Ace Junkyard, “an unlikely epicenter of San Francisco’s industrial, mechanical, kinetic, maker and artist community” which has played a big, behind-the-scenes role in supporting Burner art projects, is the subject of a new documentary. They’re seeking funding of $60,000 via Kickstarter to produce it, and have only raised $16,581 so far – with 13 days to go. Click here if you would like to support the making of this documentary. For $1,000, you can be in the film, and for $10,000, you can be an Executive Producer.
A documentary about Bill Kennedy, the magical fairy of Ace Junkyard, who helped San Francisco’s collaborative art community achieve their dream
Ace Junkyard seems like an impossible, mythical place. I was so struck by this place and by the man who ran it, I decided to make a movie about it. The world should know that sometimes, piles of junk can define a culture, make a huge difference and be the raw materials for art that changes the world.
Like us on Facebook | Follow us on Twitter #aceinthehole #junkyardoc
Bill in his Blondie days
Ace Junkyard, run by Bill “The Junkman” Kennedy, was an unlikely epicenter of San Francisco’s industrial, mechanical, kinetic, maker and artist community. Under Bill’s stewardship, Ace evolved to provide a space for industrial artists, makers, freaks and geeks to find parts, co-conspirators, share skills and experience each other’s creations. Ace Junkyard hosted a wide range of live cultural events: music, comedy, theater, experimental performance, and of course, the Power Tool Drag Races which was aired on the Discovery Channel. Many Burning Man projects came to life and went to die here.
The magical story of Ace Junkyard is a critical look at the evolution of a one-of-a-kind space, what it brought to the community that loved it and served it, and how its untimely end continues to unite the individuals it served even years after it is gone.
I have completed about 70% of principal photography of the film. The $60,000 I raise through this campaign will give me the resources to interview a handful of key people, such as Bill’s family, the landlady, Larry Harvey (one of the founders of the Burning Man festival), and a number of very important employees and customers of Ace Auto Dismantlers. The money will help me license footage that’s important in telling the story, employ a lawyer so I don’t screw anyone or anything up, insurance, permits, and other very necessary but too-boring-to–list things. AND, it will help me employ and feed an editor full-time to start editing this mother of a project, plus a team of people to make music, color correct, distribute and market the heck out of this film!!
WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?
By donating to this film you will:
1. instantly become part of Ace Junkyard crew
2. help Billy become a film star
3. (all joking aside) get to tell the world how awesome freaks and geeks are and show how collaborative culture can literally change the world
4. have access to lots of really really cool rewards that no one else can offer you
5. help preserve the San Francisco underground art and culture scene
Here is the original t-shirt design by Seth that you will get if you donate at the OBTAINER level…
Seth Maxfield Malice original design
At the COLLECTOR level you can get a piece of original junk from the yard…hand picked by Billy…you never know what treasure you can get…it will be good I promise!
“Beats. Phat beats. Dope beats. Dirty beats. Clean beats. Killer beats. Mad beats. Everyone loves beats. Then there’s the drop. Folks just love the drop…I suppose some may love the drop more than the beat. But you always have to wait for the drop – don’t you?”
Not any more. Anita’s Drop Ship presents a self-powered dubstep system. Wind the crank, and spin up the tension for the drop.
Aux.TV reports:
Like water, breathable air, and fossil fuels, dubstep is a precious and limited resource. Or at least it used to be! In response to one of the greatest challenges facing humanity, a team of developers and music lovers have made a machine that can generate an endless stream of dubstep. Its inspiration came when one of the founders’ friends, Anita,wandered Burning Man 2013 for days looking for a fat beat drop but never managed to find one. They thought, why not end the suffering?
Anita’s Dropship, as their machine is called, uses an algorithmic composition that generates music and beats in realtime, never repeating the same passage twice. But here’s where it gets really exciting. It has a crank that listeners turn to build up the intensity of the music, until a red button on the front lights up, and then, BAM!, the Dropship produces a nasty, earth-shaking beat drop.
Look out for this puppy on the Playa, they raised nearly $3000 for their $1000 Kickstarter campaign.
They tested it on animals:
It’s great to see simple, wholesome, fun Burning Man projects – it’s not only about building 100-ft+ towers with 100+ teams and $100,000+ budgets. Sometimes you don’t have to pretend you’re saving the world, you can just have a laugh, dial a hand crank, and lose your shit with the drop.
The motivation for Anita’s Dropship came at Burning Man 2013 when Anita spent an entire night running between sound camps and art cars. She loved the dubstep sound (it’s so popular these days!), but never once heard the fabled “Drop”. This was very surprising to her brother and boyfriend (that’s two different people, mind you), as the dubstep genre is known for gratuitous and overbearing drops. At once motivated to rectify their beloved’s disappointment, her brother and boyfriend (still two different people) pledged to make the drop available to Anita whenever she wanted. Anita’s Dropship was born.
The Dropship is Born! – by Whoops
The Dropship is a device which plays never-ending always-changing dubstep. Two cranks on either side of the crate are used to build the drop, but only when the big red nuclear launch button is pressed will epic dubs will be dropped. You’ll never hear the same thing twice!
Anita, who has a Dubship named after her
For better or worse, everything in our world has become customisable. Gone are the days of cookie cutter, one-size-fits-all, mass produced trinkets and baubles. These days, everyone wants their own unique snowflake. And why not with music too? Why should everyone be satisfied with listening to the latest pop-tart MP3 mobile stream, when we can all have our own unique remixes? Music on demand isn’t about getting what you want when you want, it’s about getting it how you want!
Anita’s Dropship does exactly that. When you’re tired of waving your hands in the air, no need to wait for the coked-out DJ to finally press play on the next track. Hit the button yourself and enjoy the immediate satisfaction of a big fat drop.
Rauri has put together a sound system that will absolutely blow away your tutu. Four full stacks all running off of a super quiet two kilowatt generator. We tried it out at home, but the neighbors complained. So we took it to Toxic Beach in San Francisco for a full bass workout.
To quote some passers-by, “We came for the view, but stayed for the beats.”
How can we ship drops without transportation!? What good is a caravansary if we can’t travel on the road to get there!? We’ve been fortunate enough this year to receive a donation of an old golf cart which has seen many burns over the years. It’s a fixer upper, and we need help restoring it to health and a new purpose!
Team Dropship delivers!
The musical component of the Dropship is written by Mr. Christmas in London. The entire algorithmic composition runs on a mobile phone, which lies at the heart of the Dropship. All of the music is generated in realtime, with most sounds also synthesized using state-of-the-art generative and procedural music techniques. We guarantee that you’ll never hear the same thing twice and it will never get boring. Here is a work-in-progress example of the ambient portion of the track for your listening pleasure.
Burner Anarchist Jim has brought this to our attention:
An interesting tidbit that might be worth a blog post… the Honorarium art piece Dreambox, is a front for a startup called Dreamus. They’ve got a profile on Angelist saying ‘they’re launching at Burning Man 2014″
There are many startup folks at burning man, some of which do subtle promotion. If you want to call your camp at 7:15 and H ‘My Startup’ Camp, alright, lame, but whatever. However, slapping your brand on an honorarium art piece (which was funded by BM and part of the price you paid for your ticket) and then using participant’s emails and videos to seed your startup website is incredibly offensive, IMO, and completely against the ethos of the event.
I’m all for supporting burners. If I meet someone in SF at a coffee shop, I’ve got an instant connection, and, sure, I’m more willing to support their art project or startup or whatever. But someone that’s blatantly promoting their for-profit company on playa? That’s someone that doesn’t get the event or anything about it.
Of course, there’s enough other people out there now that don’t get the event, that promoting a company probably won’t be seen as a big deal. So maybe a blog post about it will just give them additional promotion. Who knows… but there’s the story.
Sure enough, Dreamus are trying to raise money on Angel List, on the back of their Burning Man honorarium art grant. Their business model is to take 5% of all donations.
Is it time yet for us to stop saying “the only commerce at Burning Man is ice and coffee”?
www.Dreamus.com is a social platform for you to share your life-long dreams, goals, ideas and intentions with others. On Dreamus people follow each others dreams so that they receive notifications as new goals are created and old goals are completed. The platform allows you to comment on each others dreams, donate to each others dreams, share each others dreams and soon enough, join each others dreams. We are monetizing it by taking 5% of all donations.
We have built a Solar Powered Video booth called The Dreambox and brought it to Burning Man twice, capturing HD video of thousands of people stating their life-long dream to the camera. This summer we are showing these dreams to the world for the first time ever, on Dreamus.com.
This summer Dreambox 3.0 will also be back to Burning man, but this time it will be LIVE, with an internet connection, and a video feed of people’s dreams. We expect to go viral, but we know its silly to even say that. www.facebook.com/projectdreambox
Here’s what Burning Man said about the Art Honorarium grant for this project:
The Dreambox is a video booth that allows you to input your email and record a statement of your life’s dreams, goals and intentions into a HD camera. Your video will then be linked to your own private account on a brand new web platform specifically designed to allow other people to follow and support your dreams. It also includes an outdoor theater, where your dreams can be watched by other burners during the week.
They also promoted the project on their Ignite Channel affiliate.
Digging a bit deeper, we find that this project has been going since 2012 – and is brought to us by the creator of the famous “Oh The Places You’ll Go” Dr Seuss-themed Burning Man video.
Six months ago, filmmaker Teddy Saunders posted the inventive short film, Oh! The Places You’ll Go At Burning Man, and received nearly two three million hits on YouTube… Oh! The Places You’ll Go at Burning Man scored a well-deserved Best Short Film Award at this year’s New Media Film Festival in Los Angeles
…The DreamBox is a solar-powered video booth that the public can walk into and speak about their greatest dream, or aspiration in life. Using the power of film and social media, Saunders believes those dreams can and will come true.
Custom designed from the ground up featuring an interactive touch screen interface allowing the dreamer to see himself or herself, rehearse their dream, and type in their contact info needed for others to be able to reach out to them. The DreamBox contains an intricate lighting system with LED soft boxes and back lighting, making the dreamer look flawless on camera. Behind the dreamer is a green screen, which will be swapped out with cinematographic time lapse video that thematically supports them.
Saunders says, “Basically, it’s designed so the dreamers look as epic as possible when speaking their dreams.”
During the day the DreamBox is covered with shiny rainbow-colored mylar. At night, it will glow with high-powered LED lights, allowing it to be seen from a half a mile away.
When the project appears online as a web series, anyone will be able to watch the “dreamers” share their life goals. As each dreamer speaks, their Email address will be embedded into the video allowing viewers to contact them to help make his or her dreams materialize into reality.
Their first installation captured almost 300 dreams. No word on how many of those it helped to come true. There are only 17 listed on their web site – how do they decide “What Dreams May Come”?
It was out there. Teddy didn’t catch as many dreams as he wanted to, some sort of technical problems (somebody said it was dusty or something).
They managed to record 284 dreams, although the goal was 3-5k recordings.
As I watch the dreams now I see how powerful a single voice can be. We are all united, each with remarkable ideas to make the world a better place. All you have to do is share your dreams and together we can change our destiny.
Cheers and thank you again for making this dream possible.
Teddy
[Update 8/18/14 7:51pm]
I’ve watched a couple of their videos and thought about what they’re doing. I kinda like the idea. Use Burning Man and the Internet to make peoples’ dreams come true. I would contribute to one of the projects (the Give Wildlife Rights dream). The cute girls will probably get a disproportionate share of funding, that would be interesting to follow. Different things resonate in different ways in different networks. Providing a consistent format for absorbing and replaying the data makes it easy to see a variety of dreams and choose which ones you support. Burning Man is probably the world’s greatest collection of dreamers, but they could do this at Comic Con or Glastonbury or Oracle World. The Dreambox could be the next kickstarter and change the world, or it could be a clumsy attempt from the tech industry to link themselves to Burning Man – like Intel SiMan.
While I agree with many of Anarchist Jim’s comments, my personal opinion is that this party has grown up to become one big money fest now, it’s time to stop denying that and just embrace it. BMOrg should do everything they can to help startups, including using the money we provide them with to give small amounts of funding to a small number of them. Hell, they should use more of the money to fund more startups with larger donations! For $30 million a year, the Burner community ought to be able to spin off a few startups. Maybe then raving really could change the world.
[Update 8/17/14 8:58 PM]
They’re a to-do list for your entire life, according to Dreamus themselves. If it was a charity asking for a donation, it would be slightly cuter than a startup looking for investors on angel list and monetizing other peoples money in the meantime:
Project Dreambox was first created on Kickstater as Teddy Saunders and Paola Baldion raised $29,277 to build a solar powered video booth that allows people to record 30-second statements of their life-long dreams, goals and intentions into an HD camera.
They called it The Dreambox. They then brought this Dreambox to Burning Man, where they collected dreams from people all over the world. Now, with the addition of lead programmer, Nicholas Juntilla, they have built a place for these dreams to take shape online…
Dreamus is a place to collaborate on dreams with others.
We’ve all heard the term, thoughts become things. The Secret is about the Law of Attraction. The idea of manifesting your own destiny by painting a picture of the specific goals necessary to be building your dream project, working your dream job, and living your dream life.
We feel that identifying your dreams is the most important thing you could do in life because it creates a motivational drive and direction in your day-to-day actions.
By puting your life’s intentions online and allowing others to follow, you make a promise to yourself and your peers. We believe that this promise can improve your destiny.
We like to think of Dreamus as the to-do list for your life and we hope that it will enable us to live better lives, together.
Saving the world with Burning Man, Dreamus, and The Secret. One dream at a time, hopefully the 5% cut on each dream – whether fulfilled or not – is enough to pay for all the data storage required to record everyone’s dreams (condensed into a few minutes).
300 dreams, that’s got to be at least $10 for a memory stick.
I bet this data, when linked to dreamers Facebook profiles and Yahoo or Gmail accounts, phone numbers – is a dream indeed, for electronic marketers swimming in the lucrative sea of Big Data. It would appear their business model gives them a 100% cut of revenue from that, quite independently from any dream manifestation.
