was driven by internal divisions that almost tore the LLC board apart, largely over how much money departing board members were entitled to.
The corporation’s bylaws capped each board member’s equity at $20,000, a figure Harvey scoffed at as ridiculously low, saying the six board members would decide on larger payouts as part of the transition and they have refused to disclose how much (Sources in the LLC tell me the payouts have already begun. Incidentally, author Katherine Chen claimed in her book Enabling Creative Chaos that the $20,000 cap was set to quell community concerns about the board accumulating equity from everyone else’s efforts, but Harvey now denies that account).
In that speech, Harvey also said the plan was to turn over operation of the Burning Man event to the nonprofit after three years, and then three years later to transfer control over the Burning Man brand and trademarks and to dissolve the LLC (see “The future of Burning Man,” 8/2/11).
Board member Marian Goodell assured us at the time that the LLC would be doing extensive outreach to gather input on what the future leadership of the event and culture should look like: “We’re going to have a conversation with the community.”
But with just a year to go until the event was scheduled to be turned over to the nonprofit board, there has been no substantive transfer, the details of what the leadership structure will look like are murky — and the six board members of Black Rock LLC still deem themselves indispensable leaders of the event and culture.
The filmmakers say that the transition to the nonprofit was one of the things that drew them to the project, but the ticket fiasco came to steal their focus, mostly because the nonprofit narrative was simply too complex and confusing to easily convey on film.
According to Burning Man’s main founders Larry and Marian, everything is just fine. They’re on track to transfer the ownership to a new structure. They can’t just put everything into the Burning Man Project, so they’re still figuring out what to do with that and how it will interact with the party event. They definitely don’t want it to be a bureaucratic tyranny, so to protect us from that they’re going to control the culture more than ever before:
“We’re pretty much on schedule,” Harvey told me, noting that he still hopes to transfer ownership of the event over to the nonprofit next year. “The nonprofit is going well, and then we have to work out the terms of the relationship between the event and the nonprofit. We want the event to be protected from undue meddling and we want it to be a good fit.”
From our conversations, it appears that a new governance structure seems synonymous with the “meddling” they want to avoid.
“We want to make sure the event production has autonomy, so it can water the roads without board members deciding which roads and the number of tickets and how many volunteers,” Goodell said. “We did look at basically plopping the entire thing into the nonprofit, but if you look at what we’re trying to do out in the world, we don’t have any interest in becoming a big, large government agency.”
It was an analogy they returned to a few times: equating a new governance structure with bureaucratic tyranny. They rejected the notion that the new nonprofit would have “control” over the event, even though they want it to have “ownership” of the event.
“You just said the control of the event would be turned over to the nonprofit,” Goodell said.
“No, the ownership,” Harvey added.
“Yeah, there’s a difference,” Goodell said.
That difference seems to involve whether the six current board members would be giving up their control — which she said they are not.
“All six of us plan to stay around. We’re not going off to China to buy a little house along the Mekong River,” Goodell said.
“We want to make sure the event production company has sufficient autonomy, they can function with creating freedom and do what it does best, which is producing the Burning Man event, without being unduly interfered with by the nonprofit organization,” Harvey said.
“That’s why you heard it one way initially, and you’re hearing it slightly differently now, and it could go back again,” Goodell said. “We don’t think it’s sensible, either philosophically or fiscally, to essentially strip away all these entities and take all these employees and plop them in the middle of The Burning Man Project.”
In other words, Black Rock LLC and its six members will apparently still produce the event — and it’s not clear what, exactly, the nonprofit will do.
“We are giving up LLC-based ownership control, we are not giving up the steerage of the culture,” Goodell said. “That we’re not giving up. We’re more necessary now than ever.”
Scribe finishes his piece by presenting the two different viewpoints at play here.
There are at least a couple ways for burner true believers to look at the event, its culture, and its leadership. One is to see Burning Man as a unique and precious gift that has been bestowed on its attendees by Harvey, its wise and selfless founder, and the leadership team he assembled, which he formalized as an LLC in 1997.
That seems to be the dominant viewpoint, based on reactions that I’ve received to past critical coverage (and which I expect to hear again in reaction to this article), and it is the viewpoint of the makers of this film. “They’ve dedicated their lives to creating this platform that allows people to go out and create art,” Brown said.
Another point-of-view is to see Burning Man as the collective, collaborative effort that it claims to be, a DIY experiment conducted by the voluntary efforts of the tens of thousands of people who create the art and culture of Black Rock City from scratch, year after year.
Yes, we should appreciate Harvey and the leaders of the event, and they should get reasonable retirement packages for their years of effort. But they’ve also had some of the coolest jobs in town for a long time, and they now freely travel the world as sort of countercultural gurus, not really working any harder than most San Franciscans.
The latter point is felt by many old time Burners, who are often under-employed and under-funded. The art is made collaboratively, and financed collaboratively. By us, not the BMOrg. Many feel that we’ve all made this event together and that the BMOrg is being unfair in their ruthless persecution of anyone trying to make a buck in the Burner commuity, while simultaneously maximizing profits behind closed doors and doing all kinds of licensing deals without any transparency. They don’t have to share the profits, it’s not communism, but at least let the rest of the Burner ecosystem profit from Burning Man too. Do they want to be Apple and Microsoft (who pay people to develop the intellectual property that they license and control) or do they want to be Open Source (where a community gifts to the commons, for the good of all)? We’ve all heard the talk, it’s going to be very interesting to see what happens in the next year if they actually do sort their transition plans out.
Burning Man 2.0 is starting to look suspiciously like Burning Man 1.0… just with less transparency; tighter control over the culture; stepped up political campaigning in Washington, Nevada, and San Francisco; new revenue streams from new media and new markets leading to a hugely expanded scope of revenue production from the event and brand that we all co-created together – aka “we pay them to be the talent and we take care of our own wardrobe, travel, accomodation and all expenses too”; more fragmented volunteer-run organizations that may or may not be doing lots of useful stuff away from the party to give back to the community; and last but by absolutely no means least, an unprecedented public relations blitz.
In an earlier post I raised the possibility that Burning Man’s interviews with Bloomberg could be seeding the garden for a possible IPO. Interestingly, this story was presented on Bloomberg as “The Spark That Created Burning Man Festival”. Spark again. Burn Wall Street – that’s certainly one way to get Wall Street’s attention, before you hit them up for money on your roadshow for “Silicon Valley’s Hottest Startup“.
Is there some multi-year plan afoot here, similar to Facebook’s idea to release an Oscar-winning movie before announcing their IPO (with another movie)? Or is it just a coincidence that Burning Man seems to have taken the travelling, speaking, and interviewing to a whole ‘nother dimension in the last couple of years?
Watch this space – Scribe has conducted quite a few interviews about this story, and will be bringing us more soon.
For a lot of people, Burning Man is a once-a-year thing. They spend more or less time getting ready for and/or recovering from their trip to the desert, but it’s still essentially a vacation for them, a get-away, a short break from their ‘real’ lives. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course.
Some of those people are simply unaffected; they’ve been there, they’ve seen what goes on and maybe even participated, but they don’t necessarily define themselves as ‘burners’ and don’t spend an inordinate amount of time thinking or talking about Burning Man (yes, such people do exist). It’s kind of a dead giveaway, though, when you hear people rhapsodizing about the single week they spend at the event as though it is what defines them as people above all else, and yet also represents the entirety of their contact with and participation in burner culture. It seems like the more entranced you are with the Ten Principles, or the more enchanted you are by something like an unexpected whiff of dust while poking around in the garage, the more likely you are to be someone who thinks that Burning Man is just a short-term thing that happens once a year.
We’re not trying to be burnier-than-thou about it, or put anyone down, but Burning-Man-the-event is only the tip of the iceberg; no matter where in the world you are, there are opportunities not too far away for you to get together with other like-minded people and be that amazing all year long. . . which, really, can be even better than the annual party at Black Rock.
You don’t have to be at Burning Man to burn, and you don’t have to quit your job or give all your clothes to charity to burn all year ’round. You don’t need a ticket, or permission from anyone. All you need is the will and whatever leisure time you can free up, and you can transform your life and the lives of others for (what we fondly regard as) the better.
Today, the Org put their new Regionals web site up, where you can get contact information to help you hook up with your tribe wherever you are. The new site is located at http://regionals.burningman.com. The old site will be made available soon at http://crabgrass.burningman.com, which is probably a good thing, as nearly fifty Regionals have yet to copy their data from the old site to the new.
If you don’t see the new site when you visit http://regionals.burningman.com, you may need to clear your cache, or restart your browser. The new site may not be available to you yet; DNS changes do take time to propagate throughout the world, but within 48 hours of this writing the change should be global.
The Org’s web development team asks that you “keep an eye out for bad links from the old site,” and drops a tantalizing hint: “There’s an easter egg. . . on the Second Life page.”
So what are you waiting for? Why are you still here? Go get connected! Find some people doing something great in your area, and arrange to spend some time with them. Be awesome, help out where you can, and don’t worry about what you’re getting out of it. . . generally speaking, you’ll find that you get a lot out of it without having to look to your own interests much.
Almost everywhere, anyway — Image: regionals.burningman.com
Is there something in the air? It seems that the theme for this Spring is tech moguls dropping Burning Man references. Burning Man, the Maker world, and the tech world are about to converge for a weekend at BurnerHack. Some people trace the demise of Burning Man to 1996, with the event’s first coverage in WIRED magazine in Bruce Sterling’s article. WIRED and Burning Man have always gone hand in hand, as have Burning Man and tech. Despite the naysayers, they’re all still going strong. Right now it seems to be de riguer to work Burning Man into whatever you’re promoting to the technology world.
WIRED has recently done a story on Monty Taylor of Hewlett-Packard and OpenStack, the NASA backed offspring of the Rainbow Mansion that aims to run much of the infrastructure of the Internet. Monty is the engineer in charge of “Continuous Integration” for the OpenStack project, meaning he’s the gate keeper for all the developers out there who submit code to be integrated to the core. He’s a Burner, he wears pink sunglasses (Robot Heart, one wonders?), and he likens the open source movement in the software world to Burning Man:
Monty Taylor posing on New York’s fashionable High Line (photo Wired/Andrew White)
Though engineers are so often caricatured as single-minded introverts, Monty Taylor is an extrovert with a taste for more than software. “He’s super-technical,” says Mark Collier, who worked with Taylor at Rackspace and is now on staff at the OpenStack Foundation, the not-for-profit that oversees the project. “But he’s also so personable.”
No, you wouldn’t call him a typical software developer. But he’s not as far from the norm as he may seem. Whatever the stereotypes, software development is a social activity, and this is particularly true of massive open source projects like OpenStack. Taylor compares OpenStack to Burning Man, where a vast array of individuals, each with his own agenda, come together and share common ground. The OpenStack CI service is the tool that keeps this community going, ensuring that the collective doesn’t turn to chaos.
“I’m always making big Burning Man metaphors,” Taylor says. “We want to give developers as much freedom as we can, but if you give them too much freedom, it turns into anarchy. You have to have a certain amount of structure and rules.”
Open Stack seems to be a combination of several “skunkworks” type projects being conducted by NASA, Google, and others, all rolled up into one in the salon at the Rainbow Mansion. It’s open to the world, and backed by more than 150 companies, including some of the tech world’s biggest:
So much software they needed a container
OpenStack has many founders across NASA, Rackspace, and beyond. But several of the most important players were a regular part of the tech commune that thrives at the Rainbow Mansion, including Chris C. Kemp, 34, one of the freethinkers who founded the Mansion when they joined NASA’s Ames Research Center in 2006. “We were just looking for a place to live,” says Kemp. “But it turned into a place where the idea was to recruit interesting people — interesting people to have dinner with, to run into in the common areas, to be around a lot — people who could expand our understanding of the world.”
Kemp went on to become the chief information officer at Ames and later the chief technology officer of NASA as a whole. While there, working alongside several others with close ties to the Rainbow Mansion, he spearheaded the creation of NASA Nebula, an effort to bring Google’s web genius to the rest of the world. And after two years of struggle, a key part of this project — an open source platform called Nova — would merge with a complementary platform from Rackspace and give birth to OpenStack.
Like Linux, OpenStack is a bit of a miracle. The odds were against Kemp even getting Nebula off the ground at NASA — not only because it’s somewhat tangential to the agency’s mission, but because the NASA bureaucracy was so unsuited to the creation of something openly shared with the rest of the world. And NASA is only half the story. It’s even more remarkable that a project created at NASA would so quickly find a home among the giants of the tech world.
“This could have fallen apart in a million different ways, from the beginning. In fact, it all seemed impossible,” says Rick Clark, who worked at Rackspace when OpenStack was in its infancy and now helps drive the project at Cisco. “You have to please NASA and the NASA legal team and the Rackspace legal team and the Rackspace board of directors, and you have to do it in a way that still have something that’s palatable to developers everywhere else. It’s amazing that it actually happened.”
Open Source software means anyone can contribute to it; this shift in the concept of intellectual property has revolutionized the software industry, gutting the market for application software developers who are now lucky to get $3 in the App Store for their masterpieces. Google and Facebook were built on massive server farms running Linux, the variant of the UNIX operating system kernel developed as Open Source by Finland’s Linus Torvalds in 1991. The low-cost, easily modifiable software stack meant their server farms cost less to build and operate than their competitors. It’s safe to say that most of the Internet runs on open source these days – which still hasn’t stopped companies like Microsoft and Oracle making money. Their profits have increased, but some of their monopoly has been passed back to the people. This model is what is needed as evolution careens on its unstoppable course towards the Singularity…information wants to be free. The infrastructure and systems that govern our lives should be created by the people, and transparent to all – not purchased from IBM and Accenture for multi-billion dollar sums, the same systems sold over and over again to government departments and large corporations. Open source software is always evolving, can always be improved. It is free, made by the people, by those who want to share their skills and efforts for the benefit of anyone else who appreciates it.
Sound like anything familiar? In likening the open source movement to Burning Man, Monty makes the point that “without some rules, it descends into anarchy“ – which is true, but misses the larger point about the organization of human beings. We need leadership, not just rules. Sure, we need rules. Without leadership, rules descend into bureaucracy, blandness, even tyranny. Rules for the sake of having more rules. This is kind of like the role Standards play in Open Source – a convenient way for the corporate interests to put their fingerprints all over emerging technologies, slowing down and steering their development in the name of “Open Standards” (which is not the same thing as Open Source). The Open Source projects that seem to work best are the ones where there is a media-friendly character involved, a geek prepared to have a slightly higher profile than the others perhaps. The mainstream media might have no idea who these characters are, but enough of the geeks know that they have the street cred required to get others to follow them.
This same point seems to be missed by Google’s Larry Page, in calling for “spaces without rules” where experimentation can take place. I agree we need these spaces – but even more, we need the tribes that will fill them, the scouts who will convince the leaders to bring more of their tribe. In the nightclub world these would be called promoters, in the tech world they are called “thought leaders”. At BMOrg I believe the title is “social alchemist”. These tribes can operate in existing spaces and within existing rules, Burning Man is an example of a space (and challenge) that greatly facilitates the formation and connections of these tribes. What do they do to promote these tribes, and help them prosper? What sort of leadership do they provide to the inhabitants of their Temporary Autonomous Zone – and what will that look like in the future?
That’s what OpenStack is: a way for the rest of the world to compete with Amazon. “Amazon [is] at war with every IT vendor out there,” says Sebastian Stadil, the CEO of an open source cloud management outfit Scalr, the founder of the Silicon Valley Cloud Computing group, and a former resident of the Rainbow Mansion. “I think one of the reasons OpenStack is getting so much traction — despite, to be frank, iffy stability — is that it represents the industry’s only hope to survive.”
All these massive companies – and NASA! – teaming up just to fight in a war against Amazon, over a business that’s not even doing $1 billion a year? With technology coming to us from the Rainbow Mansion, 15 minutes down the road from NASA Ames? And it’s our only hope to survive? Something smells fishy to me here. This has the pungent reek of 20th century thinking, nicely packaged in a fetid veneer of pseudo-openness. It stinks of open source for the wrong reasons. It seems more like the eternal cycle of computing, from the server room to the client and back again. A whole new excuse to sell hardware and services to customers who already bought them 5 years ago when the buzzwords were different.
Anyway, the point is that Open Source ultimately wins over proprietary monopoly. If BMOrg want to monopolize their control over Burning Man, they will eventually be subsumed by something more open. People want their voices to be heard. Information wants to be free. The energy and spirit of Burning Man want to be free too, and gifted to the world.
Burning Man is the epitome of the crowd-sourced event. The cremé-de-la-cremé of BYO parties. But in a way, the rules for it get crowd-sourced too. It starts with the 10 Principles – what are they, Rules? Commandments? Then rules get added to the mix from BMOrg, from the authorities, from Burners doing stupid stuff. New ideas, new rules. Every year, more people, more rules. Without leadership, the creativity will be stifled by the imposition of systemic authority. You can see this happen all day long in Silicon Valley – the founders get kicked out of the company once it grows past a couple of hundred people, the early staff quit, because it’s “not the same” as things get bigger and more complicated and the rules come in. This is why big companies can’t innovate – they just buy innovation with their giant treasure troves.
Here’s what Monty thinks about the rules:
Taylor and team have also built a tool called Zuul, a means of efficiently testing the enormous amounts of code produced by the project, and unlike most CI systems, it tests all code before it’s merged into the collective, so that the community can move as one — and move much quicker.
The other key thing to realize, Taylor says, is that the process is automatic. No human can merge new code into the project without the approval of the system. With a massive project like OpenStack, he explains, you need a process that doesn’t favor the wishes of any one contributor. You don’t want anarchy, but you don’t want dictatorship either.
“You can’t have human enforcement of the rules. That lends itself to corruption. We want rules to — as much as possible — be sensible and machine-enforced. You can’t have someone laying down a rule because they don’t like you. They have to be rules that apply to everyone.”
The ultimate aim is to create a project that is truly communal — the sort of thing that so rarely happens in the real world. “We can’t do this in normal human life,” Taylor says, “but we can do it in source code.”
Zuul!
“The Freaks Come Marching-In” – they asked Burners to draw self-portaits. (Todd Berman)
We can’t do this in normal human life – but Burning Man has the size, ingenuity, and weirdness that maybe it could be a chance for us to create a project that is truly communal. Not controlled by a small group of privileged insiders. And not just in one way, repeated ad infinitum…but on an ongoing, repeatable basis. For example, why do we have to build the same city layout, again and again? Is it for occult reasons? We want to change things, then “Jupiter” becomes “Juniper”, and we can all feel more edgy? Let’s mix it up a bit. Experiment with different ways of living together, and see what lessons we learn. Try something new, and burn it at the end. If not at this event, then perhaps other, new ones to come.
Free Software Guru, Rochard Stallman
Burning Man can have increasingly more rules and still thrive, so long as there is leadership. They would do well to learn from the successes of Open Source, and ideas like Burner Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons. Burning Man is the ultimate creative commons, in the original sense of the term commons. Now Lessig, and Open Source demigod Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation, and even the Pirate Party which is gaining legitimate political support in Europe, are promoting the next big thing: the Free Culture movement. Enrich humanity, by sharing our cultural heritage with each other. Hollywood and the record companies still make money, Burning Man will still make money.
Since BMOrg do not exploit our photos for their own commercial gain, why do they need to have such onerous copyright policies? Why not use a creative commons license, so that we can all share together the rich tapestry of unique culture that we create and add to with every Burn. Sure, there’s stuff on YouTube, but we could do better. Everyone’s experience at Burning Man could be shared with everyone else – if they chose. Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat – we live in a world of sharing now. Not taking, controlling, hoarding. Sharing, giving, remixing, improving. Burning Man would only gain from this way of thinking, and so would the Burner community. It’s the value of the inclusive approach - it’s a party that’s created by its participants, so encourage their participation in the design and governance of the city, and the spread of the movement. Don’t try to own and control; instead give, and share, and open, and include. Its 2013, we speak the Language of We. Sharing is the new owning.
