City as thesis: The sandbox mode of Burning Man
- Leonie Maya Gantenbein
- Sep 10
- 5 min read
As a philosopher, I read Black Rock City as a diagnosis of the present: a temporary city that produces its own infrastructures, rituals, and technologies and simultaneously releases them into the world as an open thesis.
City on electricity
Surrounded by mountain ranges lies the desert of the dried-up salt lake Lahontan – on the territory of the Northern Paiute people. Beneath the vast expanses of the pop-up city "Black Rock City," built there for a week, lies a complex A power grid woven into the desert surface. It's not just a few extension cords, but a veritable labyrinth of batteries, solar panels, and generators that power the basic infrastructure of a temporary city of 80,000 residents day and night. This complex power supply is a constantly evolving network, with renewable energy, alternative fuels, and cutting-edge battery technology displacing fossil fuels and conventional generators. "Burners" (as Black Rock City's residents call themselves) have always been at the forefront of cultural, technological, and logistical innovations—with some of these innovations finding their way out into the world to offer new solutions to similar problems.
Hardware instead of simulation
In an age when more and more technology is merely simulated, it's worthwhile to venture out into the desert with real hardware. In the Black Rock Desert, technology is transformed – it becomes interactive, alive, and art. Whether it's sextant Tesla coils, a converted Boeing 747, AI experiments, or other interactive installations: Here, technology becomes tangible with dusty hands. This year's " The Moonlight Library " was a ruin-like library made of real books, in which individual volumes silently play stories when touched on their spines. The audio narrations come from visitors to the previous installation, "The Prairie of Possibilities" (2022/23). Invisibly integrated capacitive sensors, microcontrollers, and a local computer network control voices, light, and sound. A technology that seemed deliberately archaic and taken for granted to me.
Innovation and chaos, religion and technology, artists and AI merge to reveal projects that shape the dualities and paradigms of tomorrow.
Poetry through AI interaction
This year, a beautifully prepared photo booth snapped a photo of my beach outfit at Central Camp. My prompt: a black bikini top, dust goggles, jewelry with pendants, and temporary tattoos on my arm. I then received a five-line response:
"A bright afternoon cast its light. On shades where cool style takes flight. With ink on their arm. Jewels add to the charm. And confidence dressed in black's might."
« A vintage booth that translates your dusty presence into printed poetry... 24/7. », he said Verse-O-Matic: Self-Portrait Reimagined.
Data becomes images, images become conversations
Burning Stories is a science art project that has been collecting real narratives at transformation festivals like Burning Man since 2018 and processing them with AI so that collective patterns can be seen and felt. The foundation consists of 490 written stories, plus an indexed library of 290 research articles and 60 podcasts from the Burning Man cosmos. Embeddings are created from the stories, followed by UMAP, HDBSCAN, TF-IDF, and LLMs for meaningful cluster labels. Each story is then translated into an AI image using DALL·E, which the painter Luca Delcado further reworks with oil. This creates a deliberately hybrid human-AI-human practice. At the same time, the Burner AI platform opens an interactive map with a chat. Visitors can explore data patterns and contribute their own story. The project will be presented in Black Rock City 2025. Podcast "AI in Art in Black Rock City" The team led by Jukka-Pekka Heikkilae, Kiana Kiser, and Michael Zeltner describes how Burner AI makes knowledge from community stories, research, and podcasts accessible and brings it into conversation locally. This is how research meets art and community: data becomes images, images become conversations, and new conversations feed back into the living archive.
Far-reaching care
In Black Rock City, peer support has long since become professional: The Zendo Project has been offering quiet spaces and trained volunteers to support difficult psychoactive experiences since 2012. The Zendo operates a sanctuary on site as a retreat for those overwhelmed, and the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) of the Emergency Services Department triages and connects support—a kind of playbook that BRC is testing as a real-world laboratory and that serves as a best practice for harm reduction at other festivals.
Shelter for the whole world
The harsh climate on the former Lahontan Salt Lake (now a salt desert with alkaline dust) has required creativity and new solutions from the Black Rock Citizen since the pop-up city was relocated to Nevada's Black Rock Desert. This has led to the creation of insulating and quickly erected tents and shelters, such as the Hexayurte and the SHIFTPOD , which developed into their own brands. Since then, they have been continuously developed into even more robust and sustainable models and used as robust emergency shelters in earthquake zones, for example, or for emergency and refugee aid projects around the world. Our Hexayurte survived its third Burning Man this year, two of which (2023, 2025) were subject to severe thunderstorms and sandstorms.
Energy as a learning curve
Teslas with diesel generators were parked in the desert again this year, and during the day generators hummed, charging the increasing number of e-bikes. Net Zero BRC Initiative The community is testing transitions away from Fossil fuels : batteries in temporary grids, renewable fuels such as R99, solar infrastructure, and solar-powered light towers – with the aim of providing solutions for other large-scale events and temporary cities. Regional events offer ecological and technological workshops and discussion platforms for renewable energy.
The Renewables for Artists Team (RAFT) supports artworks and camps in their transition to solar/microgrids and exports this knowledge beyond the Playa. From the ecosystem, Black Rock Solar , which installed a system that now covers over 30% of the energy needs of the schools in Gerlach, is an example of how Playa pilots are impacting the region. Fly Ranch as a year-round test area: With the Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI) Prototypes are created that combine art with infrastructure – solutions for electricity, water, food, shelter and waste recycling.
You can see how well solar panels are already working in Black Rock City when large art cars with relatively small panels glide silently past you. Even when the sun is blazing down in high temperatures, it always seems innovative to me.
Through Burning Man, the Black Rock Desert becomes a studio, a stage, a city of possibilities. Even without great talent or without extensive resources or equipment, you call yourself an "artist"—you simply create, give, and bring forth.
People forge armor and jewelry, design fashion, build sculptures, robots, and vehicles, and program intelligent technological AI interactions. Here, art and innovation are playful, immediate, and accessible.
Click here for the LinkedIn article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stadt-als-der-sandkastenmodus-des-burning-mans-dr-leonie-mathis-30dwf
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