En Transit / Burning Man

Kim Riley - Photography

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 08:58:56 +0000

Once and future home of Kim Riley Photography. By default, there can't be any adult images here, because there are no images; I'm guessing that Ms.Riley just moved her site to a new host. However, if this sampling of thumbnails of her work from BM2001 is representative, we should see some interesting photos on this site in the near future.

Bookmark / Burning Man: Deidre DeFranceaux and Jann Nunn

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 08:40:20 +0000

About the cradle installation at BM2001 ... you have two choices, but I'm not sure that the first one is going to work, any more. A fraction of a cent per Meg, and people are still deleting articles online, as if we were stuck back in the 20th century, and needed to conserve every available kilobyte. Amazing.

. Original Location | Internet Archive

Image in preceding post

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 08:16:33 +0000

A thumbnail of this photo can be seen in the eighth paragraph of this post, with credit given here and in the alt tags on the thumbnail. The full sized image, seen here, is a night time picture of saucer taken near Plastic Chapel, Burning Man 2001, and is credited to Kim Riley Photography, very tentatively reviewed above.

Charles H. Trapolin and the Maze

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 07:39:37 +0000

Re: this site

Some things I liked, some I didn't, but I suppose you expected that ...

This one, I'm reviewing with the usual mixed feelings I have as I approach Burning Man sites. The title you saw on this review at its old location was the one applied to every page on Mr.Trapolin's site (Charles H. Trapolin, Fine Art and Design), which might have caused some confusion because there were (and still are) more pages on the man's site to be reviewed, but the system on my previous host forced us to give the review of a page the same title as the one the site owner, so this could not be helped.

The page I'm reviewing right now is the one Mr.Trapolin devoted to the mazes he designed for Burning Man 2000 and 2001, with pieces created by other artists appearing within. I missed Burning Man 2000, not surprisingly; being partially disabled and living below the poverty line, I find Burning Man a difficult event to get to, but I did manage to get to Burning Man 2001, so I'll talk about that year's maze.

Trapolin makes an understandable, if fundamental error in shooting his piece during the day; by day, one can't help but notice that like most of Black Rock City, the maze was constructed very cheaply, of plywood, as it would have to be. Keep in mind the fact that the whole city gets torched at the end of every event; if "Black Rock City" (the temporary community built at Burning Man) wasn't built cheaply, the expense of this yearly recreational arson binge would be enough to send Microsoft into receivership.

The question one is left with is "how does one deal with that reality"; the answer at Burning Man 2001 seemed to be "play with light and shade, and the limits of human perception"; "Black Rock City" was an imaginatively crafted illusion, made possible by the fact of its remote location, far away from the lights of any real town.

When one gets out into the middle of the Black Rock Desert of Northern Nevada, the nearest community (Gerlach) has maybe 150 people, if one counts outlying areas, and it is some tens of miles away, on the other side of a mountain range. About two hours away, one finds the largest city in Northern Nevada - Reno, which at 210,000 people, just barely qualifies as a city, failing to raise that familiar bubble of light on the horizon that in places like Northern Illinois, serve as an eternal reminder that the beloved metroplex is never so far away as one might imagine, even after one drives a few hours seeking an elusive night.

A smallish city and a town that probably should be called a village, and really little more - one finds little but the emptiness of a desert so barren as to inspire incredulity in some at the notion that people could live here at all; the evening, left to its own devices, would at times become almost impenetrably dark. Away from the encampment, one sees the Jackson range faintly traced out against a velvety black night sky in the soft blackish blue tones that remain of the moonlight, after it has worked its way through the dust which, even at night, does not have a chance to completely settle out of the air; more silhouette than landscape, the mountains reveal little more their profile, coyly granting only the vaguest hints of their more prominent features to those who would lovingly gaze upon them. The brilliant stars of one's imagination are not to be seen, as far away from most of the world as one is; their light barely ever had a chance to reach the ground. Even the light of the moon, so bright in the starlessly overlit red midnight skies over Chicago, is dimmed.

The pitch black night, like the Playa, becomes an empty canvas. During the day, when sudden dust storms haven't turned the air opaque, the sun reveals all in blinding detail and the artist must accept this. As the sun sets, however, those creating Black Rock City find that since like almost everything else, light is present only to the extent that somebody had the foresight to bring it, that this allows them to do what would be impossible in more brightly lit locations: to sculpt the light, choosing what the viewer will see and how he will see it. What by day is clearly a shabby looking sheet of plywood, by night, with the right lighting, become the wall of a convincingly solid if fittingly mysterious looking temple. Nighttime is when the visuals of Black Rock City came alive, the sunstroked day being more a time to scurry out of the merciless light in search of shade, company, quieter creative activities, and if such gods as one believed in pleased, maybe a little air conditioning or at least a mister; daytime temperatures easily topped 100.

Cultures carry over, even when a fashionable postmodernism encourages participants to pretend that they could leave such things behind, and "work during the day and play at night" is a well-ingrained pattern of behavior in much of the Western World; most of the participation seemed to take place during the day, the tired participants relaxing to enjoy the spectacle at night, as a light show played itself out against the darkened open playa. [under construction]

Kate Raudenbush Experiments

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 07:19:18 +0000

I like this site, but wish that I could see the artist's work offline for a few reasons ...

Re: The Kate Raudenbush Experiments Site Pleasant viewing - or maybe not. Yet another opportunity to see contemporary art come of age - beautiful photography of elegant nonrepresentational sculpture made by Ms.Raudenbush, much of it seen at Burning Man, along with images of a few other places she's been.

As we view these images, we run into one of the regrettable truths about posting images to the Internet - nothing is really ever really browser safe. What looked crisp and detailed and more than a little breathtaking on my computer looked washed out on my father's and almost devoid of detail, so if you're looking and wondering why I'm making a fuss, that might be why. The medium doesn't always do the artist justice, when the artist's work picks up a thousand subtle shades that come of the daylight as it filters through a transparent sculpture, or the faintly dusty desert air whose light gives these pieces the context which helps define them; would the sculpture you see to your left be the same piece were it bathed in the faint green light of an Indiana forest, instead of the blindingly yet strangely soft radiance of a summer afternoon on the Playa?

The artist makes good progress on the challenge of conveying the different look and feel of her piece in what, for most viewers, will be an unfamiliar environment, only to run into the limitations imposed by inadequate standardization in what is, after all, supposed to be a communications technology - egotistically creative self-indulgence on the part of the software engineers developing the systems we use to view the Web coming at the expense of expressive freedom of the artists who, in this, they are supposed to be serving; where would painting be today if oils randomly changed colors when a painting was moved into another room or viewed from a different angle? At the very least, the art form would have been seriously and unnecessarily limited by the artist's lack of control over her medium, as digital art is often is, now.

Good reason, perhaps, to see if Ms.Raudenbush has any upcoming showings of her photography, offline, where screen settings and the quirks of individual systems will not get between us and our enjoyment of her work.

Youtube / Draka

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 06:47:08 +0000

Having recently watched a video clip of an old Burning Man favorite I mentioned in an earlier review, which I posted recently, I find that I'm feeling a little ambivalent about it for a few reasons.

Here's one of them: As I fairly laboriously put together about a page worth of posts about the Draka site, I suspect that few readers will doubt that I like the subject of this video, but I'm not completely fond of the style. One has that whole booming base sound in the background, and an "extreme travel" style of presentation that practically leaves one waiting to see the part where Larry Harry jumps a motorcycle over Center Camp. "YEAH! Whoo! Hey, Larry, do it again, naked and on fire this time, carrying a chain saw!"

No, it's not like that. Burning Man has its reckless moments, but the more commonly prevailing spirit at the event, at least at the time this video was made, seemed to be one of free spirited, creative, eccentric mellowness, and the filmmaker doesn't seem to capture that or even really try, maybe because "we're wild! WHOOOO!!!" is an easier message to sell to an audience and build up ratings with than that of a collective creative happening, especially when the producer only has one minute and forty seconds of expensive airtime in which to portray an experience that builds up over a week, at a minimum? Which I understand in the context this clip arose in - it's footage from the Discovery Channel and the economics of Cable Television are a given, albeit not as harsh a given as those of Network Television were a generation ago, given how many more channels cable can carry. However, we're not on Cable right now, we're on the Internet, where a producer has all of the time he or she wishes. Why import the weaknesses of an old medium into a new medium?

What would have been better than a possibly copyright violating reposting on YouTube of network footage would have been an original video made by a participant who took the time to tell the story he felt, instead of feeling the need to race to tell a story that would sell. The talent is definitely present in the Burning Man community to tell it honestly and with a little flair and in the case of YouTube and Metacafe, maybe to be part of the solution instead of what might be seen as a growing problem.

Lately, as one drops by these sites, which not very long ago were these pleasant, creative quirky places where one got to watch film making become folk art, one finds the creative content beginning to be squeezed out by repostings of commercial content and those pointless hatefests. A lot of people seem to want to take a short cut to being seen in the same place as that creative content, without having to do the work that goes into making such content, and this is badly watering down the content that draws visitors to the site in the first place. Yes, this is merely a new form of an old problem that predates the Web, the "signal to noise ratio" problem that ended up doing in Usenet as a serious cultural presence, one that hotlinking on the Web (or mutual friending, in the case of a social networking site like YouTube) helps the reader evade, to some extent, but it obviously represents a significant drain on Youtube's and Metacafe's resources, one which we, as reviewers, should not be encouraging, even to the small degree that our encouragement matters.

I can understand why Ms.Nigro (the creator of Draka) and her friends and fans would be excited about her appearing on a well known channel like Discovery, and congratulations to her for getting that coverage. I certainly don't mean to run that down, and if that person up on the TV screen was me or somebody I knew, I'd probably be the king of the geeks getting that news out. "Look, look, you can see when we ..." That's fine, and a few excerpt videos like that, posted by those covered and their friends and family aren't going to kill the YouTube experience. I think. How many of those are there likely to be - and are those the words I'm going to end up eating? Well, maybe, but life is about trying to work out reasonable compromises with oneself and others, as one makes a few highly fallible guess about how things will work out along the way, and the way I'm working out the compromise with myself on this one is as follows.

I understand the bandwidth consuming nature of video. "We were on TV and would like to show off the footage" is a reasonable thing for a group to want to do on its site, and Youtube offers a site owner a reasonable, affordable way of doing so - by embedding the video of one's fifteen minutes of network fame on one's site. Cool. If I come to somebody's site and see such an embedding, I won't think any less of the site for it. Seeing that won't keep me from linking to the site or giving it a thumbs up. But I'm not going to link to the video, itself. If the site owner wants the extra review, link and traffic from me or somebody else who thinks the same way, the site owner will need to upload an original video, the owner's own original content, even when the owner's own work is the subject of the video, because however understandable the personal horn tooting is, and with however much good will we may accept it, the fact is, it still represents a watering down of the content on the hosting site, which posting additional original video content will help alleviate. In other words, "you broke it, so you bought it, or at the very least, you should be prepared to put down a downpayment", or something like that.

If, to consider a very different case, I come to the site and the video so embedded is uploaded nonoriginal content which isn't about the site owner or those associated with the site owner, then that I would almost certainly very much hold against the site, enough so that I would pretend that I hadn't seen it.

In the case of a certain cooking video, if that gets taken down off of Youtube and reposted, I might consider reviewing the reposted video if there are no objections from my current host, because I had already invested a significant amount of time and effort into reviewing that video before I ever thought about this issue, and I am loath to walk awy from that work. I don't feel that would be a reasonable thing for me to ask of myself and there is a greater social good to be served by exposing abusive charlatans like Ramsay, a good that is not served by destroying pre-existing work that was made in good faith, before the personal establishment of the principle under discussion. Linking to and reviewing to such a replacement video puts that work in context, and helps the reader understand it better, and so I'd probably do that.

Some of the same points apply to the far more pleasant Draka video. Truly new videos, yet, ones which I have not reviewed and am not invested in, are going to have to meet the originality test. I don't care how good the footage is, unless this is exposé time or something like that, if it's nonoriginal material, posted by somebody other than the creator, I just won't write a review of it and I will thumb it down, and I would urge others to consider doing likewise for the reasons given. Places like Youtube can be a wonderful resource if treated with respect, and if people taper off on rewarding the abuses of such sites, they may remain to be enjoyed by others for years to come, a desirable outcome that nobody need make any particularly crushing sacrifices to achieve.

Give and take. Yes, I'm helping to keep a limited collection of pirated videos alive in the sense of making visitors aware of them by talking about them, at least if I'm allowed to do so, but the number of nonpirated videos, ones which I won't hesitate to promote, will climb without practical limit - a finite number of them being made, but so many that the number might as well be infinite. With such incentives in place, if such an argument would be widely accepted, the proportion of nonoriginal material onsite would, at least in theory, tend to decline if posting responded to rational incentives, and the incentive was (as I suspect it is) the desire to have one's postings seen.

While the ideal is not achieved in perfection, the overall goal - that of nudging the signal to noise ratio on places like YouTube in the right direction or at least providing incentives that would produce such a result if at all rationally responded to, would tend to be approached in the limit as time goes on. The more participation one sees in this sort of response, the more desirable nudging one gets. The idea is not premised on the unreal condition of universal participation. For that reason, philosophically, I think that this is a reasonable standard to apply in such cases, and submit it for your consideration.

Welcome to Draka Arts / A Site Review

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 04:41:49 +0000

A pleasant site about a topic I like (an art car named Draka), not a bad place at all, but one which does not live up to its full potential, I think. At least not yet.

Re: The Draka Arts Site , which is archived here ...

One of life's frustrating truths, which one learns very quickly when one tries to write about anything: that which is unpleasant is so much easier to explain or bring alive for the reader than that which is pleasant. Hence, perhaps, our love as a species for souvenirs, keepsakes, photos ... what is a memory but a story one's earlier self tries to tell one's later self, as that later self itself strains to find the references it needs to connect the story that the earlier self is telling it?

That frustration comes very fully into play when one tries to answer the seemingly easy question "why did you go to Burning Man". The physical hardships of the desert, some of the political ugliness - these are easy things to understand, so easy that some will seriously ask "so it's all one big exercise in Masochism". As, indeed, it sometimes is, and say hello to the good people over at the House of Atonement, if that's the way your personal brand of kinkiness goes. But usually it isn't, or at least it didn't used to be.

Usually, the concept was that one would see the harshness of the desert as a challenge, achieving a pleasant comfort in spite of the desert, and the vastness of the desert as an opportunity. The desert was seen as a blank slate, not in the sense that there wasn't anything of value already out there, but rather in the sense that the works of man already present were few and far between, and likely to remain so for a good long while to come, leaving one free to try things that one couldn't at home, because almost all of the land was owned and one didn't have the space in which to do them. The desert offered an eternal fresh beginning to the temporary society gathering in it, in which the realities of property ownership and loitering ordinances need not get in the way of one's fleeting daydreams as they took tangible form.

Thus the frustration for one telling such a story - that sort of freedom, that of just being able to lay claim to a bare patch of ground and see what one can do with it with a little hard work and imagination, has not been part of life in places like Illinois since the frontier left them behind in the mid 19th century, leaving social engineering to begin to slowly take over where freedom left off, after its relatively brief stay. This site, the homepage of Draka, the dragon car sometimes seen at Burning Man, allows one to see one of those fleeting daydreams that took form, as somebody took advantage of the novel freedoms offered by the emptiness of Northern Nevada. Whether the reader will understand why somebody might want to do so is a question I have to ask myself as I write this piece, but the site I'm reviewing offers some help in this, and I'll try to offer some more.

Draka is a bus. Oh, wow, that sounded exciting. OK, fine. Draka is a bus made, train style, with connecting cars, built in the form of a fire breathing dragon. No, now I just sound like I was partaking of the "refreshments" being given out in the maze a little too much ... at least until one sees that this is an accurate description.

Just a bus? No, once one boarded, one found oneself inside a "chill space", a sort of lounge inside this very, very long bus. Those who rode Draka in earlier years may remember a more enclosed look than the one we currently see, as I seemed to, as this image on the artist's site taken would seem to suggest. We are, to an extent, looking at a new dragon, the old wood and metal structure having been thoroughly damaged by fire as a result of a welding accident on May 14, 2002 as we see in images at the top of this page. Lisa Nigro, the artist running for the project seems to have opted for a less fireprone design for Draka's "facelift", more than understandable under the circumstances, but still a cause for a little regret.

Part of the magic of the old Draka was the fact that it created a space of its own, one open to its surroundings, which one could take in comfort through broad windows cut into its sides, without the interior one found oneself in losing that feeling of being an interior, and losing its own sense of place. As one entered and saw that there was a small bar present, one wasn't surprised. I seem to recall a soft bluish light coming out from inside the bar, gently illuminating the interior at night, which was a nice touch, drawing attention inward to a place where meeting one's fellow passengers was inevitable, making the experience of interacting with these strangers from elsewhere a less isolating experience than it would otherwise have been. I was surprised at how effectively the sound of the pounding of the wheels on the desert hardpan was muffled, thinking that this would be a nice place to hold a fiction reading event.

With an obviously much different image in mind, a happily soused couple late on Sunday that same week decided that it would be the perfect place to hold their wedding party with their equally drunk friends, and it was all good. Draka, as it travelled through "Black Rock City", the collective encampment that was everybody and everything at Burning Man 2001, became a natural meeting place. "So did and does Center Camp", somebody is likely to say. In a sense, perhaps, but more toward the beginning of the week, I found, and in a very low key kind of way.

People brought their fatigue and mild disorientation into Center Camp, sat down and exchanged a few niceties with strangers, but for the most part, the company they enjoyed was the company they brought into the wide side offered by the Camp and as simple a thing as bringing one's own refreshments has reportedly been enough to get one thrown out of this central meeting place, which seems to function more as a very large coffeehouse than anything else. Draka represented raw spontaneity. It was there when it chose to be there, you were never quite sure when that would be, and so you had to break out of your routine to experience it; you couldn't work it into that routine. That made for a higher energy experience and a qualitatively different kind of meeting place, one that perhaps invited the short term traveler to ask himself why such wandering meeting places don't exist at home. "Aside from the fact that we really wouldn't want people doing this on the front of a CTA bus, Joe?", you ask.

Yes, aside from that. Life is not an all or nothing affair. Other places can have people ride public transportation in less than a fearful churchlike silence without arrests following and have public spaces look less than utterly corporate without the body count rising; the eternal unasked question is why so many places in America (the alleged home of the supposedly free and occasionally brave) can't bring themselves to do the same. By reminding what had been absent in his daily commute, and that there was nothing inevitable about that absence, maybe this experience could get him to question that a little bit more of that blankness and blandness of contemporary American life to which he had become accustomed in the long run, if he were to drop the postmodernist blinders and accept the notion that the status quo was a thing that the individual could legitimately question. More immediately, by pleasantly jarring the unexpected traveler out of his comfort zone, the experience knocked him out of the ingrained patterns of behavior that promoted his self-reinforcing isolation, to leave him pleasantly foundering around in the company of his equally pleasantly disordered fellow travelers, to whom he would reach out before he regained his composure and realised what he was doing, leaving spontaneity to ensue and take hold as the new reality, however briefly.

That's what Burning Man was about for a lot of us - that spontaneity, and spontaneity is a difficult thing to show, one of those pleasant things that I spoke of at the beginning that is so difficult to bring alive through any noninteractive medium. The written word is what it is, yielding in no way to the reader's actions, leaving him to wander a conceptual landscape defined by an absolute determinism; the world of a story, true or fictional, is set in stone, a reality that the author will try to mask through a series of artfully conceived illusions - or perhaps not so artfully conceived - as he tries to get the reader to imagine that he has lived through choices he hasn't been able to make, bringing us to one point on which I am dissatisfied with this site.

While we are offered some nice photographs, the eye candy on this site is static. No footage, no recordings, no real time exposure to the social experience of the dragon. Not even stories from those who were in it. Just stills, and business oriented pages like this one about future plans on something that, while certainly an attractive and well layed out site, seems more a scrapbook of memories for those who were there than an explanation for those who weren't, and the memories reserved are wholly visual ones. The experience was so much more than just that; Ms.Nigro and her associates should give themselves more credit, and maybe if those who rode the Dragon would send in a few accounts for them to publish, they would? But for now, they haven't.

Having not been a rider on the new, post-reconstruction Draka, I'm not sure whether or not it offers the same possibilities as a mobile gathering place, but judging from the more open look, my guess is that it couldn't. Even given the 5 mph speed limit at Burning Man, wheels and the clanging of metal in a vehicle that traverses an increasingly bumpy dirt road will make noise, and there doesn't seem to be as much to muffle that noise as before. Not that any criticism of Ms.Nigro or her efforts should be read into this. One can easily picture her taking a look at how suddenly and dramatically her original effort caught fire after a welding accident, thinking "thank G-d nobody was in there at the time", and then picturing a high wind turning a little of Draka's "breath" back upon a highly flammable vehicle. I certainly would not fault her for being concerned with the safety of her guests and passengers, and before anybody says "why couldn't she just replace the wood with metal" - remember that metal is neither lightweight nor cheap. Think about how much even a small automobile costs, scale that up to something the size of a large house, and see how much compromise becomes necessary. When you see those membership costs quoted on her page, this is not gouging on Ms.Nigro's part, this is simple economic reality.

The old Draka offered a magical experience while it lasted, albeit probably a more dangerous one than most of us probably suspected at the time, but nobody got hurt. Let those of us who were there find pleasure in that, and in the memories we have of our trip, and if one of us should be able to come up with a good, inexpensive, nonflammable wood substitute? I wouldn't presume to speak for Ms.Nigro, but perhaps it might open up interesting possibilities to be explored?

Untitled

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 04:36:52 +0000

What this blog will be

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 03:07:57 +0000

Hypotheticals. It will mostly be about hypotheticals, I'm afraid - things I'd like to do, if I was going to Burning Man, which I won't be. The over $300 price tag alone is enough to rule out that event for me, but I can still go into the lab (or what passes for my lab), play, tinker and share with anybody who is going.

My primary interest will be in taking some of the project ideas, and building on them. Do what you know - I have some knowledge of chemistry, which is needed in Solid State work, but I'm not a chemist, so I'll shy away from projects heavily dependent on that subject. I am a Mathematician with a Physics background who branched into Electrical Engineering, so projects involving Electronics are ones in which I'll take great interest. My main hobbies are cooking - which I've pursued since I was a small child - photography and theatre, so you're probably see some references to performance, which might sometimes draw on the theme camp ideas, some two dimensional art done by photographic printing, and some relatively easy recipes which can be done outside, requiring a minimum of clean up. Maybe. No promises.

There are some things, however, that I can guarantee will be missing. No fire - it's not safe in my area, and the city government of Chicago seems to take the subject of fire somewhat personally, anyway, for some reason. No high priced project ideas - none of that business of buying $2000 worth of lumber to build something that will be incinerated at the end of the week. No meat - the recipes will be vegetarian ones. Nothing appealing to "prurient interests". No announcements of upcoming events - even if I end up holding those, I will only announce them offline, but in fact, probably won't announce them, at all.

The kind of event I'd like to see is a gathering of some friends who invite their friends, who can do the same, everybody bringing something on which they've enjoyed working; one that never gets too big. If it grows to more than a few hundred people, one splits it in two, with each half going its own way, so it never grows so large that it needs to be anything more than an informal gathering. One would run out of room at any location we're likely to reach otherwise, anyway; there are no great wildernesses for hundred of miles as one goes away from Chicago, just small forests and parks. How much promotion does a small private party need?

For now, but not indefinitely I hope, much of this will have to stay on the theoretical level, proposals, not prototypes, because my budget is very limited, and I have no place to display work, anyway. If you see an idea you like, and would like to embellish on it further, please feel free, as long as you show me the same courtesy I show to those from whom I borrow, giving me credit for that I did and linking back to the page on which it was done. The point of this isn't to get somebody else's ideas or my ideas to go viral, but to learn from some creative work that was done in the past, and get back to the idea of culture being something that ought to be a cumulative thing, even in an ephermal city.