Black Rock City Research Articles

The Archaeology of Burning Man: The Rise and Fall of Black Rock City by Carolyn L. White (review)

The Archaeology of Burning Man: The Rise and Fall of Black Rock City by Carolyn L. White (review)

The Archaeology of Burning Man: The Rise and Fall of Black Rock City

The Archaeology of Burning Man: The Rise and Fall of Black Rock City

Wurst Storm Rising

Our subject is the legacy of Dada implicit to the Burning Man phenomenon. Animate in the provocative output of fin-de-siècle French Symbolist writer and puppeteer Alfred Jarry, and filtered through the antics of the San Francisco Cacophony Society, Dada is foundational to the cultural aesthetic of Burning Man, by which we mean the event in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert playa (Black Rock City) and a global network of “burn” events. We address the significance of the Cacophony Society expedition that inaugurated the desert phase of Burning Man in 1990, “Zone Trip # 4: Bad Day at Black Rock.” Integral to the surreal tourism ventured by Cacophonists prior to the inception of Burning Man, and pivotal to its desert phase, the Zone Trip kindled “Burner” culture on the Black Rock playa and abroad. Exploring the Dadaist impulse affecting Black Rock City and woven into a worldwide network, informed by interpretative and applied methods, the article addresses art projects (including those designed and implemented by Vitos) at three regional events—Israel’s Midburn and Germany’s Burning Bär and Kiez Burn—visited in 2018 and 2019 as part of a multisited ethnography of the Burning Man movement. As these projects illustrate, the ghost of Jarry haunts, as the spirit of Dada animates, the transnational “burnscape.”

Review: The Archaeology of Burning Man: The Rise and Fall of Black Rock City, by Carolyn L. White

How do you conduct archaeological research on the temporary but cyclically recurring organism that is Black Rock City? Carolyn White collected data using precise, detailed archaeological methods at Burning Man as a participant-observer from 2008 to 2016. She was afforded excellent behind-the-scenes access through stakeholders in the Burning Man organization, the Bureau of Land Management, and of course, Burners attending the annual event. In White’s resulting book, The Archaeology of Burning Man, she not only explicates her findings, but she also relates her work to an array of archaeological theories and makes a case for the legitimacy of an “archaeology of the present” on active sites (22).With 75 figures and 6 tables, White provides a colorful and accurate picture of the culture, principles, and history of Burning Man. As a Burner myself, I appreciated her occasional whimsical hints at Burners’ attitudes, styles, and playfulness. In general, however, her book takes a scholarly tone that is particularly heavy in the first two chapters where she provides a literature review and lengthy discussion of her methods and approaches inspired by seminal archaeologists—certainly important context for scholars in her field, though quite technical for the layperson. As a specialist of contemporary archaeology, White is highly influenced by the theories of James Deetz and Lewis Binford, whom she credits with inspiring her project, though she modifies and adapts their practices to suit this unique site.One of White’s themes is the categorization of spaces as public, intermediary, or private, according to Henri Lefebvre’s tripartite scheme, which provides a fascinating framework for her discussions of the layouts of Black Rock City as a whole, as well as representative theme camps and villages. In describing a particular camp’s layout, White frequently applies the schema using abbreviations to delineate the use of space. For example, Pr/pr (private/private) to describe a sleeping area that is completely removed from the public eye (148); Pr/pu (private/public) to explain the use of a “dress-up tent” for costuming that is available only to the inhabitants of that camp (private) but is open to all of those inhabitants (public) (153); or Pr/i (private/intermediary) to designate a back area that holds private property (private) in a place to store items (intermediary) (143). This categorization of spaces is, in my opinion, the most intriguing aspect of her discussions of particular sites.Georges Bataille’s concepts of immoderate consumption, the dissipation of the “accursed share,” and the effervescence of life, as applied by White, contribute apt themes for the extravagance of Burning Man—a place where participants go to extremes to expend excess energy on building and burning down structures, constructing art forms, costuming, gifting, and simply experiencing everything to the fullest. Performative squandering of wealth at Burning Man is key to its ethos. At the same time, this aspect of the event can also spark a controversial discussion about elitism and privilege, an issue that White does not delve into but only hints at. The rhizome and meshwork metaphors that she employs also correspond well with her portrayal of Burning Man as a mutable organism. The comprehensive index and bibliography are useful to locate the numerous references to scholars.Ultimately, White argues that studying Black Rock City as an active site, with dwellers engaging in daily activities, affords an opportunity to understand place as a concept, “a place that is unlike any other city but is also just the same” (3). With up to 75,000 inhabitants who live together for one week, Black Rock City offers the rare chance to study, over the years, the constancies and changes of an intentionally ephemeral site, a city that rises and falls at an accelerated pace.

The Archaeology of Burning Man: The Rise and Fall of Black Rock City. Archaeologies of Landscape in the Americas Series. By Carolyn L. White

<i>The Archaeology of Burning Man: The Rise and Fall of Black Rock City.</i> Archaeologies of Landscape in the Americas Series. By Carolyn L. White

Black Rock City versus Manhattan: An economist's view.

Urban street networks take many forms, from the circular streets in Black Rock City (which is built and removed every year as part of the Burning Man Festival) to the streets and avenues in the Manhattan grid. This paper compares the traits of cities with different street networks using the tools of urban economics. When both cities have commuting arteries of the same length, cities with circular streets have higher population densities unless access to these arteries is expensive and the number of arteries is large. Cities with arteries set at a 45o angle to the grid have smaller population densities under all circumstances.

Ephemeropolis

Foucault’s concept of heterotopia is adapted to comprehend events with intentional transformational agendas. An ephemeral community installed annually in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, Burning Man is an exemplary evental heterotopia. With the shortcomings of the romantic-utopian “transformational festival” label identified, the article considers Black Rock City as a heterogeneous threshold and contested space. This hyperliminal weave is redolent in a complex ethos known as the “Ten Principles.” Informed by Michel Foucault’s ambiguous entry on heteroclite spatialization, the article explores the paradoxical “other space” of Burning Man in which the “default world” is simultaneously neutralized, mirrored, and resisted. If Burning Man is transformative, this is therefore an enigmatic aesthetic. Adapting Foucault’s six “principles of heterotopia” and modulating Victor Turner’s “liminality,” the article navigates the hyperliminal dynamics of Burning Man. In the process, a provisional framework is suggested for the study of transformative events.

At Home in the Big Empty

Burning Man is an artistic community event that has been dis/assembled in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert every summer since 1990. The location of this event in this desert has had a shaping impact on Burning Man as a gathering, a city, an organization, and a transnational cultural movement. A unique facet of what is known as Black Rock City is not simply that it is dis/assembled in a desert region, but that it recurs on a playa, the ne plus ultra of deserts. The Black Rock playa has obtained a special significance for participants (i.e. burners), for whom this liminal space is recognized, paradoxically, as ‘home’. This uniquely sublime no-place contextualizes a familial encounter experience shaping on-playa identity over three decades of event-going. Informed by Emily Brady’s study of paradox in natural sublimity, the writings of poet-geographer of the ‘Big Empty’ William L. Fox, and the author’s experience of Black Rock City in seven cycles from 2003, three qualities of playaspace (otherworldly, ephemeral, limitless) are addressed, each implicated in its unique potential for a transformational community that has fashioned a homeland on the frontiers of the sublime.

Giving burning man its wings [Resources

Most people know Burning Man as the 70,000-strong end-of-summer experimental arts festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. Lesser known is its FAA-designated airport. The Black Rock City Municipal Airport springs up each year to coordinate nearly 3,700 general aviation, chartered, and scenic flights carrying some 6,000 passengers in and out of the gate.

Civilised Tribalism: Burning Man, Event-Tribes and Maker Culture

Otherwise known as Black Rock City, Burning Man is an artistic event, that, mounted annually in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, has become the inspiration for a global cultural movement. While it has been the subject of considerable attention from ethnographers and sociologists, Burning Man has persistently resisted classification. In this article, I undertake a tentative approach to Burning Man via a concept integral to Maffesoli’s postmodern social philosophy popular within Anglophone sociology: the neo-tribe. Ethnographic attention to Burning Man illustrates spectacular aspects of neo-tribalism. It is cyclical, immediate, sensual, enchanted, collaborative and offers multiple sites of belonging for participants, many of whom will self-identify as ‘tribal’ or ‘neo-tribal’. And yet Burning Man is also demonstrative of an optimising modernist ‘project’ complicating, if not incongruent with, postmodern tribalism. With Black Rock City theme camps, art projects and build teams echoing a design-orientated maker culture, and an organisation – the Burning Man Project – dedicated to propagating and scaling (making) the ethical, civic and progressive dimensions of this culture, this article demonstrates the paradoxical proclivities of Burning Man’s tribal character. The objective of the article is to forge a fuller understanding of Burning Man and other ‘transformational’ events illustrative of an alternative tribalism, and to explore ways the phenomenon both approximates and deviates from Maffesoli’s thesis.

Mapping Utopias: From New Babylon to Black Rock City

New Utopian plans for liberated urban spaces emerged during the post-war era with the work of the Lettrist (LI), Situationist International (SI), and specifically Constant Nieuwenhuys, a Dutch painter turned architect and sculptor who understood urban planning as intimately linked to nomadism, play and creativity. Influenced by the bombed detritus of European capitals and the possibilities of new technology, Constant’s plans for a future society were post-revolutionary, with unseen automated factory production and spaces for innovation that were elevated on stilts. Constant’s conflicting ideas are referenced and emulated in Black Rock City – a short-term encampment erected every year for the Burning Man festival in the desert of Nevada. These multileveled zones would allow for the blurring of public and private space as well as zones of work and leisure.

Micrometeorology of an ephemeral desert city, the Burning Man experiment

Observations are presented from a 12-day micrometeorological experiment investigating impacts of an ephemeral city (Black Rock City, Nevada, population 70,000), which emerges each year on a flat, arid, vegetation-free playa in late summer for the week-long ‘Burning Man’ event. Analysis focuses on observations from a 28m tower deployed in the center of the city prior to, and throughout the event. Wind profiles show a reduction in wind speed, particularly below 5m and indicate an increase in roughness length. Surface radiation and energy fluxes were remarkably unchanged after the development of the city. Both cases resembled other arid surfaces and somewhat other urban surfaces, though with little anthropogenic and much less heat storage flux than traditional cities. CO2 fluxes increased rapidly from 5.2gCm−2d−1 on the first full day of measurement to 24.8 during the event and peaked during the exodus (33.3gCm−2d−1). Inventory modeling revealed sources were mostly stationary, especially on-site electricity generation for air conditioning units. The car-free nature of the main event reduced the mobile sources to less than metabolic sources from the population itself and the CO2 flux per capita was three times smaller than on arrival and exodus days.

Social and Economic Implications for the Smart Grids of the Future

IntroductionWe live in a world that is set up on consuming energy day after day and hour after hour. The whole existence of humanity is dependent on energy. One simply cannot imagine an everyday live without a comfort of having electricity at our homes, functioning street lamps lighting up our streets, an unlimited supply of gasoline to fill up the tanks of our cars, or the smooth flow of natural gas in our pipes to heat up our homes in winter.The best representation of energy that is always there, always on demand, is, without any doubt, electricity. Growing up in any developed Western country in the 1980s, the 1990s, or even later would leave one firmly believing that electricity was ubiquitous and always on demand whenever one needed it. Surely, blackouts happened from time to time, but they were relatively seldom. The energy supply worked on the money and there was always hot water in the pipes, the heating kept the homes warm in winter, and the lights, TV and radio were always working.It is hard to imagine surviving several days without electricity. All of us, consumers or business, depend on its constant and undisrupted flow (Janda et al., 2013; Abrham et al., 2015). In a way, we believe in electricity like if it was some form of a new religion (Strielkowski and Cabelkova, 2015).Sure enough, one can imagine a day or two of hiking and sleeping in a tent by the campfire. But what if this unintentionally turns into a longer stay perhaps lasting for a week or even longer? All of a sudden one will start to realize that her or his smartphone is discharged and stopped working all together, the flashlight ran out of batteries, it is not possible to call or e-mail anyone, friends' status on Facebook cannot be checked and all thin lines with the outside world are broken. For most of the people life in such situation would become too hard to bear. Surely, some people might find it adventurous and romantic to go into the wild and sit by the campfires but many of these endeavours end up badly unless you drag the power generators, solar panels and other things with you. Even the participants of the Burning Man (called Burners), famous art festival that takes place in Nevada's at the end of every August and includes creating an entire self-sustainable and self-supporting city (called Black Rock City) in the lifeless desert bring with them enormous amounts of equipment, supplies and fuel to light up the desert in one-week long magic carnival and to create all sorts of comfort for themselves - including smartphone charging stations, live music podia, discotheques, saunas, movie theatres, and much more (Kozinets, 2002). Everyone depends on constant supply of energy, even the modern-day couch journalists who try to shape up the public opinion from the comfort of their homes without even going into the field (Cabelkova et al., 2015).Overall, humankind grows too comfortable taken the electricity supply of energy as granted. But of all this can change one day and the scenarios might vary. For instance, the NBC Revolution TV series (2012-2014) shows the world in 2027, about 15 years after a hypothetical secret government weapon project that used nanotechnology as a means of draining electricity from all power devices went awry. The opening line for each of the series' episode starts with the following lines:We lived in an electric world. We relied on it for everything. And then the power went out. Everything stopped working. We weren't prepared. Fear and confusion led to panic. The lucky ones made it out of the cities. The government collapsed. Militias took over, controlling the food supply and stockpiling weapons. We still don't know why the power went out. But we 're hopeful someone will come and light the way (Revolution, 2012).These words very precisely portray the current situation and the people's attitude to today's power systems: we rely upon them too much and we cannot do without them. …

Prosumption: From Parasitic to Prefigurative

During the week prior to the 2006 Labor Day weekend, explorers of Black Rock City, a temporary city in the Nevada Black Rock Desert, may have stumbled upon a handmade wooden stand. Unlike conventio...

“Long Gone Hippies in the Desert”: Counterculture and “Radical Self-Reliance” at Burning Man

“Long Gone Hippies in the Desert”: Counterculture and “Radical Self-Reliance” at Burning Man

The Paradoxical Black Rock City: All Cities Are Mad

Since 1986, Burning Man has evolved from an obscure bohemian San Francisco solstice celebration into the world's largest intentional community, anchored by annual burns on a playa in Nevada's Black Rock country. Participants embrace an ethos that radically challenges mainstream culture through Black Rock City's yearly (re)formation, negotiation, immolation, and deconstruction. Voicing curiosity, as humanists, in who we are, what we do, and why we do it, we examine rituals associated with this transitory yet international‐scale event. Such happenings imply a human need to seek clarity, dwell in close confines, and engage with a utopian desire for concerted communal participation. Yet, there exist historical‐cultural paradoxes associated with Burning Man, including steep entry barriers that reinforce an elite homogeneous population no longer representative of Burning Man's distinctive California roots.

Performance, Space, Time: The Production of Interiority in Black Rock City

ABSTRACTTemporary environments for revelry and celebration offer incredible opportunities for exploration, experimentation, and empowerment; the impermanent nature of experience is mesmerizing when we cherish the moments and wish they would last forever. Ephemeral spaces constitute an amazing laboratory for researching the social production of interiority. When researching temporary environments, there is hardly a better case for ephemerality and enchantment than the surreal phenomenon of Burning Man, an event that creates Black Rock City in the Nevada desert. Black Rock City provides a safe and supportive environment for experimenting with new kinds of social organization, new relationships, norms, and rules of behavior, as well as new forms of art and new spatialities. The goal of this project is to explore the production of space by this alternative culture that physically gathers for only one week each year. The objective is to highlight the social nature of the interiorization of space in this city constructed for celebration, where people experience, collaborate, and take pride in their work. At Black Rock City, the interiorization of space becomes a product of social inclusion, sharing, and personal transformation. This is a realm where the production of space is tantamount to the production of interiority. The Burner culture produces a continuous, free-flowing, and all-inclusive interiority in its accommodation and celebration of creativity, diversity, and spirituality.

Effects of recreational use on branchiopod egg and ephippia density, Black Rock Desert-High Rock Canyon emigrant trails National Conservation Area, Nevada, USA

Numerous plays playas occur on valley floors of endorehic basins in arid regions of the western USA. Their openness makes them attractive for hiking, vehicle travel, military, and other uses when dry. Branchiopod crustacean dormant egg banks survive in these systems and are a rich food resource for migrating birds. Brachniecta gigas Lynch, 1937, B. mackini Dexter, 1956, and Lepiduras lemmoni Holmes, 1895, and Moina cf. macrocopa (Straus, 1820) occur in the Black Rock Desert playa, Nevada, USA. We collected playa egg bank samples to determine effects of human use in three studies. We compared intact egg and ephippia density in virgin playa areas with: 1) a heavily used vehicle track, and 2) recreational camping and vehicle activity mitigated by dust abatement in Black Rock City (site of the Burning Man Festival). We also attempted to quantify changes in intact egg and ephippia density through repeated vehicle travel over a track on virgin playa. We found no observed decrease in intact egg or ephippia density attributed to incrementally increased vehicle travel over virgin playa, which may be attributed to strength of the playa substrate matrix. Differences in intact egg and ephippia density were substantially lower in heavily used vehicle tracks than in adjacent playa, but differences were not statistically significant. Density of intact eggs and ephippia in Black Rock City were lower following the festival, but differences were statistically significant only for eggs in camping areas and not roads. Weak effects observed on these roads may be attributed to dust abatement that maintained substrate density.

The sense of community in a geographically dispersed organisation

This case study of Black Rock City, also known as Burning Man, examines the psychological sense of community (PSOC) within a geographically dispersed organisation, identifies communal aspects, and embarks upon an understanding of the intentional and fortuitous aspects of managing and developing a systemic community without physical boundaries. The methodology used is a qualitative case study with data collection procedures including in-depth exploratory interviews of self-defined Burners, a history, direct observations, an ethnographic study, and primary research using the sense of community index version 2 (N = 222), commonly referred to as the SCI-2 (Chavis et al., 2008). Findings of this study convey ‘shared emotional connection’ as the most important factor of this geo-dispersed community. Thematic analysis also suggests that acceptance, collaboration, and shared symbols and rituals can create a ‘sense of community’ despite ambiguous boundaries.

Welcome to Black Rock City: Ephemeral Homes, Built Environments, and Participatory Negotiations

By applying Bourdieu’s ideas of habitus and doxa, this paper explores how Burning Man participants negotiate ideological and pragmatic limitations in transforming a vast desert landscape into an urban physical and social space. The ephemeral city serves as a model for radical self-expression with an internal society that creates an engaging participatory experience among differing and sometimes conflicting social institutions. Black Rock City LLC, committed to democratically and collaboratively engaging with festival participants in the production of space, demonstrates a realistic possibility for successful negotiation of pragmatics and ideologies while still allowing ample room to foster freedom and community. In examining these dynamic negotiations and their resultant influences on the physical landscape through varied lenses, this article suggests how Black Rock City might be a portable adaptation for other spaces of insurgency.