Burning
Man 2000 Photos
nick.parlante@cs.stanford.edu 9-6-2000
It is essentially mandatory that any nerd attending Burning Man must
construct a web page more or less exactly like this one. Burning man is
such a bizarre and visual event that as you come across this series of
increasingly weird and neat things, there's a natural instinct to want
to record and share what you are seeing.
What is Burning Man? Katie says it's "Renaissance fair meets Mad Max."
People show up without much in the way of rules and put together an art-project,
costume, dance club, bar, or motorized couch to entertain everyone around.
People essentially donate art to everyone else just for fun. This is not
without precedent -- graffiti, personalized license plates, web pages.
It's reassuring that we live in a country where the traditional liberal
spirit of "you guys can go off and do whatever you want so long as you
don't kill anyone" works -- it's a bit unbelievable that the thing is allowed.
Let's just say, it does not have that "we'll just have legal take a look
at this" feel. Participate before it gets outlawed.
A few notes...
-
These photos are presented in the order I took them. I think the better
ones are toward the bottom, but they're basically just jumbled together.
The weather looks mostly nice since when there was a dust storm, I tended
to take naps. The later photos have more of the cool desert scenery. My
favorites include the flaming tears head, the man made of books, the trampoline,
the swimmers, the flying carpet... oh well you get the idea. These are
just the things I happened to get -- there's lots more to see. I'm especially
sorry I did not capture the 20kW diesel welding generators with the with
giant Tesla coils. There's a sight I'll never forget.
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There's no nudity in these photos that I recall -- when a naked woman ambles
up to the line you are standing in, in me at least, there's an instinct
to very casually and nonchalantly find some other direction fascinating
to look. Doubly so if you have a camera. Maybe 5% of the people around
you were naked at any one time (apparently the weather was nicer before
I got there).
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Our theme camp was "Blue",
and you'll notice that all of our outfits are blue, as was everything else
at camp including the blue croquet course, the blue bike-taxi with glowing
blue wire, the blue candy we gave away, the blue carpet, the blue mailbox,
... well you get the idea. I stupidly forgot to take a picture of
our camp. I tended to take the camera on our walks and my brain just turned
off when we got back to camp and it was nap time. And then suddenly camp
was being disassembled and lit on fire (as is traditional). I'll try to
add some Blue photos from somewhere. Mostly I took photos of objects. Later
on I got a little more bold and, in accordance with the Burning Man rules,
I would ask people if I could take their picture. There are also pictures
of whoever from Blue was with me on the daytime walks.
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These were all shot with a fairly clumsy 1 megapixel digital camera (Agfa
cl30). I shot at 1152x864, and then reduced to 640x480 for this page. The
camera's greatest limitations are (a) film speed of about 100, so nighttime
is near impossible, and (b) delay between when you push the button and
the picture is taken, so for example, it was impossible to capture the
fireball mushrooming out of the back of the flamethrower car. Other than
that, digital is clearly and totally awesome. I took about 150 shots and
the half that were at all decent are here.
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I've set the images to open in their own windows so your browser won't
bog down re-rendering this large catalog window.
This
page created on a Macintosh using PhotoPage by John A. Vink.
