ABSTRACT
Where on Earth can you find tens of thousands of people gathering in a gigantic festival intended to provide a huge variety of entertainment? Where can you find people costumed, covered in glitter, or in feathers, riding unicycles, wearing funny hats, body paint of every color, or nothing at all? Hundreds of art cars and extraordinary vehicles, from starlit UFO taxi cabs to mobile taxidermied horses, giant glowing lobsters, Viking ships, or enormous flame-belching dragons? Endless miles of participatory “theme camps” – with names like Astral Headwash, Lingerie Planet, Mad Cow Country Club, Technofartz Camp, Porn Star Lounge, and the Temple of Atonement – where festival-goers artfully offer up to one another a bizarre concatenation of spiritual and carnal sustenance and smart, regressive, pop-culture-inundated, ironic fun? Dozens of radio stations? An immense range of art, from massive sculptures made of books to digital kaleidoscopes? Where? You can find them about 120 miles east of the city of Reno, in the middle of the desert near the center of the state of Nevada, in the United States of America. For one week every year, you can find this combination of unparalleled weirdness and breathtaking inspiration at Burning Man, and at no place else on Earth.
