Check out this video from WIRED Magazine about the Bliss Dance iPhone app that allows you to control the lighting on Bliss Dance yourself. How fun is that?

To read more about the Black Rock Arts Foundation bringing Bliss Dance to Treasure Island – Click Here

Exploratorium Science of the playa

Our friends at the San Francisco Exploratorium have put together a fantastic set of videos that examine some of the more scientific aspects of the Black Rock Desert.

“What do you get when you send a crew from the Exploratorium to Burning Man? Geeks gone wild! Join us on the playa in Black Rock Desert and explore the science of pyrotechnics, flight, dust devils, rainbows, and more.”

Senior Exploratorium scientist, Paul Doherty, unlocks the mystery behind the corrosive dust that coats the Black Rock Desert, the science of dust devils and the properties of Fire in the desert.

Enjoy the challenges of flying over the Black Rock Desert with pilot Michael Marin and learn about zoology in extreme playa conditions with Alex Smith as he visits the MicroZoo.

Check out these videos and more at http://www.exploratorium.edu/tv/ and understand your temporary home just a little more next week.

Home Sunrise photo by Ales Prikryl

Once again Jim Tierney (Anarchist Jim) and Evonne Heyning and the whole Artery Team have put together individual Audio Art Tours for a wide variety of Installations. You can download a couple or get them all in a zip file. Bring them with you on your trips around the playa to really get some insight on these magnificent pieces.

Take a look and a listen and then YOU can be the one who, when you’re out there looking at this amazing thing before you with your friends, can say, “Well, that project was created by… and the artist says this and that….” for which your friends will no doubt be quite grateful and much spontaneous wonder and artistic appreciation will ensue.

Yes, it promises to be a great year once again. Enjoy it everyone!

Fountain is a 1917 work by Marcel Duchamp

Last week many of us turned in art proposals in hopes of financial support for our little, or in some cases huge, artistic desert visions. The value and beauty of many of these projects is not only their eventual physical manifestation; the highly collaborative nature of their conception and construction is equally important.

Historically, in the early parts of the twentieth century, collectives and collaborative art production were a feature of Dadaism, Surrealism and Constructivism. This spirit of collective art production was then revived in the 60s by the Fluxus, Conceptual, community-based, and feminist art movements.

‘The greatest legacy of the 1960s is the community based arts’ – Lucy Lippard

Turning to our current world of desert art making, how is this collaborative nature changing the current language/dialogue of art? And how is it doing so using the many web networking tools we have at our disposal? With the importance of the art making moving from ‘appearance’ to ‘conception’ and now to ‘society’  how is Burning Man participating in fundamentally changing values within art?

The Berlin-based KS12 collective is asking some similar questions about the fundamental nature of art in highly networked times in their “The Future of Art” – an immediated autodocumentary.  The film was shot, edited and shown at the Transmediale festival last week and supplemented by realtime photos from Flickr, videos from Vimeo, and questions via Quora. It was open to for anyone to submit to the process of production. The very tools of these highly networked times shaped the film; it was a production-as-process work.

The Future of Art from KS12 on Vimeo.

The questions they were investigating are very relevant to the Burning Man art making process:

What are the defining aesthetics of art in the networked era? How is mass collaboration changing notions of ownership in art? How does micropatronage change the way artists produce and distribute artwork?

These are some of the very questions that one ponders when making work with collaborative groups such as the Flux Foundation and Flaming Lotus Girls. Last year we saw many examples of the importance of networking tools. We saw the power of social networking as it challenged Paypal, and Kickstarter revolutionized the fundraising process for countless creative projects, making the concept of ‘micropatronage’ not only tangible but accessible and essential to successful work.

In what other ways do you see this networked era change and challenge our ideas of art and art making?

Sol System at the Exploratorium

The Exploratorium will soon move to Piers 15 and 17 on the San Francisco Embarcadero.   They are in the process of creating and environmentally friendly new home and  solar power will be a part of their efforts.  Before the big move, they are featuring exhibits that help visitors explore ideas of energy  and  power use, and to kick it off,  the October 7th “After Dark: Sol Systems” will feature Solar SunFlowers.

Black Rock Solar and the Sunpower Foundation, together with Cynthia Washburn and Patrick Shearn and their  team at Poetic Kinetics, are creating two solar powered, kinetic sunflowers that will open gently in the morning as the sun rises, track the sunlight during the day, and close again each night. The multi-colored flowers will be 22 feet tall at their full height and will sense when people sit down at their bases, automatically leaning over to provide shade. The flowers will be outfitted with state-of-the-art technology and will draw people into their space with an unprecedented visual allure. The SunFlower project is believed to be the first of its kind anywhere, blending large-scale interactive art and cutting-edge technology in an immersive educational experience designed to change the way people think about renewable energy.

“After Dark: Sol Systems”

Thursday, October 7, 2010 through Sunday October 10th

Exploratorium
at the Palace of Fine Arts
3601 Lyon Street
San Francisco

Other participants include a bunch of  DIY electric cars, a small aquaponic company called Kijiji Grows (http://kijijigrows.com/)  and solar power sewer  Paul Nosa (http://pnosa.com/fr_website.cfm) who also participated in the Exploratorium’s August After Dark event, Nomadic Communities.   Hogg Island Oysters will be served while you find out about biology of  oyster and ecology of sustainable oyster farming. The night will also feature bamboo bikes and electric motorcycles as well as demos by staff scientists about electromagnetism and hydrogen.

For more information, visit their site at http://www.exploratorium.edu/afterdark/

Solar Sunflowers

Destinations
The Solar SunFlowers will be installed at schools, events, and festivals throughout the course of the year, at different locations across the country. The first installation will be at the Exploratorium where students and teachers will experience the SunFlowers first-hand: learning about renewable energy and technology, climate change, solar power, and green jobs. The SunFlowers will then be transported to destinations throughout California and the United States, where audiences from school kids to solar professionals and government officials will have the chance to interact with the SunFlowers.

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