Eight visual and media artists from Tampa, Florida decided to pool their talent and resources and make the trek to Nevada. The five day mission of these self proclaimed "media refugees" was to gather the sights and sounds of Burning Man as best they could-and have one a Hell of a time doing it. The results of these efforts would eventually become "Flashback".
For those who don't know... Burning Man is loosely organized festival, that takes place each Labor Day weekend. Located in the middle of Black Rock Desert, an absolutely empty patch of federal land in northern Nevada. This year was the 12th incarnation of the event.
For the pst two years approximately 10,000 to 12,000 people hauled their own shelter, food, and water to create an instant city. The area is spotted with encampments - of tents, jury-rigged huts, and circles of Winnebagos. The vehicles and structures are organized into affinity tribes: pyromaniac camp, wind surfer camp, psychedelics camp, rave camp, art camp, gun and ammo camp, and so on. The point of it all? That's up to each participant. There are no spectators.
The meteoric growth of Burning Man is becoming a conflagration--a fire so large that it has generated its own wind. Unlike the Woodstock generation, the participants of Burning Man embrace new technologies (as well as nudity and psychedelilc drugs). Many of them are computer programmers, designers and graphic artists in their real lives. As concrete evidence of this, consult the growing community of individual web sites that have been generated by participants. They have begun to form a wave, a spreading tsunami of information. In its fast gathering magnitude, it dwarfs any conscious campaign of promotion.
Any large corporate entity, spending millions to develop web sites and commercial advertising campaigns, might well envy the contagious spread of public enthusiasm that Burning Man has produced. With a cover story in Wired magazine (November '96) public perception and interest has grown rapidily.
So with two RV's stuffed to the gills with 24 cases of gear, fuel, watermelons, clothing, and 20 5 gallon bottles of water we made a temporary home among the dusty campers. Armed with three camera systems we sought not to make sense of, or put our slant on the event- rather to explore, let events happen without our interference and make sure our cameras were rolling. We met many interesting, kind, and creative souls on the playa. We became part of the emerging community-adding to it and take some back with us.
Over twenty hours of raw material now awaits a re-transformation. We weren't the only ones out there documenting the event. Crews from news stations, super-stations, and other independents such as us, were there too. no one can claim to have the exclusive version of this story. It is too spontaneous, surreal, and spread out.
Our goal now is to put together a piece that reflects the energy and spirit of the event by mixing together and juxtapositioning the images: day and night, close-up and paranoramic, bizarre and the even more bizarre in hopes of simulating what it was like to be there. Of course, there is no substitute for tearing your clothes off, yelling your lungs out and dancing around a bonfire with a few thousand ecstatic people until dawn, but perhaps it's as close as you can come from the comfort of your living room.
