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Burning Man 2020 Goes Burn-From-Home, Courts Potential Global Audience

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Yeah, we know. You can’t go to Burning Man this year, and it sucks.

But maybe not entirely.

Burning Man, the mac daddy, mac mama and mac baby of events/festivals/raves/cultural touchpoints, normally takes place in the Nevada desert at the end of August. But when the in-person event was canceled this year due to COVID-19, organizers got busy mounting a virtual festival recreating many of the highlights and adding a different kind of sizzle.

It’s all meant to be experienced from the comfort of your own home, or at least from a safe social distance. And what it loses in the intimacy of Black Rock City (the temporary town of 79,000 that’s Burning Man’s desert home), it makes up in creativity and potential global reach. Anyone around the world with a device can be a virtual Burner.

From Work-from-home to Burn-from-home

Each year’s Burn has a different theme, and “In a twist of synchronicity,” reads a statement from the Burning Man Project, 2020’s theme was already scheduled to be the Multiverse, the astronomical theory of an unknowable number of universes outside our own. “Little did we all know how truly multiversal things were going to become.”

Kim Cook, Director of Creative Initiatives for the Burning Man Project, calls this year’s Burn a “grand experiment.” Just as Burning Man has become a “global cultural force” (Art of Burning Man exhibits have set attendance records at museums in Washington, D.C., Cincinnati and Oakland), the 2020 Burn may be an unexpected opportunity to push the envelope of creativity with virtual technology.

“We’ve all now familiarized ourselves with Zoom, GoToMeeting, Skype or Google Hangouts,” Cook says, “but that doesn't mean that we’ve all had a satisfactory experience of engagement and interactivity.”

So she calls the virtual Burn “a laboratory of interactivity that’s digital, and that's super interesting.” Designers have created a Multiverse of experiences in 10 platforms, “all expressing their version of ‘what does interactivity look like in digital space?’”

Offerings range from gargantuan to intimate enough for your backyard, balcony or bathtub. Some are best experienced via virtual reality headsets, while others require nothing more than a handheld device.

Iconic Experiences Recreated

Take the temple, one of the iconic Burning Man experiences. In normal times, it’s a mammoth wooden structure featuring a different, grand architectural design every year.

Temple visitors are encouraged to write directly on the wood and leave offerings — notes, objects, mementos — evoking things they’re trying to work through: “memories of loss and changes, from divorce, to death, to pets, to personal identity shifts,” Cook says. The community can wander the interior, contemplate offerings, meditate on the sand floor, get in touch with their own spiritual side. Then, on the last night, the temple and all it contains are burned in a climactic, cathartic conflagration, encircled by crowds looking on in hushed silence from a safe distance.

For the 2020 virtual temple, called the Ethereal Empyrean Experience, Cook says that the creators have stayed true to Burning Man’s ethos of participation. Visitors can upload their own digital offerings, “audio files, text files, photos, images — then decide whether they want to let other people see it or not and put it on the temple.”

When the temple opens on August 30, she says, “You can go have a virtual experience inside the temple and see what people have left,” well over 1,000 virtual offerings as of this writing. Then on September 6, in the spirit of the annual temple Burn, the creators will destroy the virtual temple virtually and in real life: hardware, software and data.

If the temple is one of the heavier experiences, another, Sparkleverse, feels like an online map to digital gathering places. Sparkleverse creator Ed, who calls himself “an amateur philosopher of parties,” explains “you can connect in all the ways humans want to connect, in all the ways we deserve to connect,” such as chatting with friends in a virtual jazz club or a virtual hot tub, all while tooling around the virtual playa on a virtual bicycle and maybe uploading content of your own.

Others experiences span the photorealistic landscapes, art, parties, theme camps and DJ sets of the in-person Burn, through BRCvr, Burn2, Infinite Playa and MysticVerse to random encounters amid the hand-drawn aesthetic of the interactive Build-A-Burn. On September 5, when the namesake Man would normally burn, Burn Night: Live from Home offers blueprints for building your own two-foot-tall effigy to burn from home.

Across the Multiverse

The entrée to the experience is a portal called Kindling; if you don’t have a Burning Man profile, you’ll need to create one, and you’ll want to check the tech requirements in advance for your chosen content. Some content requires a payment, but most does not, and other content works off of donations.

In addition to the envelope-pushing creativity of the Multiverse are dozens of opportunities to gather, experience, play and learn, echoing the offerings during a normal Burning Man. Some are serious (workshops from social VR relationships to how to run for political office), others are playful (building your own man to burn - safely, please - wherever you are), fun (DJ sets, virtual bar parties, online puzzles and games) and others silly (we think - like the porta-potty simulator). And much like during the actual Burning Man, much of the fun is wandering the site and making unexpected encounters.

Long-time Burners may find all this a balm for a Burn-less summer, and for the Burn-curious, it’s a low-impact way to check it out. And, Cook says, while until now the Burning Man experience was possible only in person in Black Rock City, “now suddenly it could possibly be available internationally.”

My favorite thought about the 2020 experience comes from Stuart Mangrum, host of the Burning Man Live podcast: “If social distancing is the answer to the pandemic, Burning Man might just be the answer to social distancing.”

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For further reading: To see how the cancellation of the in-person Burning Man 2020 is impacting life in the neighboring town of Gerlach, Nevada, click here.

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