This year’s Audio Art Tour. Come and get it!

We have some amazing Art on the playa this year, and here’s a message from our very own Jim Tierney aka Anarchist about this year’s Audio Art Tour that he and Evonne have put together for all Art loving citizens of Black Rock City. You can get all the individual mp3s or a zip file of all the projects  on the Burning Man website at Audio Art Tour 2009.

Jim writes:

Having just wrapped up the 5th version of the Audio Art Tour, the Burning Man folks wanted me to tell you a bit about it.  The Audio Art Tour is designed to be a docent led tour of the significant Honorarium art installations (Honorarium installations are funded in part by Burning Man). It’s similar to what you’re given in museums when they hand you an ipod like thing that has fun facts about the art and artists. In this case, you can load the Audio Tour on to your own iPod (or other mp3 player) and listen to it as your checking out the installations on playa or listen to it while driving out to the playa to get a preview of what you’ll see.

Currently, we only do Honorarium installations, but that could change in the future. Artists can record their own tour for their installation if they want, but most do not. This year only the RayGun Rocketship did their own and it came out great (The Zsu Zsu team were the only artists to record one last year). I’ve put it in the middle of the lineup as a sort of intermission… to give you all a break from myself and Evonne. :-) In truth, I’d really like to see more artists doing their own pieces for the tour. With some 25 installations to write, record, and produce it’s a little hard for me to get really creative with them. But it is fun chatting with the artists, going over the honorarium applications and putting everything together.  I also think it’d be great to have non-honorarium installations submitting audio pieces next year. So feel free to email me if you want to include a piece.

So what do I think is really worth seeing? You never quite know how an installation is going to come together on playa. Sometimes what you see on paper (and hear on audio) doesn’t do the installation justice. That said, there are the obvious ones like Flaming Lotus Girls’ Soma and the Raygun Rocketship that’ll be great. I’m also looking forward to the Nowhere Omnibus, Who Gave Birth (by Celtic Forest’s Laura Kimpton), and Chaotic Harmony (by Heady Sirico who did Alien Semaphore, which is one of my favorite pieces from years past).

If you have one of them old fashioned CD player things, you can come by the Artery and get a CD with the tour on it (and say hello!).

Have a great burn and see ya out there…

Jim Tierney

(Anarchist)