bm2004: art & burn

after breakfast, i finally got some sleep in the nice air conditioned blyss abyss dome. mmmmm wonderful blissful sleep.

in the afternoon i tooled around the playa with kurtis, exploring and looking some of the art. we stumbled upon the chasm, which was the project by elsewhere campmate jd. it’s a cool work: like the earth has split open, revealing an alien archeological excavation site, complete with strange alien tubes and periscopes down into the ground and an indecipherable metal instruction manual.

my favorites:

• the ambient armchair encounter: brilliantly simple, it’s just a few armchairs sitting out on the playa under beach umbrellas, each with a speaker on either side of the head and a subwoofer underneath. you sit down, and just sink into gentle ambient music as you look out across the desert. wonderful.
  
• io: the improbable orchestra: as they describe it: “IO consists of a 4 speakers arranged in a circle pointing towards a central podium/command console. Visually enticing and mysterious sets of knobs and buttons are laid out to lure a passer-by into experimenting with the sculpture. IO creates a 24-hour dynamic, ambient, soundscape determined by user input via physical controls.” it’s like playing with your own 808! super fun and super cool.
  
• observer/observed: a 10 foot cube with translucent plexiglass, which is reflective on the outside during the day, so the insiders can only see out, and which is reflective on the inside during the night, so the outsiders can only see in. we got to talk to one of the guys who made it and watched him try and windex that sucker down.

honestly, i don’t have much to say about the burn. beforehand they had hundreds of fire spinners performing, in what was the largest fire spinning performance the world has ever seen. however, it just kind of went on too long and they were too far away, even though we were a few rows from the front. they did have some cool ones, though, like the guy who was spinning that huge flaming tetrahedron, and those girls who spun at each other and then did backflips. and of course, the hula hoops.

then the observatory burned, the man burned, the man fell down. everyone rushed to the middle, and was ground around like a big blender, and shot out of the human centrifuge, and i lost everyone i was with.

i ambled over to the mutaytor camp, where they were having some huge last performance, but i was quickly bored. more than anything, i wanted to go back and brush my teeth, since i realized that i hadn’t brushed my teeth in a whole day.

on the way hit christopher and betty ray’s nebula exhibit, and they were there and managed to get the flamethrower portion going as well. flamethrowers, man! nothing is better.

having brushed my teeth, and having stayed up the entire night before and danced my share, i went to bed and slept a sound eight hours of sleep.

Posted at September 5, 2004 8:02 AM