Monthly Archives: May 2012

May 23 2012

Burning Man in Popular Mechanics: 10 Cool Art Cars

Popular Mechanics just published a story, “10 Wild Art Cars From Burning Man”

Some highlights:

The Golden Mean

Metal artist Jon Sarriugarte built a 12-foot snail on top of a 1966 VW Beetle floor pan. The galvanized scrap metal is cut into “scales” and welded together. 

Because the vehicle is intended to carry up to 19 people, Sarriugarte replaced the stock VW suspension with airbags and a compressor that can vary the load-carrying capacity. The engine is hot-rodded and has a large snorkel system to keep sand out during Black Rock Desert sandstorms. The steering linkage and brake systems are a custom design, he says, but the rearview mirror and a split rear window are homages to the original Beetle. Small balls of flames shoot from the vehicle’s antennae, and the vehicle is licensed for street use. 

The Golden Mean won’t be at this year’s Burning Man, though, since Sarriugarte and his wife, Kyrsten Mate, are bringing two new 50-foot-tall wheeled serpent vehicles instead.

Official site here.

From the Golden Mean, you can derive the Nautilus. But not this one:

all photos by Scott London

The Nautilus

The 9000-pound Nautilus is inspired by Jules Verne’s submarine from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Its base is a 2005 Eagle TT8 diesel airport tug with four-wheel drive. 

Californians Christopher and Amber Marie Bently conceived the idea; Five Ton Crane, creators of art sculptures in the San Francisco Bay area, built it. The Nautilus is 25 feet long and 12 feet tall and made of laser-welded steel with decorative rivets lining the hull. The engine and steering controls are on the “bridge” of the machine. The Nautilus features surround sound, a library, a map room, and a full bar.

Neverwas Haul

Shannon O’Hare of Vallejo, Calif., took the frame of a fifth-wheel camping trailer and built a three-story Victorian mansion on top.

The powertrain for the motorhome is from an 80-year-old forklift three-cylinder motor driving a hydraulic pump that in turn powers a wheel motor connected to an International pickup truck axle. The driver steers the front-drive machine from a command deck in the front of the vehicle via hydraulic cylinders.

The first floor of the mansion is the “engine room”; it’s made of a steel frame to support the upper levels. Upstairs is a lounge deck that will hold about 10 people, O’Hare says. Above that is an observation deck. 

A 70-gallon propane tank fuels the machine, which tours the Burning Man playa daily during the event, covering about 30 miles a day. For the 2012 festival, the Neverwas Haul is getting a new three-cylinder Kubota engine.

Berserker

For the 2006 Burning Man festival Scott Cocking of San Diego studied spoke-wheel construction and set out to create 4-foot-diameter wheels out of 15-inch car wheels and 4-foot-diameter plastic drainpipe to carry the machine. Each aluminum car wheel is used as a hub, drilled with 96 holes for spokes. The three wheels have 26-inch tires stretched over them, and the machine is powered by bicycle-style gears, chains, and pedals. Cocking reports that about 1200 screws are used to hold the tires to the plastic drainpipe, and his custom-made spokes are held to each wheel with more than 1700 eyebolts, nuts, and washers. The steering system is by cable, with 12 pulleys, and large tanks of propane behind the seats of the Berserker are used for the fire cannons Cocking designed.

…and here’s how to build your own one.

 

May 23 2012

Latin pop star makes Burning Man song

Is this commodification? Latin pop star releases song “inspired” by the Burning Man ticket crisis.

Press Releases

Ex-Menudo Star Addresses Burning Man Crisis

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Dance-pop artist, Ash Ruiz, launches his solo career with a Music Video inspired by the sold-out ticket crisis facing mega-festival “Burning Man”. The video, directed by Elevate Films founder, Mikki Willis, features Ash’s “electro-ganic” dance-pop song, “Burn (One Love)”, from his 7-song Debut EP, “Electric Innocence”. The EP and video will be released worldwide simultaneously on Tuesday, June 12, 2012. Video Sneak Preview @ http://youtu.be/dr6xcos2aMI

Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) May 22, 2012

May 2012 — Ash Ruiz, ex-member of Latin-sensation band, Menudo, formally launches his solo music career Tuesday, June 12, 2012, with a controversial music video after 14 years touring with conscious pop band, Here II Here. Ash will release his debut EP album “Electric Innocence” and a music video inspired by Burning Man and the ticket crisis currently facing the mega-festival in the desert. The video is directed by Mikki Willis, founder of Elevate Films, whose credits include Alanis Morissette and India Arie.

Despite Burning Man Festival’s efforts to create a smooth ticketing process for the 2012 late-summer festival after last year’s sold out festival crashed online ticket sales, this year’s lottery system instead created an unprecedented crisis. The massive desert lake-bed festival, capped at 50,000 people by contract with Nevada land management authorities, relies on experienced veteran attendees (called “burners”) each year to create the extensive fusion display of art and music. The lottery system failed to account for that need, and thousands of essential veteran burners have been unable to secure tickets for the approaching sold-out festival.

Ash’s Music Video for his original song, “Burn (One Love)”, addresses this with an up-tempo invitation for those who cannot attend the festival to create the experience in their own homes and communities. Given that the Burning Man culture has always encouraged people to bring its ethos of joyful – and responsible – human expression out from the desert and into mainstream, Ash’s video works to visually create what that can look like. Ash says, “When people watch this video, I want them to be inspired to live everyday like the fabulous creative beings they are!”

via Ex-Menudo Star Addresses Burning Man Crisis.

May 23 2012

Let Burners have a say in their creation! vox populi at Burning Man

At the moment, Burning Man is a pyramid organization. The pyramid has ruled humanity for thousands of years. I’m not talking about 2.3 million 2-ton limestone blocks in Eqypt – I’m talking about an organizational structure that is taught at every business school. You have the CEO on the top, you have subordinates, then you have a layer of worker drones at the bottom. Almost all of Western society is organized in this fashion.

Burning Man’s org chart is no different. We have the “All-Seeing Eye” of Horus/Hours/Whores at the top, and everyone scrambling to be included in the bottom. This is very much the structure of Burning Man today. The community expresses our opinions, they listen, then they decree. Then we go back to our serfdom, and they run their party (sorry, “event“) however they damn well please. Except for one key difference: in commercial, military, and government pyramids, all the workers get paid by the Eye at the top. In Burning Man, only a few get paid, many are volunteers, and money is not supposed to exist; most participants in the pyramid structure are obedient to their masters, they pay to go and pay to contribute art, and get no reward other than being there. Burners get no say in any of the decisions, and no say in the context being created for them to self-organize in.

Burning Man is an amazing social experiment. But the nature of an experiment, is you need to try different things. Not just keep it the same. Burning Man should evolve. The 10 principles are not the ideal guide. We need a streamlined Ritalin Kid version for the 30,000+ n00bz coming this year, the Millenials and others to come, who’ve never known a time when they weren’t on an iDevice.

Bureaucracies stagnate. We live in that system in the Default World. Burning Man is our great shining hope for freedom, for humanity to fuse with technology and joy and love and spirit and Nature, and evolve. Consciously, and harmoniously.

“Our centralized and bureaucratic system of authority is crushing our spirit”…so what is the answer? Participatory democracy, also known by the more punchy phrase Direct Democracy. This is a great introduction to the idea, you can fast forward to 7:55 he wraps it up pretty well in the conclusion:

I was first put onto the Direct Democracy movement by black belt trends forecaster Gerald Celente, a frequent contributor to Max Keiser and Alex Jones.

From Celente’s directdemocracynow.org 

 

What Is Direct Democracy?

Unlike the current “Representative Democracy” where elected representatives make decisions regardless of the wishes of their constituencies, inDirect Democracy individuals vote on critical issues and their decisions are carried out by their elected representatives… Whether they like it or not 

…As Victor Hugo put it, ‘There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come’

I believe that time is now. And if you believe it, we can make Direct Democracy happen. We are looking for allies; volunteers with expertise in diverse fields. Direct Democracy can happen if we make it happen

As Celente says, if we can bank online, we can vote online.

Here’s Gerald responding to his critics: