The Breathtaking Wonderment of Burning Man's Lighting Installations

The Breathtaking Wonderment of Burning Man's Lighting Installations

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Burning Man is a festival sure to have crossed the radar of any individual interested in intricate lighting and sculpture combinations, sustainable arts, and Mad Max-style desert celebration of humanity. The 8 day-long festival takes place in a hand-made, desert lake city which disappears soon after the event ends, with a huge, ceremonial burning of all temporary art installations. Although it may seem this festival is made for hippy-dippy ravers, the reality of the situation is that techno punks and futuristic tech-smart innovators rule the barren and unforgiving desert lands of Black Rock City. Such individuals create the shocking new conceptions of art and human potential by normalizing 50 foot sculptures with LED installations on the blank canvas of a white-hot desert. Not only does this art become part of the environment, but the people surrounding the art become part of the installations, as a form of collective expression.

This great cultural movement takes conventional art practices such as typical sculpture and learned silent observation, and flips them all around, encouraging, or rather requiring participation by all viewers. Burning Man encompasses a feeling rather similar to that of art “happenings” from the 1960’s, and combines it with modern technologies and identities relating to Silicon Valley and startup culture. To start, the center focus of the Burning Man festival revolves around a giant wooden stick figure man, which gets exploded and burned to the ground on the last day of events. However, there are countless other art installations featuring millions of LED lights, as well as moving “art cars” which are immensely more intricate and technical than the burning man himself.

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In 2006, the festival's date-of-origin, Burning Man showcased a work called "Big Round Cubatron", which happened to be the world’s largest three-dimensional full color dynamic light figure at the time. The beautiful and whimsical circle, composed of 6720 individual LED lights, stood at 10 feet in height and 40 feet in diameter. This installation encourages the connection between art, software, and hardware, derived from corporate individuals as artists, rather than businessmen.

An object of mystery and wonder was crafted by sculptor Michael Gard in 2014 for Burning Man, titled Dreams of Flight. This sculpture is composed of different wire figures in the shape of dancing men and women, with internalized LED lights which are flown around at night under the dark desert skies. The figures are held aloft in the cold night air by black balloons, which give an illusion that the dancers are flying around of their own accord.

Another amazingly beautiful use of LED lights in the desert festival location can be seen in the vast canopy of light displays which is formatted and designed to show whimsical, psychedelic, and celestial images while playing comforting classical music. This project, called Firmament was constructed by Christopher Schardt, and was envisioned to become a community gathering location in the seemingly ever-expanding desert of the festival grounds.

Many of these LED art installations present at the Burning Man festival incorporate extremely detailed and cutting edge lighting programming and design. For example, Ilya Barannikov, of the company Soul Oceans, programmed a classic UFO figure sculpture to transmit participant’s voice messages through space using an extremely powerful UV laser with a 25 light year range. This UFO, called "In Case We Miss Each Other," sits just above head of the participants, and utilizes fabric sails with holographic coloring, and custom programmed, intelligent light displays to give the installation an out-of-this-world appearance.

With a glance towards the near future, a magnificent, high-tech installation is planned to be featured at the 2018 rendition of the Burning Man festival, by artist Eran Weissenstern from Brooklyn, NY. The interactive sculpture, titled “Come-Million”, is a giant, light up chameleon which is made of hundreds of tiles containing thousands of tiny LED lights. This chameleon sculpture is meant for people to climb inside of, on top of, as well as all around, simply to be interacted with in every way. As participants interact with the installation, a strange, sensory beating heart notices the different ranges of motion, and changes the color of the tiny outer lights, in order to adapt to, and match its surroundings and inner activities. This soon-to-be responsive sculpture is a great example of how these Burning Man artists take technical-heavy ideas and incorporate them into a vast, unforgiving landscape, where the harsh realities of nature collide with human innovation and collaboration.

We here at StageSpot love providing the tools artists need to bring their vision to life. We even came to the rescue last-minute for Steven Spielberg's team earlier this year during South by Southwest for their Iron Giant installation for the feature film Ready Player One, and provided a pair of American DJ LED Dotz Pars to bring the Giant's eyes to life. 

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