We’ve been covering the build of the Control Tower over the last month or two, and today we’ve got an opportunity for YOU to be part of the project on-playa.
Sevenn, the International Arts Megacrew‘s administrative angel, is looking for people to fill slots as “Control Tower Ensigns,” helping the crew keep the Tower manned and operational 24/7. There are a number of four-hour shifts available throughout the week that will give you a chance to get a look at the workings of this massive, amazing art project from an insider’s point of view. There may be swag involved, and you’ll also get to hobnob and generally rub elbows with the legendary builders of the IAM, creators of the Temple of Transition that wowed Black Rock City in 2011, among other major playa art projects.
“The Control Tower Ensigns will help support the crew and systems of the Control Tower during the event, serving as ambassadors and safety personnel,” says Sevenn. “There will be a Control Tower crew member on site at all times to train and help you. Thank you for your assistance and support!”
As a CT Ensign, you’ll be assisting an IAM crew member with duties such as keeping people from climbing the tower, recording any technical issues, acting as a liaison with Rangers and law enforcement personnel, ensuring the generators are running and fueled up, and more.
Sign-up for a CT Ensign shift is quick and easy; just visit the Volunteerspot page for the project and enter your information, then show up for your shift on the playa at the appointed time. You won’t have a hard time finding it – even at Burning Man, a sixty-foot tower loaded with lasers and flamethrowers and other implements of funstruction will be hard to miss – just go to 3:15 and Esplanade, and you’ll see it.
That’s a 1:5 scale model of the Tower; crew members are actual size
The 1:5 scale model of the Control Tower shows off
Mischief Lab’s fine work-in-progress on the Tower’s flame capability
The Temple of Transition, Burning Man 2011 — Photo by Peter Gordon
Peter Gordon is an award-winning photographer based in Ireland, where he’s been working full-time as an art photographer for the last seven years. Gordon studied history and politics, but said goodbye to all that so that he could indulge the avid interest in photography he acquired from working with his father, photographer Ed Gordon. “I got hooked,” says Peter, “and there was no turning back.”
Inside the Temple — Photo: Peter Gordon
Gordon has not just won awards for his Burning Man images, he has won the most prestigious photography awards in Europe for them, including European Photographer of the Year, and a European Reportage Golden Camera from the Federation of European Photographers. In 2013, Peter Gordon was named Irish Professional Photographer of the Year, Landscape Photographer of the Year, and Pictorial and Travel Photographer of the Year by the Irish Professional Photographers Association, while his work took Best Single Image in both the Landscape, and the Travel and Pictorial categories.
Peter Gordon’s latest project focuses on the Temple of Transition at Burning Man 2011, which has been widely regarded as the best Burning Man Temple to date. Mr. Gordon kindly agreed to tell me all about it.
Whatsblem the Pro: Peter, I understand you’ve got a book project in the works. Can you tell me about it, please?
Peter Gordon: That’s right. ‘Life and Death – The Temple‘ will be an exhibition and book of fine art photography of the Temple of Transition. It’s not just about the Temple of Transition as a structure; it’s about the Temple experience. It’s about capturing the essence of a poignant spiritual experience in the incredibly beautiful surroundings of the Black Rock Desert. The imagery shows that we’re all human beings; we all celebrate life, we all mourn death. We do it in different ways, but the project is saying: Look, here’s a way that people are dealing with very deep problems: loss and separation, death, and celebrating the most important elements of their lives as well, like marriage. And WOW is it working for them! When the project is released fully in late September, you will see these themes of Life and Death in people’s expressions and experiences at the Temple, in the building itself, and of course on the canvas of the Temple walls.
Photo: Peter Gordon
Whatsblem the Pro: Is this a solo project, or are there other people involved?
Peter Gordon: The IAM crew, especially James Diarmaid Horkan – aka ‘Irish’ — are the only other people directly involved with the project. They built the Temple that I’m telling the story through. I was an IAM crew member on the Temple build, so we’re bound together by friendship, common experience, and a set of (hopefully) iconic images.
Whatsblem the Pro: How did you find out about Burning Man?
Peter Gordon: In 2011 I was part of the fundraising drive to build the Temple of Transition. ‘Irish’ is an old friend of mine from the motherland here in Ireland, and when the IAM crew got the go-ahead to build the 2011 Temple, Irish asked me to get involved. I jumped at the chance to get back to the desert!
The idea was to give crowdfunding supporters of the Temple a chance to own a limited-edition fine art print of a photograph of the structure. The reward seemed to go down well with donators, so I got myself on a plane across the Atlantic from Ireland and hit Burning Man.
Whatsblem the Pro: What do you hope to achieve with ‘Life and Death – the Temple?’
Peter Gordon: Initially, my goal was simply to fulfill the fine art print reward through a series of drop-dead beautiful images of the Temple. As I spent more time at the Temple, the project began to evolve in my mind. I could see the real – and very positive – impact the Temple experience was having on the people taking part, and I was struck by the very serious process that so many people were going through. I had never seen the Temple story told fully through a documentary photography project, and just felt compelled to tell it. The process involved a fair amount of deep sadness, but also incredible joy and ultimately catharsis.
Photo: Peter Gordon
Whatsblem the Pro: I know what you mean. I’m not a person who cries easily or often, but the Temple of Transition at dawn, and all the things people had written on those walls, had me weeping openly. What kind of support are you looking for to bring this project home?
Peter Gordon: I’m trying to get people involved with the project through the Kickstarter campaign, which I’m hoping will raise enough money to print a 112-page coffee table book, and pay for design services and a launch space in Dublin. I’m planning to bring the project to the US as well, so I’m actively seeking spaces where that can happen.
Whatsblem the Pro: Where can we get more information?
Peter Gordon: If people want a bit more info about the project and me, they should check out my website or my Facebook page.
Whatsblem the Pro: How can we donate or otherwise get involved?
Peter Gordon: People can get involved through my Kickstarter campaign. We have some really cool swag on offer as rewards, including Temple screen savers, the coffee table book, and fine art prints.
Whatsblem the Pro: Thanks, Peter, and good luck. I’m looking forward to showing that book off on my own coffee table!
The International Arts Megacrew is a crew of builders that has earned a massive amount of respect from the citizens of Black Rock City, in particular with the success of their very ambitious and brilliantly executed Temple of Transition in 2011.
The IAM has announced their project for 2013, a mysterious structure called THE CONTROL TOWER. I met with Irish, one of the group’s leaders, to find out more.
Whatsblem the Pro: Welcome back to the States! Tell me about the IAM.
Irish: Thanks. IAM is a loose collective of people from over twenty countries, of which the core group is based in Reno. The crew initially grew from a group that knew each other from working together at the Black Rock International Burner Hostel (BRIBH) camp from around 2005 onwards, particularly members of the leadership team: Kiwi, a master carpenter and general contractor from New Zealand, myself, an artist from Dublin, and Beave, a notorious international man of mystery from England. IAM has since expanded to include many other people, including our architect Ken Rose and a wide diversity of crew from Reno and further afield.
The BRIBH was a camp that sought to provide burners from overseas a means to integrate faster at Burning Man by providing a surrounding community and a shared project – camp construction – for them to get involved in, even in their first year at Black Rock City. Attending Burning Man from overseas is a daunting task, both psychologically and logistically, and the role of the Burner Hostel was to make the journey easier, allowing international participants to spend more energy on really getting stuck into Burning Man while knowing they had a sweet home base to return to whenever they needed. . . and this philosophy of providing accessible experience to international burners continues in our art projects today.
IAM crew distribution — Image: Josh Simmons/IAM media team
The first big project we did, Megatropolis, grew from a whiskey-sippin’ conversation at Kiwiburn 2010 between Kiwi and Otto Von Danger, there at the time to build his Cow with Gun project. Too late to apply for a grant that year, we hustled, begged and borrowed to raise the funds required and drove to the playa on fumes, where, over the course of twelve hotdog-eating days, twenty-five of us managed to pull off a pretty big and popular project. Black Rock FX came in at the end to help us with an epic, pyrotechnics-intensive burn.
Our crew that year included people from New Zealand, Ireland, the UK, Australia, the USA, Hong Kong, Canada and Germany.
Megatropolis went so well that at some point during cleanup, Kiwi jumped to the next logical conclusion: building a Temple.
Megatropolis burning — Photo: Chris ‘Kiwi’ Hankins
This was a very different project – much bigger, far more complex – and being the Temple, required a lot more sensitivity and thought. With a crew that topped out at just under 400 volunteers from over twenty countries at Hobson Square, an awesome warehouse complex on 4th Street in Reno, we spent an extremely intense four months pre-building, then had an even more intense time with the on-playa build. . . so intense that we needed a year off to recuperate in 2012.
The Temple of Transition appeared to be well-liked by the community; afterwards we heard estimates that there were around 45,000 people at the Temple burn, which hopefully means it was a special place for a lot of people and that it performed its intended function effectively. The Temple is a well-understood, well-developed concept that had been explored and clarified over the preceding decade by David Best and other Temple architects and crews, and we tried our best to create and honor that same experience and feeling on our watch.
The IAM’s Temple of Transition, Burning Man 2011 — Photo: Scott London
Whatsblem the Pro:Well done, it was a great Temple.
What is the Control Tower? What does it signify artistically, and what do you hope to achieve with it?
Irish: Where the Temple was serious, the Control Tower is designed to be fun, both for participants to interact with and for us to build!
Sensible grown-ups that we are, we realized that the theme is likely to inspire all manner of bizarre air and space craft, no doubt operated by a babbling smorgasbord of unlicensed, cantankerous, and demented pilots, all buzzing around Spaceport BRC in the most uncontrolled, abstract, and fundamentally irresponsible manner. Very dangerous! Very haphazard! So we figured we’d step up to do our civic duty and provide some modicum of air traffic control, provide landing clearances, define flight paths and so on. . . all of which can only realistically be achieved from sixty feet above the playa, high atop a flaming, laser-shooting Control Tower.
Aside from selflessly providing this vital public service, of course, we wanted to focus on two key principles this year: interactivity and collaboration. So every system on the tower – flames, lasers, lighting, sound – will all be interactive via a number of secret game-like methods which will have to be discovered upon visiting the installation. Many of these systems will be built by a rapidly expanding list of awesome collaborators including UV99, Mischief Lab, BambooDNA, Audiopixel, the Media Architecture Institute, Ideate, Play)a(skool, several 2012 CORE crews, and even some peaceful, softly glowing visitors from the Fractal Planet, so the project is shaping up to be a collaboration of epic proportions. We strongly believe that collaborations yield the best Burning Man projects, so we’re really excited about where the Control Tower project is going to end up by the time we actually get to playa!
The Control Tower. Not pictured: your mind exploding — Image: IAM
Whatsblem the Pro: What is the Org’s involvement in the project? Does it meet your expectations?
Irish: Sadly, we did not get a grant from Burning Man this year, which makes our lives a little more difficult. It’s hard to know exactly why they chose not to support a project that delivers so much interaction, collaboration, visual impact, and fire in a theme-appropriate way. The community as a whole clearly likes the idea very much, as shown by the massive wave of support we’ve experienced in just three short weeks since we launched on Facebook, and since we like those people so much, we HAVE to move ahead, grant or no grant! We built Megatropolis without a grant, so we know it can be done, especially with so much support gathering around the project already.
It’s also important to note that Burning Man supports its artists in more ways than just via grants, and this non-monetary support can be just as – if not more – critical to making a project happen successfully. Now that we have been given a very clear mandate by the community itself to build their Control Tower, it will be interesting to see how the Burning Man Org supports the project as it evolves. The fact of the matter is that we love building awesome projects at Black Rock City, and Burning Man loves awesome projects too, so I’m very hopeful they will work with us closely to ensure the whole community gets to enjoy the full, ridiculous magnificence of the Control Tower.
Whatsblem the Pro: What’s the plan for actually getting it built, and when and where will everything happen?
Irish: Well, we hope to start building in early May at the Generator, a new art space in Sparks, NV. Matt Schultz of the Pier project has very generously offered us space there, and we’re hoping the space will be quite the hive of Burn-related activity for the summer. We’re way into the family vibe that comes from working side-by-side with other projects, and it allows us to share our experience and infrastructure with smaller or less experienced crews. Our actual start date – indeed whether we start at all – will depend a great deal on how fundraising goes over the coming four to six weeks.
Whatsblem the Pro: What does the project need in order to succeed?
Irish: Like any other project, we need to assemble a mixture of four key resources to make the whole thing come to life: materials, funding, people, and clever ideas. We think it’s important to list materials ahead of funding because in the end, funds get used to buy materials anyway, and we really try to find free/cheap/donated material, equipment, and tools rather than spending on new stuff. However, even being super-proactive about using second-hand gear, we still think we need to raise just under $50,000, and we’re going to try to raise at least half of that on Indiegogo.
Equally, if we can come up with clever ways to avoid spending money by finding unexpected solutions to technical or organizational challenges, this helps reduce the fundraising load too, and that’s where the whole community comes in; we are always open to volunteers and new ideas. Across a community as big as Burning Man, we know there are people who have already developed a lot of the solutions we need to make this project go, and we’d love to hear from anyone who wants to get involved!
Whatsblem the Pro: How do people contact you to get involved, and how do they donate?
Irish: The easiest and fastest way to support the project is via our Indiegogo campaign.
We are fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas, an umbrella 501(c)(3) that provides tax-deductible status to qualifying art projects. This means donations of money, materials or equipment to the project are all fully deductible to the extent permitted by law. A list of materials and equipment we need is available here, and we can pick stuff up in both Reno and the Bay Area. We will work with donors to determine a fair valuation of their donations for tax purposes.
To volunteer, collaborate, contribute ideas, or get more info about the project, just visit our Indiegogo page.
