Burning Man

Burning Man is a project best known for an eight-day-long annual festival that takes place in Black Rock City, a temporary city on the playa of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, 90 miles (150 km) north-northeast of Reno, ending on the American Labor Day holiday in September. Though the event's specific location on the playa changes from year to year, the location has been quite constant in recent years. The event is described by organizers as an experiment in community, radical self-expression, and radical self-reliance and takes its name from the ritual of burning a large wooden sculpture of a man on the sixth day. The event is organized by Black Rock City, LLC, under the guidance of founder Larry Harvey.

The event is named after its Saturday night ritual, the burning of a wooden effigy.

History

1986 to 1989

The annual event now known as Burning Man began on the summer solstice in 1986 when Larry Harvey, Jerry James, and a few friends met on Baker Beach in San Francisco and burned an eight-foot- (2.4-meter-) tall wooden man as well as a smaller wooden dog. The inspiration for burning these effigy figures has been shrouded in mystery by Harvey, who described it as a spontaneous act of radical self-expression. Sculptor Mary Grauberger, a friend of Harvey's girlfriend Janet Lohr, had held spontaneous art-party gatherings on Baker Beach on or about the summer solstice for several years prior to 1986, and the burning of sculpture was a central theme. In addition to the burning of sculpture, a key ingredient to the pre-Burning Man gatherings was the fact that Baker Beach is a cove area frequented by nudists.

Satellite image of Black Rock City showing the familiar "C" or semicircle pattern.

Harvey attended some of the pre-Burning Man gatherings on Baker Beach, and when Grauberger stopped holding her parties, Harvey picked up the torch and ran with it, so to speak. Harvey asked Jerry James to build the first eight-foot (2.4-meter) wooden effigy with him, which was much smaller and more crudely made than the neon figure featured in the current ritual. In 1987, the effigy had grown to almost fifteen feet (4.6 m) tall, and in 1988 it grew to around forty feet (12 m).

For Harvey, the use of wood in building the man had symbolic significance and was a critical part of the ritual; also, he swears that he did not see the movie The Wicker Man until many years later, so it played no part in his inspiration. Accordingly, rather than allow the name "Wicker Man" to become the name of the ritual, he started using the name "Burning Man."

John Law, as well as other members of the Cacophony Society, has been heavily involved in Burning Man since 1989. Recently, John Law has begun legal proceedings openly contesting claims by Larry Harvey regarding the control of certain trademarks related to Burning Man. He also tells a very different version of the origins of Burning Man, which conflicts both in emphasis and content with the history described on the Burning Man website.

1990 to 1999

The event grew quickly, moving from Baker Beach in San Francisco to the Black Rock Desert of Nevada in 1990 after the burn scheduled for the summer solstice was shut down by police. After striking a deal to raise the Man but not to burn it on the beach, event organizers disassembled the effigy and returned it to a vacant lot where it had been stored. Shortly thereafter, the legs and torso of the Man were chain-sawed and the pieces removed when the lot was unexpectedly leased as a parking lot. The effigy was then reconstructed, led by Dan Miller, Harvey's then house-mate of many years. The Man found his new home in conjunction with the already scheduled Cacophony event sponsored by John Law and Kevin Evans, "Zone Trip #4" in the other worldly, remote and largely unknown, Black Rock desert.

As the event has grown, one of the challenges faced by the organizers has been balancing the freedom of participants with the requirements of various land-management and law-enforcement groups. Over the years, numerous restrictions have been put in place, such as bans on fireworks, firearms, dogs, and driving non-art cars. A notable restriction to attendees is the 7-mile- (11-km-) long temporary plastic fence which surrounds the event and defines the pentagon of land used by the event on the southern edge of the Black Rock playa. This 4-foot- (1.2-meter-) high barrier is known as the "trash fence" because its initial use was to catch wind blown debris that may escape from campsites during the event. Since 1998, the playa beyond this fence is not available to "burners" (Burning Man participants) during the week of event. Some artists and early attendees believe the underlying freedoms and concepts of the Burning Man event have been reduced or eliminated by these restrictions, leading to criticism of the current event as being too structured and controlled. Others contend that these restrictions are unfortunate but necessary to the survival of the event in the face of growth and notoriety and that in balance the original spark of creative invention is well alive and flourishing. Additionally, other recreational users of the desert believe the event's rapid growth and arid location (where the natural healing effect of the winter rains is not as effective) have caused the surface of the Black Rock Desert to change for the worse. The Burning Man organization strongly denies that the event has ever caused any damage.

Several documentary films have been made about the event, some of which give a fair representation of it. Most of these films are available through the Burning Man website.

2000 to present

In January 2007, John Law announced that he would be pursuing Michael Mikel and Larry Harvey in a bid to make Burning Man and its trademarks a part of the public domain.

Timeline of the event

Statistics shown below illustrate the growth of the Burning Man event, according to a timeline on BurningMan.com and other sources:

(Note: The man has remained close to 40 feet (12 meters) tall since 1989. The height and structure of the base have changed; thus the following referenced height figures are misleading.)

Year	Height from ground to top of Man	Location	Participants	Theme	Notes
1986	8 ft (2.4 m)	Baker Beach, San Francisco	20	None	Larry Harvey & Jerry James build & burn wooden man on Baker Beach on the summer solstice.
1987	20 ft (6 m)	Baker Beach	80	None
1988	30 ft (10 m)	Baker Beach	150-200	None
1989	40 ft (12 m)	Baker Beach	300+	None	First listing of the Burning Man event in the Cacophony Society newsletter.
1990	40 ft (12 m)	Baker Beach / Black Rock Desert, Nevada	500 / 90	None	Figure erected at Baker Beach on Summer Solstice (June 21) but not burned. Labor Day weekend becomes the date the event is held in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada.
1991	40 ft (12 m)	Black Rock Desert	250	None	First year of neon on the man.
1992	40 ft (12 m)	Black Rock Desert	600	None
1993	40 ft (12 m)	Black Rock Desert	1,000	None
1994	40 ft (12 m)	Black Rock Desert	2,000	None
1995	40 ft (12 m)	Black Rock Desert	4,000	Good and Evil	Encampment becomes known as Black Rock City.
1996	48 ft (15 m)	Black Rock Desert	8,000	The Inferno	Theme featuring Dante's Inferno/HELCO. First year the man is elevated on a strawbale pyramid. Guns banned.
1997	50 ft (15 m)	Hualapai Playa	10,000	Fertility	Driving banned. First year the city has grid streets.
1998	52 ft (16 m)	Black Rock Desert	15,000	Nebulous Entity	Forms its first management structure, fund-raises and becomes solvent.
1999	54 ft (17 m)	Black Rock Desert	23,000	Wheel of Time	Listed in the AAA's RV guide under "Great Destinations."
2000	54 ft (17 m)	Black Rock Desert	25,400	The Body	First active law enforcement activity, 60 Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and police arrests and citations. Most are for minor drug charges following surveillance and searches
2001	70 ft (22 m)	Black Rock Desert	25,659	Seven Ages	See Seven Ages of Man. Over 100 BLM citations, 5 arrests
2002	80 ft (24 m)	Black Rock Desert	28,979	The Floating World	First year for FAA approved airport. 135 BLM citations, 4 Sheriff citations
2003	79 ft (24 m)	Black Rock Desert	30,586	Beyond Belief	Dogs are banned for the first time. 177 BLM citations, 9 police citations, 10 arrests. First person to unequivocally die at the event after falling off an art car, resulting in dozens of persons associated with the car's camp being named in the resulting lawsuit
2004	80 ft (24 m)	Black Rock Desert	35,664	The Vault of Heaven	BLM: 218 citations, some issued from decoy 'art car', Camps giving away alcohol subjected to state law compliance examinations and 1 arrest. Pershing County Sheriff's office: 27 cases, 4 arrests, 2 citations. Nevada Highway Patrol: 2 DUI arrests, 217 citations, and 246 warnings were issued.
2005	72 ft (22 m)	Black Rock Desert	35,567	Psyche	The Man can be turned by participants. BLM: 218 and 6 arrests.
2006	<Variable>	Black Rock Desert	39,100 (est.)	Hope and Fear: The Future	The Man goes up and down reflecting a hope/fear meter. BLM: 155 citations and 1 arrest. Pershing County Sheriff's office: 1 citation and 7 arrests. Nevada Highway Patrol: 234 citations, 17 arrests, and 213 warnings.
2007	TBD	Black Rock Desert	TBD	The Green Man

The event has changed considerably as it has grown from a small handful of people on a beach in San Francisco to over 39,000 people attending the event in 2006. The scale of the event has increased enormously, and Black Rock City, LLC has in turn become more structured.

Principles

)'( is an iconic representation of The Man.

Because of the variety of goals fostered by participatory attendees, Burning Man does not have a single focus. Features of the event are subject to the participants and include community, artwork, absurdity, decommodification, and revelry. Participation is encouraged, and being a spectator is discouraged. The Burning Man event is governed by the 10 principles of Burning Man, which are radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation, and immediacy.

Gifting

Instead of cash, event participants rely on a gift economy, a sort of potlatch. In the earliest days of the event, an underground barter economy also existed, in which burners exchanged material goods and/or favors with each other. While this was originally supported by the Burning Man Organization, this now is largely discouraged by the event organizers. A gift should be given unconditionally. Often the giver benefits more than the recipient.

Decommodification

With the exception of the following items, no cash transactions are permitted in accordance with the principles of Burning Man:

• Café products (coffee, chai, etc.) are sold at Center Camp; the money raised offsets the cost of the coffee.
• Ice at "Camp Arctica" in Center Camp, of which sales benefit the local Gerlach-Empire school system. Block and crushed ice is available for $2/bag.
• Admission tickets, though most attendees purchase tickets in advance at select stores and via the Burning Man ticket website.
• Tickets for the shuttle bus to the nearest Nevada communities of Gerlach and Empire, operated via a contract with Green Tortoise. As of 2006, the tickets were $5. Participants must be clothed and sober to board the bus.
• Pumping of waste tanks from recreational vehicles, provided via a contract with Johnny on the Spot, which also services the event's portable toilets.

Volunteering

The Burning Man event is heavily dependent on a large number of volunteers. Many of these participants happily donate their time and energy to assure the event's continued survival.

Art

Art on the playa is assisted by the Artery, which helps artists place their art in the desert and ensures lighting (to prevent accidental collisions), burn-platform (to protect the integrity of the dry lake bed), and fire-safety requirements are met.

Since 1995, a different theme has been created, ostensibly by Larry Harvey, for each year's event. For 2006 it was "Hope and Fear" and for 2007 it is "The Green Man." It determines to some extent the design of the Man (although his design and construction, while evolutionary, has remained relatively unchanged) and especially the structure on which he stands (an Observatory for "Vault of Heaven," a Lighthouse for "The Floating World"). These themes also greatly affect the designs participants employ in their artworks, costumes, camps and vehicles.

Burning Man primarily features outsider art and visionary art, though a great variety of art forms are presented during the event. Creative expression through the arts and interactive art are encouraged at Burning Man. Numerous Theme Camps, registered and placed by the LLC, are created as event and residence centers by sizable sub-communities of participants and use extensive design and artistic elements to engage the greater community and meet the LLC's interactivity requirements. Music, performance, and guerrilla street theatre are art forms commonly presented within the camps and developed areas of the city. Adjacent to the city, the dry lake bed of Lake Lahontan serves as a tabula rasa for hundreds of isolated artworks, ranging from small to very large-scale art installations, often sculptures with kinetic, electronic, and fire elements.

Artwork is generally viewed as a gift the artist makes to the community, although art grants are available to participants from the LLC via a system of curation and oversight, with application deadlines early in the year. Grants are intended to help artists produce work beyond the scope of their own means, and are generally intended to cover only a portion of the costs associated with creation of the pieces, usually requiring considerable reliance on an artist's community resources. Aggregate funding for all grants varies depending on the number and quality of the submissions (usually well over 100) but amounts to several percent (on the order of $500,000 in recent years) of the gross receipts from ticket sales. In 2006, 29 pieces were funded.

Various standards regarding the nature of the artworks eligible for grants are set by the Art Department of the LLC, but compliance with the theme and interactivity are important considerations. This funding has fostered artistic communities, most notably in the Bay Area of California, the region that has historically provided a majority of the event's participants. There are active and successful outreach efforts to enlarge the regional scope of the event and the grant program. Among these is the Black Rock Arts Foundation (BRAF).

While BRAF does not fund any installations for the event itself, it relies on the donations from the LLC for a significant portion of its funding, and does facilitate presentation of work created for the event in outside venues as well as offering its own grants for artworks that typify interactivity and other principles and traditions the event.

Mutant vehicles

Mutant Vehicles are vehicles, often motorized, that are purpose-built, or more commonly, creatively altered cars and trucks, and are a common art form at Burning Man. These range in size from motorized chairs and couches to golfcarts and large double decker buses even to tanks such as the Badonkadonk Land Cruiser. Participants who wish to bring motorized art cars or Mutant Vehicles must submit their designs in advance to the event's own DMV or "Department of Mutant Vehicles” for approval and for physical inspection at the time of the event. Vehicles that are unsafe, minimally altered, and/or whose primary function is to transport participants are discouraged or rejected. In prior years art cars (defined as art vehicles that are still legally driveable on public roadways) were allowed but as the number of participants at the event increased, further restrictions needed to be added to the registration process. Now it is very rare for an art car to become registered - the level of modification required is generally large enough to rule out most such vehicles. Art cars can be present at campsites but they must remain stationary for the duration of their stay.

Most participants bring bicycles to help traverse the event, which covers an area of approx. five square miles. Many participants turn their off-the-shelf bicycles into art bikes through "garage engineering" and decoration with accessories including fake fur, reflective tape, stuffed animals, electroluminescent wire and other materials.

Temples

In addition to the burning of the Man, the burning of a temple has become an important ritual at the event. The ritual burning of David Best's temple projects from 2000 to 2004 rivaled the burning of the central Burning Man complex in community significance and popularity. The ornately designed temple buildings have used recycled scrap plywood from toy manufacture and other wood mill operations and have borrowed from Southeast Asian and Balinese architecture to create very large and flammable structures. Themes of loss and grief are expressed by participants who use the temples as repositories for memories, often of deceased loved ones, which are often commemorated with objects and mementos placed in the temple and writings on the objects or the temple itself.

In 2005, Best stepped aside to allow for another artist, Mark Grieve, to build his own interpretation of a temple. Grieve's temples were seen in both 2005 and 2006. However, David Best will once again embrace the title of temple builder for the 2007 event.

Black Rock City

The neon-tubed Man at the 1999 event

Black Rock City, often abbreviated to BRC, is the name of the temporary urban phenomenon created by Burning Man participants. Much of the layout and general city infrastructure is constructed by Department of Public Works (DPW) volunteers who often reside in Black Rock city for several weeks before and after the event. The remainder of the city including theme camps, art installations and individual camping, are all created by participants each year.

City planning

The developed part of the city is currently arranged as series of concentric streets in an arc composing, since 1999, two-thirds of a 1.5 mile (2.4 km) diameter circle (resembling the layout of Poverty Point or Seaside, Florida) with the Man Sculpture and his supporting complex at the very center. Radial streets, sometimes called Avenues, extend from the Man to the outermost circle. The outlines of these streets are visible on aerial photographs.

The innermost street is named the Esplanade, and the remaining streets are given names to coincide with the overall theme of the burn, and ordered in ways such as alphabetical order or stem to stern, to make them easier to recall. In 1999, for the "Wheel of Time" theme, and again in 2004 for the "The Vault of Heaven" theme, the streets were named after the planets of the solar system. The radial streets are usually given a clock designation (for example, "6:00, 6:15"), in which the Man is at the center of the clock face and 12:00 is in the middle of the third of the arc lacking streets. These avenues have been identified in other ways, notably in the 2002, in accordance with "The Floating World" theme as the degrees of a compass (for example, "180, 175 degrees") and in 2003 as part of the Beyond Belief theme as adjectives ("Rational, Absurd") that caused every intersection with a concentric street (named after concepts of belief such as "Authority, Creed") to form a phrase such as "Absurd Authority" or "Rational Creed". However, these proved unpopular with participants due to difficulty in navigating the city without the familiar clock layout.

Center Camp

Center Camp is located along the midline of BRC, facing the Man at the 6:00 position on the Esplanade, and serves as a central meeting place for the entire city. It is also the only place within in Black Rock City where things can officially be purchased with money - though only drinks from the Center Camp Cafe and ice from Camp Arctica.

Villages and theme camps

Villages and theme camps are located along the innermost streets of Black Rock City, often offering entertainment or a service to the temporary residents.

Theme camps are usually a collective of people representing themselves under a single identity. Villages are usually a collection of smaller theme camps which have banded together in order to share resources and vie for better placement. Some theme camps and villages have added links at the end of this article.

The Burning Man community

Terminology

There is specific terminology used by the Burning Man community.

burner

A Burning Man participant.

LEO

a Law Enforcement Officer. This includes local, county, state, and federal officers, as well as federal BLM rangers, but NOT Black Rock Rangers.

MOOP

Matter Out Of Place. Litter on the playa.

MIP

Matter In Place. Identifying the correct spot for an object or undoing MOOP.

piss clear

if your urine isn't clear and abundant, you're not drinking enough water. Also the name of the Black Rock City alternative paper which is distributed daily.

playa name

a pseudonym by which a burner goes around at the playa, often something creative, funny, and witty.

Six Up!

a phrase used to indicate the presence or near presence of a LEO.

tourist

Pejorative terms used to refer to people who come to Burning Man as spectators rather than participate in the event, often arriving not long before the actual act of immolating the effigy.

virgin

A first-time Burning Man attendee, or one who has yet to attend the event but plans to do so eventually.

welcome home

how the citizens greet each other. You are welcomed to participate and to belong. This phrase may have originated with the Rainbow Gathering.

whiteout

A dust storm on the playa.

yahoo

see "tourist".

Self-expression

The event promotes self-expression, and participants express themselves in a variety of ways. The event is clothing-optional and public nudity is common, though not practiced by the majority.

Burning Man and the environment

"Leave No Trace" policy

Participants are encouraged to Leave No Trace of their visit to Black Rock City. Burning Man takes place in the middle of an uninhabited large desert playa. Participants are told to be very careful not to contaminate the playa with litter (commonly known as MOOP, or "matter out of place"). In addition, while fire is a primary component of many art exhibits and events, materials must be burned on burn platforms. At one time, burning was allowed to take place directly on the ground of the playa, but the formation of burn scars was observed.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which maintains the desert, has very strict requirements for the event. These stipulations include trash cleanup, removal of burn scars, dust abatement, and capture of fluid drippings from participant vehicles. For four weeks after the event has ended, the Black Rock City Department of Public Works (BRC - DPW) Playa Restoration Crew, remains in the desert cleaning up after the temporary city and making sure that no evidence of the event remains.

A local environmental group, http://stopburningman.org, has criticized Burning Man for the environmental impact left by the event. Their criticisms include the following

• Despite the BLM and LLC insistence on the practice of LNT, the amount of residual trash at the site has increased over the years.
• The cleanup verification process is flawed
• According to ecologists Peter Brussard and Donald Sada, the cumulative effects of Burning Man on the complex playa ecosystem need to be more carefully investigated.("Stop Burning Man". Retrieved 2006-08-06.)

Burning Man and effect on global warming

A group of San Francisco scientists are calculating how much the event will contribute to global warming. They have created the CoolingMan organization and have implemented a system that will calculate how much greenhouse gases Burning Man participants will create. The project has inspired many to look for positive ways to get involved in the global warming and climate change movements by seeking out solutions. The CoolingMan website suggests ways that Burners may offset the damage by planting trees or investing in alternative energy solutions. Since this is a new development, the impact won't be fully realized until Burning Man 2007, a year when ecological concerns will also be explored through the art theme of "The Green Man".

Safety, policing and regulations

BRC is patrolled by various local and state law enforcement agencies as well as the Bureau of Land Management Rangers. Burners refer to these people collectively as LEOs (Law Enforcement Officers). Burning Man also has its own in-house group of volunteers, the Black Rock Rangers, who act as informal mediators when disputes arise between burners. When the occasional eviction of a burner from BRC becomes necessary, volunteer rangers typically enlist the assistance of LEOs.

Burning Man has developed a reputation for drug use, which is not tolerated by law enforcement.

In 2001, local law enforcement objected to an art installation depicting a homosexual act at a former camp called "Jiffy Lube" now renamed "Stiffy Lube." The art was moved to a more private area of the camp, giving rise to charges of censorship and homophobia from a number of quarters.

Regional events

The popularity of Burning Man has encouraged other groups and organizations to hold events similar to Burning Man. In recent years, burners wishing to experience Burning Man more frequently than once per year have banded together to create local regional events such as Xara Dulzura, Fuego de los Muertos in San Diego, Playa del Fuego in Delaware, Burning Flipside in Texas, Recompression near Vancouver, BC, and Kiwiburn in Whakamaru, New Zealand.

Some of the events are officially affiliated with the Burning Man organization via the Burning Man Regional Network. This official affiliation usually requires the event to conform to certain standards outlined by the Burning Man organization, and to be substantially coordinated by a "Burning Man Regional Contact," a volunteer organizer with an official relationship to the Burning Man Project via a legal Letter of Agreement. In exchange for conforming to these standards, the event is granted permission to officially represent itself as a Burning Man Regional Event.

Other events similar to or inspired by Burning Man are organized and created by burners completely independent of affiliation with the LLC.

Some of these events are attended by only a few hundred participants, but larger numbers of participants are becoming more common as any individual events build in reputation and in production. It is also becoming more common, that successful regional events create a need to develop official entities which are entrusted by the community, to handle the details of the event (such as ticket sales, insurance policies, permits, and local and federal tax liabilities). Based on the Burning Man principals, these entities which are created to produce the events are usually non-profit organizations, such as Ignition Northwest in Washington state.

One type of event is popular with those that find returning to the "default world" to be a little jarring after having enjoyed the experiences of the burn. To relieve this culture shock, burners may participate in Decompression events to recapture the spirit of the original event.

Other regional events have been established that connect and grow localized communities of burners. These events build upon the cultural bond of Burning Man, yet add a particular unique flavor of their own. Most regional events last a few days, occur annually, and are much less formal than Burning Man itself.

See also: List of regional Burning Man events

Burning Man in popular culture

Television

Burning Man has been featured in both fictional and non-fictional accounts on American television.

• In the 1997 Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "When She Was Bad," Sunnydale High's computer science teacher Jenny Calendar describes her summer vacation (which included attending Burning Man) to Buffy's watcher, Rupert Giles:

  "I did Burning Man in Black Rock, ohhh, such a great festival, you should've been there. They had drum rituals, mobile sculptures, raves, naked mud dances, you would've just... hated it with a fiery passion!"

• In a 2000 episode of The Simpsons Lisa joins the environmental group Dirt First which is looking for someone to camp out with in an endangered tree. The group's leader, Jesse, says, "Once you're up there, you can't come down. Not for a Phish concert, not even for Burning Man."

• In an episode of Jimmy Neutron, Jimmy's dad attends an event called Burning Duck.

• In the 2003 Reno 911! episode "Burning Man Festival," the officers, planning to go undercover at Burning Man, head out from Reno but get lost on the way, encountering various embarrassing situations such as having to attend a family restaurant in their fairly ridiculous costumes and getting questioned by other fellow cops.

• In the 2005 South Park episode "Die Hippie, Die," Eric Cartman briefly makes references to Burning Man while talking about hippie festivals. Also, in the background at the hippie festival, a large neon man, similar to the one at Burning Man, can be seen.

• In the 2005 American Dad! episode "Francine's Flashback," Stan and Hayley actually attend the event in order to rescue their brainwashed mother.

• In the 2005 Malcolm in the Middle episode "Burning Man," Hal and Lois discover Malcolm and Reese's plan to sneak off to Burning Man, and decide to make it a family outing, with predictably disastrous results. Hal sets up a barbecue grill and curious observers assume that he's actually engaged in some kind of "suburban dad" performance art. Reese and Lois embrace the true spirit of the event and Malcolm loses his virginity to an older woman. In the end, as opposed to the man burning, the RV the family came in is burned and is thus dubbed "Burning Van."

• Burning Man 2006 was covered extensively for television for the first time by Current TV which handed out cameras to participants and broadcast daily updates via satellite from the playa. In keeping with the spirit of Burning Man, Current TV removed their corporate branding and said no to commercial sponsorship for the entire week of coverage. The result was a temporary "pirate" TV station known simply as TV Free Burning Man.

• In the Clone High episode titled "Homecoming: A Shot in the D'Arc", Clone High principal, Cinnamon J. Scudworth, and GESH (Genetically Engineered Super Human High) principal, Colonel Principal, make a bet on a basketball game between the two schools. Colonel Principal's bet is the Clone High won't score a single point against GESH. The loser has to do the other principal's laundry for a week. When Clone High does score one point, Scudworth holds up a pair of stained underwear in front of Colonel Principal and says "I wore these bad boys at Burning Man...7 years in a row!"

• In an episode of Darma and Greg, the couple try explaining what Burning Man is to Greg's parents... who obviously don't get "it".

Film

• Several documentaries have been made about the event, including Burning Man: Beyond Black Rock and Juicy Danger Meets Burning Man. A short documentary on Discovery: Times's Only in America hosted by Charlie Leduff. A clip from the 1998 burning of the Man can be seen in Bodysong, a full-length documentary about human life on earth.

• Naked States, a documentary about and directed by photographer Spencer Tunick, also features Burning Man, where he organized thousands of participants to pose for an epic artistic nude photograph.

• In the 2007 Movie "Knocked Up" one of the characters undergoes harassment for growing a beard. One of the comments made towards him is "Going to make it to Burning Man this year?"

• A documentary film is also currently in the making by Madnomad Films. The filmmaker has been following the Flaming Lotus Girls since 2004, as well as other groups of Artist. For previews please check at http://www.madnomad.net/menu/index.php?iframe=film

• Part of the film Neurosphere was produced at Burning Man. The film is expected for release in 2009.

• Dave Attell references Burning Man in a routine on his Album Skanks for the Memories.

Software

In 2006 the first Burning Man Software was created by Dan Alvidrez (The Builder) of BurnItMan.org. He created several pieces of Mac OSX Software that topped Apple.com's charts including:

• The Burning Man Countdown Widget
• The Burning Man Search Widget
• The Burning Man Slideshow Widget
• The Burning Man Screensaver

Other Burning Man software includes:

• Virtual world Second Life has an annual virtual burn, Burning Life, that coincides with Burning Man.

Print

• In issue 75 of the Marvel Comics book X-Force, the characters visited a thinly disguised Burning Man-like event entitled "Exploding Colossal Man."

• The parody newspaper The Onion has published several jabs at Burning Man, including 1998's "Local Teen Definitely Going to Burning Man Next Year" and 2003's "No One Makes It to Burning Man Festival".

• The book The Google Story by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed contains an entire chapter describing how Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the creators of the Google search engine, were regular attendees of the event.

See also

• Larry Harvey
• Black Rock Ranger
• Art Car
• List of regional Burning Man events

External links

• Official Website
• Template:Dmoz
• Piss Clear, Black Rock City's independent alternative newspaper
• BurnItMan.org, Burning Man Software, High Rez Photos & Videos - By Burners for Burners!!