The temple at Burning Man is an amazing artifact of secular humanism and a moving beacon of non-denominational transcendence. Every year, burners visiting the temple find themselves surprised at being brought to tears by visiting a place so full of emotion. Even though it is temporary and only exists for a week, it is a place for mourning, for celebrating, and for feeling connected to one another, free of the orthodoxies of organized religion.
The design for the 2023 temple, called the Temple of the Heart, has been announced:
It’s been three years since Burning Man Project announced a new physical Temple, so we are extremely excited to kick off the new year by presenting Temple of the Heart by Ela Madej with Co-lead, Reed Finlay.
It looks amazing! They’re going to need a lot of volunteers and some money to bring this to fruition, so visit their website and see what you can do to help.
If you run a returning theme camp that has been to Burning Man before, and you are hoping to get some of the goodies that the Placement team dispenses, like, um, placement, but also Stewards Tickets, you’ve got a form due January 18th:
Placement’s Statement of Intent (SOI) is due January 18 at 12 pm PT / 3 pm ET / 9 pm CET for all returning theme camps and villages planning to participate in BRC this year and request ticket access for the Stewards ticket sale (formerly Directed Group Sale or DGS). Log into your Burner Profile and navigate to the BRC Participation Forms to access the form.
What are Stewards Tickets? Burning Man is limited to about 70,000 participants, but there are thousands more who would love to go, so the tickets in the main sale essentially sell out in a matter of seconds and many hopeful burners are left without tickets.
Back in 2011, Burning Man sold out for the first time. In 2012, they tried running a lottery to allocate ticket sales, which was, essentially, a fiasco. Suddenly theme camps, art projects, and mutant vehicles found that their key members – the artists, creators, organizers and builders, did not score in the lottery and didn’t have tickets.
(The whole story of the lottery disaster is covered in the documentary film Spark: A Burning Man Story).
To address this problem, the org decided to reserve a certain percentage of tickets for creators. Originally called Directed Group Sales, they were renamed Stewards Tickets in 2021.
If a returning theme camp is in good standing, the Placement team will allocate a certain number of tickets that members of that camp can buy without fighting it out in the main ticket sale (which is basically a lottery that sells out immediately). The exact formula remains a tightly guarded secret but many theme camps report that they get enough for about 1/3 of their campers.
What is Placement again? That’s the all-volunteer team that reviews applications from potential theme camps and decides where to place them on the map of Black Rock City.
Anyone can subscribe to the Placement Newsletter which is a good idea if you are involved in organizing a theme camp because you will find out about important deadlines, like this one!
Life is a Festival hosted by Eamon Armstrong. About all kinds of transformational festivals but includes a lot of Burning Man episodes.
Burncast ran continuously from 2007-2009, hosted by DaBomb. A great oral history of a particular slice in time of Burning Man history.
The Intersection, a series produced by radio station KALW, did a whole season on Burning Man in 2019, hosted by David Boyer
Galaxy Tenants is a podcast mostly about music, but they did about ten episodes about Burning Man that are outstanding. Look for episodes 021-027, 042, 045-047 and 0490
Every year I hold my breath for Duncan Rawlinson‘s amazing set of Burning Man photos. They’re comprehensive, high-resolution, and Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial, which means you’re legally able to use them for non-commercial purposes. In a minute I’m going to take advantage of that to spruce up this website with some of his great photography!
The Man 2022The Seed of DreamsSharkPoint of ViewConfluenceMidnight MuseumEmpyrean Temple
You can either see this year’s collection on Flickr, which works best with mobile, or directly on Duncan’s own website, which is a single page that takes forever to load and will try very hard to crash your browser. He’s also got a great Spotify playlist of music from this year’s burn which I’ve got in heavy rotation right now!
Marc is an amazing burner; his LED suit probably has more individual LEDs than anyone else on playa and his very old-school blog captures the playa vibe perfectly. Check out his pictures here.
A lot of people think that 88NV, the Black Rock City airport, is a problem, bringing in the crowds of rich spectators who spend their nights dancing at Mayan Warrior without contributing or participating in the interactive experience of Burning Man. “A large percentage of the worst BM participants make it to BRC in via the airport,” writes didacticgiraffe on Reddit. The Burning Man organization generally likes the airport because the size of Black Rock City is limited by the Bureau of Land Management based on the capacity of the roads (447) to bring in people, and the few hundred people who come in via air allow more people to participate in Burning Man.
“There’s an endless menagerie of imagined animals we bring with us to Burning Man.” This year’s theme is Animalia.
Art themes can mean as much, or as little, as you want them too. There’s no rule that says art at Burning Man has to fit in with the theme. I guess a good way to decide how inspirational a theme is to Burning Man artists would be to look at how much art seems to fit the theme.
My first year was 2018 when the theme was “I, Robot” when there were just a ton of cool robots all over the playa, including a dozen very diverse robots standing sentinel around the man base.
Stay True to your Selfie by: Larsen Family from: Shingle Springs, CA year: 2018 Photo courtesy Duncan Rawlinson, https://duncan.co.
