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Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
Burning Man 2000 ( day 2 ) : Page 1, 2, 3, 4
Imagine Burning Man as a nine square mile art installation set on a thousand square miles of bleached alkaline desert. It’s a canvas only God could begin to fill. Not everyone comes to Black Rock City to create, but those who do — limited only by means, talent, and ambition — create works of art ranging from body painting to mammoth sculptures. Every imaginable material is used—fabric, wood, steel, the alkaline lake bed itself, a twenty-ton meteor-like boulder hauled from outside the nearby town of Gerlach, even light.
The hand-blown laser weighs eight-hundred pounds and requires a clean room environment and its own 6700-gallon water tanker to keep it cool. At work it is breathtaking. Despite only four hours sleep the previous night, I drag myself out to attend the show sometime late each night. (Time has no meaning here. It’s 24/7 here; the numbers on my watch no longer correlate with the quotidian.) To the pounding sound of techno-pop and bass-and-drum music, the laser sculpts an infinite variety of half-mile long, three-dimensional geometrical objects over and around us, then spins them into the sky. It is awe-inspiring. Despite the siren call of my sleeping bag I laugh and dance within the light until the show ends some hours(?) later. I asked Patrick why he does it. Why spend so much money and time to come to Burning Man? He doesn’t know. Instead he talks about the Sacred Ratio in the works of Rembrandt and DaVinci. The laser uses an algorithm based on the ratio, which also determines the placement of leaves on trees and the proportions of the human body. When he finishes I ask again: why the money, why the time? He thinks a minute. "In the outside world, time is money," he says at last. "At Burning Man, time is art."
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Patrick Flanagan has been in love with light as long as he can remember. With a riot of sandy hair, heart-and-star tattoos on his pecs, and coiled black earrings, it would be easy to mistake him for an aging Santa Cruz surfer-dude (he has homes there and in Sedona), not a scientist and inventor who spent a half-million dollars to bring a powerful krypton-argon laser to Burning Man. 
