Burning Man

Eras

• Burning culture, The event explaining itself. Larry Harvey on how it started, the Cacophony Society and Baker Beach, the ten principles, gifting and decommodification, and the arguments about what the thing is for.
• Moments, The photographic record. Tens of thousands of frames from 1990 onward, the people, the costumes, the dust, the art and the quiet parts between the spectacle.
• Aftermovies, The year edited down. Recap films and personal edits from 1999 onward, the footage people cut when they got home and the dust out of their gear.
• Burn, The night the Man goes up. The burn from 1995 onward, the circle around it, the fire conclave, the collapse and the crowd surging in afterwards, plus the Temple burn that follows and is nothing like it.
• Art, What gets built out there and mostly destroyed. The large-scale installations, the mutant vehicles and art cars, the fire art, the sculptures lit from inside, and the pieces that took a year to make and one night to lose.
• Burner POV, The playa filmed by the people crossing it. Bike rides out to deep playa and back, camp walk-throughs, dust storms hit head on, and the handheld footage that shows what a week there actually looks like from inside.
• News coverage, How the outside world reported it. Broadcast segments from CBC, Arte and the networks, the early curiosity pieces, and the coverage that arrived once the attendance figures did.
• Performances, Music and staged work on the playa. Bands playing the open desert, sound camps, theatre and circus acts, the Mermen in 1995 and everything since.
• Bird's eye, Black Rock City from above. Drone and helicopter footage of the arc of streets, the Man at the centre, and a city of eighty thousand that exists for one week a year.
• Documentaries, Longer films about the event. Feature documentaries, festival cuts and the sustained pieces that follow a camp or an artist through a build.
• Timelapse, Time compressed. Temple and Man builds shot frame by frame, the city assembling and vanishing, and the light moving across the playa.
• Theme camps, The camps themselves. The bars, the games, the sound systems and the elaborate one-joke installations that people haul out and set up every year.