Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Locked thread
Tom Clancy is Dead
Jul 13, 2011

Introduction

Every year 50,000+ people trek to the alkali flats of Black Rock Desert, Nevada, to create a temporary city where the expectations of society and self fall away and allow them to explore what it means to be them.... yadda yadda yadda. It's also a place where a bunch of kickin' rad art gets made, because crazy people like me spend their whole year making stuff to take out there. I've been going off and on for 6 years now, and I've been making art for it even when I haven't been able to make it out.

The City


These are the main zones for big art. Throughout the rest of the city there are theme camps, where the people who stay there provide some sort of interactive experience for the participants at Burning Man.

Here's a map of art and theme camp locations from 2017.

The Four Kinds of Burning Man Art

Installations
An art installation at BM is any piece that lives away from your camp and stays in one place. They range in size from about as big as a person to towering structures a hundred feet tall and hundreds of feet across. They are set up on Playa (in the desert) before the event starts, though construction often spills into the week as things go wrong and run late. Many burn in ceremonies throughout the week, but others come back multiple years or find a home out in the default (not BM) world. Interactivity is a big theme with installations - most have something that participants can do with them from simply climbing on them to controlling lights, motion, or sound, to puzzles or rituals. Most installations are found on the Inner Playa, but they are also in the Keyholes and scattered across the Outer Playa. While not all installations receive art grants, a list of those that did from past years can be found here.


Mutant Vehicles
Mutant vehicles are art cars, but not your kooky man in the local parade kind. Anything motor powered that can transport multiple people counts, but to get licensed to drive around during the event, it needs to be radically transformed. The Department of Mutant Vehicles has been getting stricter in the past few years as more and more people want to bring art cars, they now want every part of the base vehicle to be hidden or changed. DO NOT BUILD AN ART CAR BECAUSE YOU THINK IT WILL BE CONVENIENT TO RIDE AROUND THE PLAYA. Mutant Vehicles take a ton of work, require constant maintenance, and involve a lot of management. They are a giant pain in the rear end. They are also the coolest thing I've ever done.


Theme Camps
Theme camps provide a participatory experience from being a bar serving free booze to hosting performances to washing people to teaching workshops to rope bondage. There is a seemingly endless variety of activities or experiences going on at any given time. Physical art for theme camps includes pieces in the camp itself, but also the architecture for the camp. Stages, bars, domes, shade structures, things to climb on or sit in, advanced living arrangements, it all lives here.


Personal Art
From costumes to bikes to ride around on, people go all out on decorating themselves and their things. This is the type that I've done the least with, though I'd like to do more in the future. The city is huge; it can easily take an hour to get from one side to the other on foot and small mutant vehicles aren't super common, so bikes are the main form of transportation. While most burner bikes are beach cruisers with some fur glued on, people take it way further than that. I had one bike I was pretty happy with that I can't find any pictures of, but I'd really like to do something more elaborate some year in the future. Same for clothing and props - some year I'll take off from doing the big art and focus on making personal things.




The Borg
What makes Burning Man special is that the attendees bring the art and do the performances. They aren't provided by the festival. However, The Borg (Burning Man Organization) does do some stuff for art:

  • The Man, an entirely on the nose metaphor in the form a giant wooden man what burns in effigy on Saturday night. The man burn is the climax of burning man, a spectacular show where everyone gathers and celebrates.
  • The Temple, a place for saying goodbye to whatever you need to leave behind. It burns Sunday night and is the only time you'll experience quiet in a crowd at the burn, unless some rear end in a top hat decides it'd be funny to play Freebird.
  • Art grants, in the form of the Black Rock City Honoraria Program. These are only for installations.
  • Some tickets reserved for those bringing art to buy.
  • Placement for installations and theme camps.
  • Permits for mutant vehicles.
  • Fire safety inspection and permits.

Projects I've worked on

The Prodigal Swan

Janky Barge

Shelly The Crab

Automata Equis

Bottlecap Gazebo


So far this is general context for what art at BM is. In future posts I'll delve into my history doing art, the projects I've worked on with WIP shots and fabrication details and discussion, the particular challenges of building art for Burning Man, working with fire, and post as I go with what I'm going to be working on this year. I'll also try to update the OP with more useful information. If there are other burners out there, I'd love to see what you have made. If there is anything else I should cover or anything in particular you'd like to hear about, let me know!

Tom Clancy is Dead fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Nov 23, 2017

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Tom Clancy is Dead
Jul 13, 2011

For Burning Man 2018

Tom Clancy is Dead fucked around with this message at 02:27 on Dec 20, 2017

Tom Clancy is Dead
Jul 13, 2011

Reserved x2.

Illuminado
Mar 26, 2008

The Path Ahead is Dark
Can't wait for this, ground floor.

TehRedWheelbarrow
Mar 16, 2011



Fan of Britches
I too would like to hear about fire and steel and drugs.

Rotten Cookies
Nov 11, 2008

gosh! i like both the islanders and the rangers!!! :^)

Fuckin' nice

Trabant
Nov 26, 2011

All systems nominal.

Tom Clancy is Dead posted:

If there is anything else I should cover or anything in particular you'd like to hear about, let me know!

While they are all undoubtedly cool, I'd love to hear more about Automata Equis.

Applesnots
Oct 22, 2010

MERRY YOBMAS

Was Shelly the Crab a type of Strandbeest?

Tom Clancy is Dead
Jul 13, 2011

Theseus pt 1. A boy and his LOI

Applesnots posted:

Was Shelly the Crab a type of Strandbeest?

Yup! Shelly pulls herself along by electric powered Strandbeest legs.


Trabant posted:

While they are all undoubtedly cool, I'd love to hear more about Automata Equis.

That will be a great place to start looking at my past projects, it's how I learned to weld.

BUT FIRST, in a real treat for all you fine folks of the DIY forums, let's talk about the magical world of grant writing!

I intend to take you along for each step of preparing for the burn in 2018, so we're going to go deep. My main goal this year is to lead an installation. While I've been a core team member on a variety of projects in the past, it's never primarily been my vision and my responsibility. It's going to be dependent upon getting an art grant. While I feel pretty good about my chances, rest assured that if I don't get it I will still work on other projects and have plenty of fodder for the thread.

Right now is the start of the 2018 Black Rock City Honoraria grant cycle. For now, the program is open for Letters of Intent - not a full grant proposal, but an abridged version. If they like it, they invite you to submit the actual grant proposal. If they like that, they give you some money. LOIs aren't due until November 26th, but I'm meeting with a number of young, up-and-coming big art artists in Oakland on Saturday to go over our LOIs so I need a rough draft. Some of the artists have been through the whole process before and successfully brought installations to the Playa, while others are just starting out (though I think everyone has at least some experience making big art).

This rough draft will change in response to Saturday's meeting. I'll be soliciting the advice of a bunch of friends who do grant writing whether they are artists, scientists, or work in non-profits. I'm also a better editor than writer, so I'll be revisiting it with fresh eyes down the road. This is all to say that I welcome your advice, but keep in mind that at this stage higher level concepts are more useful than specific details. I've minimal experience with grant writing, so I'm going to get all the help I can here.

Someone awesome posted up notes from an info session about the Burning Man art grants on the Burning Man Builders and Makers Facebook group. Some are applicable to the LOI, some are for the main application.

-----

LOI

Art Installation Title
Up to 80 characters of text.
Please provide us with the working title of your art installation.


Theseus

Project Summary
Up to 300 characters of text.
Briefly describe the project for which you are requesting funding.


Theseus is a wooden trireme that participants paint with watercolors on. It comes back to The Bay Area and each individual piece is replaced one by one with new wood. All the painted wood is built into a minotaur, both go out the next year with a video of the transformation, each is named Theseus.

Physical Description
Up to 800 characters of text.
What will the project look like? What will its visual impact be?


Theseus will be in the shape of a classical Greek galley, with a pointed ram, a proud bow, a billowing sail, and a sleek flat body holding banks of oars down each side. At the start of burning man, Theseus will starkly stand out as an all white ship. As the days progress and people watercolor on it, the mixed and mottled coloring will serve as a camouflage, requiring people to get a bit closer to see it, but adding additional complexity to what they are seeing. In the last few days, the color will darken with the additional layers of watercolor, once again making the ship more visible. At night, LEDs will shine from the sail and run down the oars. On the deck will be shrines to the lesser known parts of the legend of Theseus: his trials on the way to Athens and his hardships sailing home from Crete.

Interactivity and Mission
Up to 1500 characters of text.
The mission of Burning Man Arts is to change the paradigm of art from a commodified object to an interactive, participatory, shared experience of creative expression.
How does this art installation fit our mission? How will the citizens of Black Rock City interact with your art?
Please don’t explain how your project relates to the 10 Principles; we’re interested in learning how it supports our mission and encourages participation.


The first way that participants interact with Theseus is to climb on top of it and explore the small tributes to the smaller, less well known trials in the legend of Theseus. The next is painting on it with watercolors, leaving their own mark and transforming the legend. There will be a video camera facing one side and not the other, so participants choose whether they want to be seen while playing with the structure and whether they want to show off if they are, or if they want to paint in shadow. Those who choose to be on camera will be incorporated into the video of the transformation from ship to minotaur.

In year two, participants will be challenged by the existence of two different installations, each claiming to be the original. They will be encouraged to explore from one to the other, and reconcile that concept. Both ship and minotaur will have ceremonial burns in year two.

What is the philosophy of your piece?
Up to 1500 characters of text.
What are you hoping to express with the manifestation of your installation? What does the art mean to you and what do you hope to communicate to participants?


Theseus seeks to help us question identity. Is it the form or the material that makes us who we are? It is a literal interpretation of Plutarch’s ship of Theseus thought experiment: “The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete [after slaying the minotaur] had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, in so much that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.” By contrasting the remade ship with a new structure entirely made by the old material, both claiming to be the original, Theseus will highlight the dichotomy and encourage introspection. Are we the same person we were ten years ago?

Another theme that Theseus explores is the creation and transformation of legend. Participants painting the ship transform it a little bit, like how every retelling of a legend does, adding detail or coloring a particular part in a particular way. The transformation from ship to minotaur echoes the transformation the awareness of Theseus underwent from being a larger-than-life hero, a flawed king of Athens who overcame many trials, to being the man who slayed the minotaur.

By having a camera on only one side of the ship in its first year, Theseus will explore the Hawthorne effect and its interaction with Burner’s vanity. Which side do they prefer? Do they paint better, litter less, or spend more time? These questions can all be quantified and studied.

--------

This LOI is just for year one. I'll make that clear in the funding section, later on.

I'm not happy with it yet. I can definitely paint a better picture in the physical description. I am unsure how much to talk about just the ship year one vs. the overall concept and year two. As far as I know, there isn't a whole lot of precedent for intentionally multi-year projects, and they tend to be successive stages adding on to the same thing rather than the whole point. And the philosophy section is too long. It's probably too pragmatic, not exciting and fluffy enough. I'll try a energetic rewrite in a few days.

I would also like to work in this year's theme, I, Robot, somehow. While I think the question of identity is relevant to it, that doesn't really come into play until year two, by which point the theme has passed. I could make it more about metricizing the video data and the question of data consent that brings up, but I don't know if that's interesting enough or if it takes away from the rest of the art. I thought about roboticizing the oars, but I don't think that has much meaning, it's expensive, I'm trying to not bite off more than I can chew, and it magnifies two of the challenges of art on the Playa: Safety Third and structural integrity in the face of a a bunch of hosed up people doing hosed up things with your art. We'll revisit those two challenges in their own posts down the road.

If I could find something else interesting to say with my ship in the desert on it's own year one, that could be a solution to most of my issues. Bonus points if it's on theme. So far the camera thing is the best I've got, which doesn't feel like enough on it's own and I'd be OK mostly dropping it or at least talking about it, if I had something better in it's place. The single camera idea comes from chatting with a videographer friend about what it would take to incorporate people painting into the transformation video. Not only does it allow for me to explore some ideas, it's also cheaper and creates easier footage to edit into a better looking video.

-------

Next week we'll dive into Automata Equis, with fabrication details and WIP shots, how I got involved and what I did, challenges and the lessons they taught, and a bunch of pretty pictures of the installation on Playa. I might also revisit the LOI with what I learn in the meeting or make a post about one of the challenges specific to making art for the burn.

Tom Clancy is Dead fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Nov 11, 2017

Megabound
Oct 20, 2012

Incredibly excited for this thread. That sounds really cool so far.

Liquid Communism
Mar 9, 2004


Out here, everything hurts.




You seem to be pretty solid for funding, but has the post-sellout era wave of techbros and scalpers changed the art culture at BM? I haven't been in the dust since '11 at this point, but folks I've heard from that ran big theme camps have been reporting trouble and a ton more expense getting their people on-site.

Tom Clancy is Dead
Jul 13, 2011

Liquid Communism posted:

You seem to be pretty solid for funding, but has the post-sellout era wave of techbros and scalpers changed the art culture at BM? I haven't been in the dust since '11 at this point, but folks I've heard from that ran big theme camps have been reporting trouble and a ton more expense getting their people on-site.

Not really. There's an average amount of art each year that's trending up pretty reliably, I think. The ticket sales thing affected theme camps and art cars much more than installations (which have a separate system) but it was mostly confusion and panic the first year when there was a raffle. I've yet to know anyone who prepared as if they were going to the burn who couldn't find a ticket at face value. They also have a thing called the "directed group ticket sale", which is a batch of tickets set aside for theme camps and art cars where each one gets allotted a certain number of tickets to buy ahead of the main sale. They messed up as far as a lot of the bigger art cars were concerned last year and didn't allot them enough to be guarantee a core crew, but they created a second directed group sale so most were able go.

The art has probably gotten a bit less weird/creepy/disturbing overall, but that's been a trend for a long time.

As far as the whole changing culture/plug n play camps etc. I mostly notice some more suspiciously clean and attractive people, or heckle one of the camps while going by before moving on with my day. While there are a bit more people who "don't get it" that sounds like a personal problem. Maybe by being confronted with it all, they realize this. I'll show them what it's about for me if they want. Or maybe they won't. Either way, I'm not going to let it ruin my experience.

Tom Clancy is Dead fucked around with this message at 01:17 on Nov 15, 2017

Liquid Communism
Mar 9, 2004


Out here, everything hurts.




Tom Clancy is Dead posted:

As far as the whole changing culture/plug n play camps etc. I mostly notice some more suspiciously clean and attractive people, or heckle one of the camps while going by before moving on with my day. While there are a bit more people who "don't get it" that sounds like a personal problem. Maybe by being confronted with it all, they realize this. I'll show them what it's about for me if they want. Or maybe they won't. Either way, I'm not going to let it ruin my experience.

Sounds like a good way to approach it.

Tom Clancy is Dead
Jul 13, 2011

Sorry for the late post. I wanted to talk with the lead artist of the ponies before posting, but didn't manage to get in contact until today. I am working on the post now, but I also have cooking and travel to do for Thanksgiving, so I might have to post it Friday.

I'll try to be more transparent in the future.

Tom Clancy is Dead
Jul 13, 2011

Automata Equis

Automata Equis is a small herd of unearthly horses, languidly traversing no distance across an immense playa. They howl with the wind, a lament of the freedom they lack to dance across the dust, still they carry their passengers forward into a reveling dusk.



The life size animatronic metal horses move, their limbs slowly reaching out and striking the earth in a stationary march. They will be sturdy enough for those curious enough to tame a dessert mustang to climb aboard and will have windpipes running through their frames to catch the whipping wind.



The animals are lit from within glowing at night and casting eerie shadows out into their environment.



Automata Equis invites people to investigate properties of locomotion and their participation in the world around them. It is a study of rhythm, expectation and an observation of the forces of nature. Horses are known for their speed and grace, Automata Equis upends that expectation with its decelerated pace. Abstraction leaves room for the imagination to take hold and observe the intersection between natural line and mechanical force.



I thought I'd start with selected text from the LOI, since that's what we were talking about last time and I'm working on now.

--------------

I joined the project through the lead, Heather Stewart.



We'd met through mutual friends a few times at parties and decided we should be Facebook friends. She posted that she needed a small horse figurine to scan and model off of, and I told her that I thought my dad would have one; he plays minis and has a ton of figures. He didn't have anything appropriate, but she invited me to go check out the project regardless. When I went, she put me to work. I came back.

This is a pretty typical story for getting involved in big art projects. The best way to join one is show up, do the work, and offer to come back. You keep doing that, and you'll end up part of the crew. Most people filtering through will check it out once or twice and not stick with it. For the initial invitation, connections are good, but sometimes people post open calls for help to their local Burning Man Facebook group or whatever. The Burning Man Builders and Makers group also has a looking for projects/looking for workers thread. To make connections outside of friends' circles, go up to an artist showing work at an event who's work you like, engage with them, tell them you're interested in working on art, and ask them if they could use help in the future. Most artists maintain a Facebook group or email list to draw on when they need workers. Even if the artist you approach doesn't need anyone, it's pretty likely that they know someone who does and will direct to them. Some projects need people to come in with skills, but many are willing to teach total noobies.

From the artist's perspective, it's important to design around what kind of labor you'll need. If you need too much skilled labor, particularly of a specific kind, it can become a major sticking point for your project. This can be planned around by making connections in advance or you can sometimes fix it by putting out calls to your friends for their friends who have the appropriate skill. It can also be solved by having a good strategy for onboarding. While I'll make a whole post about onboarding in the future, Automata Equis had the best process of any project I've worked on so far.

The first time I went, I was put to work cutting square tubing for the legs and then grinding the edges down to be smooth. I also got a band saw tutorial, and used it to cut slices of pipe that were used for the main material of two of the horses. They were then smoothed out in a super loud stand up tumbler, which worked sort of like the spinning back of cement truck.



The next time, Heather taught me to MIG weld on a bunch of practice scrap, and then had me welding slices of pipe inside the molds for the horses body. I was pair welding, like pair programming, trading back and forth between holding pieces in position to be worked on and doing the welding with someone more experienced. It was a perfect learner project as it involved a lot of repetitive work on the inside of the structure, and pieces were each held by multiple welds. Doing messy welds didn't matter too much, though mine cleaned up (and sped up) a lot by the end.



It was a great project to join, because I was encouraged each step. I didn't have to say "what do you need me to work on?" repeatedly or ask to be taught new skills, which is often what ends up happening. Instead I got smoothly folded in, directed and pushed from the start. I was paired with on the skill intensive tasks rather than getting a lesson and then doing it on my own.

After the first two visits I rotated mostly between welding and prepping metal pieces. Towards the end of the project, I also spent some time assembling the legs and putting bearings in the joints.

I didn't end up helping them set up on Playa. I was working on Playa on both the swan and the barge, and didn't have a whole lot of free time. At one point Heather and I made a plan, but I honestly forget if I flaked on her or she flaked on me. This is normal, there is a whole lot going on and unless you make really solid plans before going out, there are a lot of reasons why plans might not happen. My experience working on the ponies and the swan despite not camping with them and how difficult it was means that I'm going to insist that core members for Theseus camp with me. It's a nightmare to coordinate people between a bunch of different camps.

--------------

By the time I got involved, molds for shaping the ponies' bodies were already done. To make these, Heather says they took slices of a 3d model and projected them onto wood sheets and then followed those curves with a jigsaw (I will have to remember this project the curves trick. It would have been super useful for creating the wings of the swan among other things). These were then stacked up to produce the form. Two of the ponies were made from the cut pipe and were molded from the top down.



The heads were made separately with slices of smaller pipe for finer detail, then attached to the neck piece, and finally that was attached to the torso.



One mold had curves that had vertical overlap so we used it until part way up the side, and then finished the form by hand.



Disco was different. He was molded from the side and made out of washers. Parts of his mold didn't quite line up right, but we used a wire mesh over the wood to keep the shapes organic.



Once both sides were made, he was connected down the spine with a few washers added by hand to fill in gaps.



The legs were modified Strandbeest legs with bearings in the joints. The plates were watercut for precision.



For moving the molds or the ponies, we used the crane system set up at American Steel in Oakland, where they were being built.



----------------

Heather and I slammed out one side of Disco in a more-or-less ten hour straight welding bonanza. We didn't have respirators with us, and something, I forget what exactly, meant that it would have been difficult to get them. This was really loving dumb. The washers we used had a zinc coating. Breathing in zinc fumes give you something called Metal Fume Fever, where you feel like complete rear end for a day or two. It's sort of like having a bad flu. I went to work on the Janky Barge the next day, and I thought I was just a bit hungover but it kept getting worse and worse. I sat in a corner painting shields with a plastic coating, basically the easiest possible task, and I was struggling with it. Heather had to do an interview and lost her voice. The effects are temporary and there is no long term damage, but wow is it miserable. Never weld galvanized without a respirator. I won't now.



Remember the windpipes from the LOI? Yeah, those got scrapped. Along with the size of the herd being reduced from 5 or 6 to 3. The grant proposal was submitted in Feb, accepted in March, and the money didn't start coming til April. The event is at the end of August. There wasn't enough time to do everything that was planned. Both the making slices of pipe and the welding were significant bottlenecks that couldn't scale with the number of people working on the project. Even after we figured out a setup for cutting eight pipes at once, it still took an incredible amount of time.



The Playa dust got into the the joints of the legs at the event, gumming them up and causing the motors to burn out. Playa dust gets everywhere and can really screw with your art in a bunch of different ways. I'm going to have to go out to the Playa and get some pure dust (I have piles of it from things that went out there, but it gets mixed with dirt) to test the watercolor painting and finishes/sealant with.



--------------

Now the ponies of Automata Equis are out to pasture in the Sierra Nevada foothills. A couple of them have new legs, made from the same material as their bodies, but we might go back at some point and remake the moving legs.



Tom Clancy is Dead fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Nov 24, 2017

Tom Clancy is Dead
Jul 13, 2011

Let me know what you think of the format. And please ask any questions.

I have to submit my LOI next week so I'll show you my final version, along with my reasoning about the changes. What retrospective are you interested in next?

Tom Clancy is Dead fucked around with this message at 09:59 on Nov 24, 2017

ante
Apr 9, 2005

SUNSHINE AND RAINBOWS
This is cool. Saving that projector trick for later

TehRedWheelbarrow
Mar 16, 2011



Fan of Britches
that is really incredibly cool

Trabant
Nov 26, 2011

All systems nominal.
Late to the party, but I really appreciated the Automata Equis writeup. It's both informative and inspirational, and just really cleverly done!

If you're still taking requests, I'm a fan of the Prodigal Swan image. I'd love to hear more about how you achieved the curvature of the sheet metal at that scale, or if the scale is actually what's helping achieve a curved look.

Tom Clancy is Dead
Jul 13, 2011

Theseus pt 2. "Your 2018 BRC Honoraria Letter of Intent - Congratulations!"

Art Installation Title
Up to 80 characters of text.
Please provide us with the working title of your art installation.


Theseus

Primary Image
This is the image we will see most frequently when reviewing your proposal, so please select your best image & upload it here.


Project Summary
Up to 300 characters of text.
Briefly describe the project for which you are requesting funding.


Theseus is a wooden ship that participants paint with watercolors on. It comes back to The Bay Area and each individual piece is replaced one by one with raw wood. All the painted wood is built into a minotaur, both go out the next year with a video of the transformation, each is named Theseus.

Physical Description
Up to 800 characters of text.
What will the project look like? What will its visual impact be?

Theseus will be in the shape of a classical Greek galley, with a pointed ram, a proud bow, a billowing sail, and a sleek flat body holding banks of oars down each side. 15’ long by 5’ wide and 5’ tall, the whole side and deck will be within easy reach for painting on.

The watercolors will be yellows and reds, creating a slow-motion burning effect from afar as Theseus is painted throughout the week. At night, LEDs will shine from and move with the sail, outline the ship, and run down the oars, flickering to preserve the flame illusion.

On the deck will be shrines to the lesser known parts of the legend of Theseus: his trials on the way to Athens and his hardships sailing home from Crete.

There will be a side table where the painting supplies are distributed, with a EULA/TOS painted on it.

Interactivity and Mission
Up to 1000 characters of text.
The mission of Burning Man Arts is to change the paradigm of art from a commodified object to an interactive, participatory, shared experience of creative expression.
How does this art installation fit our mission? How will the citizens of Black Rock City interact with your art?
Please don’t explain how your project relates to the 10 Principles; we’re interested in learning how it supports our mission and encourages participation.


Participants interact with Theseus by climbing onto the deck and exploring the small tributes to the less well known trials in the legend of Theseus, learning about the imperfections of a larger-than-life character.

They are encouraged to paint on it with watercolors, leaving their own mark on and transforming the legend. There will be a video camera facing only one side, so participants choose whether they want to be seen while playing with the structure. Those who choose to be on camera will be incorporated into the video of the transformation between years.

Participants will be shown a EULA when they acquire the paints. Data from their interactions with Theseus will be mined for insights and put on a website.

In year two, participants will be challenged by the existence of two different installations, each claiming to be the original. They will be encouraged to explore from one to the other, and reconcile the existence of both.

Both ship and minotaur will burn in ceremony year two.

What is the philosophy of your piece?
Up to 1500 characters of text.
What are you hoping to express with the manifestation of your installation? What does the art mean to you and what do you hope to communicate to participants?


With a camera on only one side of the ship, Theseus will explore how Burners react to being observed. Which side do they prefer? Do they paint better, litter less, or spend more time? These questions can all be quantified and studied.

Theseus looks at quantization and consent. As we move towards a more monitored world, where actions leave permanent records and AIs interpret them, it's a topic of increasing importance. Theseus hopes to encourage conversations about this, both with the EULA when people approach the piece on Playa and later when the metrics are later published on the web.

With it’s transformation between years, Theseus seeks to help us question identity. It is a formulation of the Ship of Theseus thought experiment first posed by Plutarch. Is it the form or the material that makes something itself? That makes us?

Another theme that Theseus exemplifies is the creation and transformation of legend. Participants painting the ship transform it a little bit, like how every retelling of a legend does, adding detail or coloring a particular part in a particular way. The transformation from ship to minotaur echoes the transformation the awareness of Theseus underwent from being a larger-than-life hero, a flawed king of Athens who overcame many trials, to being the man who slayed the minotaur.

Is there anything else you think we should know?
Up to 300 characters of text.

Funding is for year one only.

I worked on The Bottlecap Gazebo and have been a core member on The Janky Barge, The Prodigal Swan, Automata Equis, and Shelly the Crab.

I'm building community with a BM Builders and Makers FB group, a how-to blog about making big art, and a group of younger BM artists.

-----------

My LOI has been accepted! In changing it from the roughest draft, the main differences were to focus more on this year and the theme this year (I was warned by various people that they may not take anything I say about the next year into account) and to be more poetic than technical in my description. In retrospect, what I should have done is submit three, since you are allowed to submit any number of LOIs: one entirely focused on the transformation, one entirely focused on this year, and one split between both, like I did. That way they could choose what they wanted, and I'd have a better idea for what to do for my full app. As it stands, I guess I will be talking about both this year and next year.

-----------

Going forward I'll need:
  • Engineering & Safety Plan
  • Leave No Trace Plan
  • Lighting Plan
  • Itemized budget for 3 different levels of funding
  • List of core crew roles, who's filling them if filled
  • Project Construction Plan
  • CAD illustrations

All by January 16th. It's going to be a busy holiday season for me!

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Tom Clancy is Dead
Jul 13, 2011

Trabant posted:

Late to the party, but I really appreciated the Automata Equis writeup. It's both informative and inspirational, and just really cleverly done!

If you're still taking requests, I'm a fan of the Prodigal Swan image. I'd love to hear more about how you achieved the curvature of the sheet metal at that scale, or if the scale is actually what's helping achieve a curved look.

I'll do The Prodigal Swan next. The scale helps, and the sheet metal is attached to curved scaffolding/skeleton underneath.

  • Locked thread