Galleries / Mad Science at Burning Man

The browser you are currently using does not support Discover's photo galleries. Supported browsers include recent versions of Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer (version 7 or later), Google Chrome, and Apple Safari.

If you have any questions or feedback, please email webmaster@discovermagazine.com. Thank you for reading Discover, and we apologize for the inconvenience.

Dan Glass; published August 25, 2007

The Man Burns

Dr. Megavolt

Big Round Cubatron

Little Man

I.T.

Voice of Fire

Nanoman

Bok Globule

Evapowheel

The Playa

<p>The 22nd annual Burning Man festival begins today in Nevada's beautiful and forbidding Black Rock desert. The weeklong event is a unique combination of hedonistic rave, mammoth art show, and experiment in community organization, one with a highly developed ethos based on community participation ("no spectators") and environmental stewardship ("leave no trace"). In addition to Mad Max-style desert rats, artists of various mediums, hippies and neohippies of every flavor, and progressive nine-to-fivers, Burning Man also attracts throngs of physicists, chemists, biologists, engineers (lots of engineers), astronomers, mathematicians, programmers, and others in both the theoretical and applied sciences. </p><p>The events described and pictured in this photo essay all transpired at Burning Man 2006, but the same stream of scientific creativity runs through each year's festival.</p>

<p>"We love you, Dr. Megavolt!" yells a crowd of people to a man in the mesh suit and birdcage helmet as he stands on top of a tractor-trailer between two nearly-nine-foot-tall Tesla coils. The towers begin to whine, and on the ground a guy in a cowboy hat and red smoking jacket holds up a small fluorescent light bulb that flickers from the charged air. Soon the toroids erupt with jagged branching arcs of white-blue lightning. The crowd cheers. As fireballs launch into the night sky from passing mutant vehicles, Megavolt reaches up and catches thick bolts with each hand.</p><p>Dr. Megavolt is Austin Richards, senior research scientist at an infrared-technology firm in Santa Barbara, California, and this is how he plays. It's an enormous amount of work, but there's no more appreciative audience than at Burning Man, where play is truly an art form.</p>

<p>Their imaginations can run free here. It's a festival of ideas, where the science minded indulge in projects of whimsical practicality, utter frivolity, and feats of artistic engineering. Big installations like programmer/hacker/artist Mark Lottor's Big Round Cubatron, a programmed three-dimensional array of 6,000 color-changing LED fixtures, mesmerize people with dynamic, retina-tweaking displays.</p>

<p>Examples of tabletop science can be found just a few camps over. Andrew Oxner and his neighbor Bill Brinsmead, physics department technicians at the University of Nevada, make fresh ice cream with liquid nitrogen and ride around on a four-wheeled, solar-charged replica of the Little Man atomic bomb made from scrap parts and outfitted with a Western saddle for extra comfort and irony (and the Dr. Strangelove reference). A couple of nights before their respective partners arrive, Andy tosses me a glowing rainbow flag pendant and asks me to figure out its power source. Tiny glass capsules the thickness of pencil leads are sealed between thick plastic discs. "It's radioactive, isn't it?" I ask. "Yup, tritium," says Andy.</p>

<p>Last year's theme, The Future: Hope and Fear, also inspired fictional science art from nonscientists, like Michael Christian's I.T., a 40-foot high War of the Worlds-inspired climbable sculpture, and a pyromechanical engineering marvel from the Flaming Lotus Girls called Serpent Mother, a 90-foot-long mechanized, maneuverable sculpture that gnashed fiery teeth and shot flame from its mouth. At night people couldn't help but flit frantically between glowing things and fires, giving in to their inner moth.</p>

<p>The playa, as the ancient alkaline lakebed is called, begs for this stuff. Floor-flat and almost entirely devoid of flora and fauna, there's nothing to run into or burn (besides the substantial amount of fuel expressly for that purpose) for tens of miles. "It's a place where you can play with things you're denied access to in normal society," says Tim Black of the Mad Scientists Collective camp (tag line: "Better living through reckless experimentation"). "High voltage, large fireballs in the sky, 75,000 watts of audio across the playa--it's just a blank slate you can play on."</p><p>His camp's main project is L3K, a programmed ring of lights around the Man, the huge sculpture that is the festival's eponymous symbol and centerpiece. L3K is both decorative and functional, serving to define the safety perimeter on the night the Man is burned in a spectacular pyrotechnic display. Tim, an electronics engineer, is also known for the Voice of Fire, a "sort of burning bush sculpture" that records voices of participants and plays them back at varying intervals, using 13 flames to reproduce the sound. "Essentially, you're using 4,000 volts of audio to turn the flame envelope into a diaphragm," he says, calling it an "old trick" done on a large scale.</p>

<p>While the vastness of the playa usually inspires large-scale projects, the "really friggin' small" award goes to first-timer Cheryl Kane for the Nanoman. Using a scanning electron microscope at the University of Cincinnati, she and her friends have created an 830-by-200 nanometer image of the Man. They put the image on postcards and bandannas and gave them away. </p><p>"The scientist works mainly at the level of very abstract ideas," wrote physicist and Einstein contemporary David Bohm in his treatise On Creativity. Everyone expects artists to be creative, but perhaps it's the formality of science that precludes people from considering imagination as one of its most vital components--despite Einstein's famous quote about it being more important than knowledge. How else to conceive of Einstein's theory of general relativity or of quantum mechanics, where bizarre, intuition-defying behavior must all be imagined? Artists--and this is no slight--can at least see what they're working on.</p>

<p>Ten-year Burning Man veteran Carter Emmart straddles the art and science worlds. I am on a friend's bus when we pick him up in a dust storm one night to try to help him find his installation, the Bok Globule. We finally spot a 30-foot geodesic dome lined with reflective material and swarming with strobe lights. Gathered there is a throng clad in playa-style garb--call it survivalist Salvation Army Mardi Gras--waiting to get in. We lie on the foam-covered floor and get lost in the image projected overhead of a subtly morphing Earth shot from a live satellite feed, a voice on the PA--Carter's voice--informs us. Here in the middle of the desert, in the middle of a dust storm, we are about to get a tour of space: Carter and his camp have built a planetarium. </p><p>It turns out that Carter is the director of astrovisualization at New York's Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. He then proceeds to orient and disorient us with a tour of galaxies, star clusters, and nebulas using a program he helped create called the Digital Universe--a highly accurate, three-dimensional graphic atlas of the known universe.</p><p>"If you get it right, you have the possibility of showing a very large number of people our relevance, our position in a larger environment. Ultimately, it's worthwhile for humanity," he says. "It shows us our limits, future things to explore, and perhaps a great appreciation of [our] worth. I don't care if I [get to] go to Mars. There's no place I can come back to that's better than here, that's built for me."</p>

<p>This appreciation of the Earth as home is common to pretty much everyone at Burning Man, where people take the leave-no-trace ethic very seriously. This year's theme--the Green Man, addressing humanity's relationship with nature--is especially timely. Now approaching 40,000 people, the event's growth illustrates, in an empirical and personal way, sustainability issues like energy use and waste production. The lack of municipal infrastructure, like public power or waste removal, forces an unavoidable case of IMBY upon residents of Black Rock City; a little neglect after partying quickly turns evaporation ponds fetid, among other unpleasantries. The pee jug at the back of the tent that early in the week seemed so convenient doesn't walk itself down to the port-a-potties, and a simple, neat solution to handling other fruits of our metabolism has yet to materialize. </p><p>Some, like Andy and Bill, have already gotten a jump on it, pumping their used sink and shower water through a homemade filter and swamp cooler to generate air conditioning for their bus, which also happens to run on biodiesel, a fuel this community has embraced for years. They are thinking of joining the Alternative Energy Zone, a generator-free camp that gives tours and seminars, and, incidentally, makes potent margaritas with their solar-powered blender.</p>

<p>Burning Man is a community of responsible hedonists, peaceful badasses, and enlightened tribalists, engaging as they do in acts of lowbrow high concept, creative destruction, and other colorful dichotomies. The temporary city tends to bring out the everything in people, and the scientist/artists here provide stellar representation of what physicist David Bohm described as "humanity's process of assimilating all experience into one dynamic and creative totality." Dependent on this process, Bohm suggested, may be mankind's "physical and mental health, his joy in life, and ultimately perhaps, the continuation of life on this planet." The sharing of scientific knowledge and creativity is critical to this process, as well as to the success of the Burning Man community itself.</p>

Digg

Digg

Stumble Upon

StumbleUpon
Reddit

Reddit

Reddit

Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us

Facebook

Email

Email

Help

Help

RSS

Increase - Decrease Font Size

Increase - Decrease Font Size

Increase - Decrease Font Size

Font