Artwork at Burning Man
One of the greatest things about Burning Man, of course, is the tremendous quantity of art.
Broadly, there were three types--buildings, art cars, and actual art installations.
Some of the vehicles may have been just Mad Max ripoffs, but others
were simply terrific. I saw giant floating eyeballs; mastodon skeletons; fish; starship shuttles; a floating lotus blossom; a flying
carpet. Somewhere I hear there was a Segway done up like a chariot with invisible horses. There were double-decker buses, ripped
open to bear travelling night clubs; trucks morphed into galleons; land-speeders, hobby-horses, flying saucers; truly amazing work.
Apparently the 'thing' to do is to amble out into the desert in the evening and just catch a ride on an art car.
You can almost always just hop on; many have built-in bars and bands; I've seen live drummers and full sound systems. The flying carpet,
which was kind enough to take us out to the far ends of the Playa, had its own built-in hookah! (But when I asked if travelling this way
was a 'whole new world' for the carpet's pilots, nobody got the joke... tragic.)
The buildings and art
installations were no less incredible. Tents like giant pigs; giant cats; fractals; bizarre geometric forms and shapes. The
freestanding art ran the gamut from digital to welded to inflatable.
You name the technique, if it could handle the elements, it was out there. Buildings made from inflated vinyl, teepees of
cheesecloth, inverted wooden pyramids designed to funnel heat into spinning mobiles. Dizzying! One camp had built a functioning zip-line,
a three-story-tall tower with a cable leading down to a pile of mattresses 150 feet away; THAT was FUN! (I just had to.) Another
camp had recreated BattleZone, the old video game, right down to the spinning spaceships and the jagged landscape and the turretted
tanks; you could drive the tanks around the nighttime desert. They even had the original sounds from a game ROM.