Burning Man Festival

BURNING MAN ISN’T YOUR USUAL FESTIVAL. IT’S A CITY WHERE ALMOST EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS IS CREATED ENTIRELY BY ITS CITIZENS, WHO ARE ACTIVE PARTICIPANTS IN THE EXPERIENCE. 

Burning Man is an annual week-long gathering at the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada, in the United States and turning your fantasies and your imagination into reality. Dedicated to anti-consumerism, self-reliance and self-expression, the Burning Man festival, which appealed more than 65,500 participants in 2014, traditionally ends with the ritual burning of a large wooden statue of a man, which is set ablaze on Saturday evening.

In other words, it’s a week long gathering of people who are fascinated in exploring the world, which is about entities producing instead of masses consuming; of people building something of direct value to their community rather than doing whatsoever it takes to be able to buy stuff that has little value but derives with a silly brand or logo on it.

Burning Man was founded in 1986 when San Francisco artist Larry Harvey gathered a small group of people on the Summer Solstice to burn an 8-foot wooden structure of a man at Baker Beach. Today, Burning Man is celebrated on an empty lake bed in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. For six days in late August, “Black Rock City” exists as a self-sustaining community. On the seventh day, the residents of the temporary community break camp, taking care to “leave no trace.” Burning Man, which costs over $8 million dollars to run, is supported by ticket sales. (In 2006, a ticket at the gate cost $350.) A team of six people, led by founder Larry Harvey, plan and oversee the festival. Profits from the event are invested in creating the following year’s festival.

Unconventional forms of self-expression (like performance art using light or fire, nude body painting or the creation of “Mutant vehicles”) are integral to the Burning Man experience. In 2005, Burning Man featured over 275 art projects, 485 theme camps, an extranet ,intranet and a WiFi network that provided the entire area with connectivity. In Black Rock City, all commercial activity is forbidden and is replaced by the adoption of an extensive barter economy and the practice of “gifting.” Due to the harsh conditions of the desert, a comprehensive survival guide that emphasizes the importance of self-reliance and preparedness is provided to all prospective residents. Civic responsibility and communal effort are of special importance. Volunteers and a limited number of paid employees contribute to the creation of the physical community, including telecommunications infrastructure, fire management, waste control and the immense clean up efforts that follow. Total cleanup, a requirement of the Bureau of Land Management, can take as long as a month.

Burning Man is a place where accepting your and others’ individuality, freedom of expression and right to do all that jazz you want (as long as it doesn’t violate someone else rights) is highly esteemed.

It’s a place for those – the crazy ones who have belief in their god-like power to outline a reality where the purpose of life is to give and experience as much happiness and sovereignty as possible.

Burning Man has grown with the Internet as a populist movement and is sometimes seen as a concrete version of the free wheeling, “anything goes” spirit of the early Internet. The festival has inspired many of the Web’s founding technologists with its ability to generate personal connections that transcend traditional divisions of age, income, geography and class. Past “burners,” as participants are known, include Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Brian Behlendorf, the primary developer of the Apache Web server and Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive.

The easy way to describe Burning Man is its like going to an event with 60,000 people and everybody shares everything they have with every person. No Money is swapped at the event, except for buying coffee and ice, which is run by the event, and all the money goes to charities.

In April 2011, Larry Harvey declared that the organization had started the process of transitioning management of Burning Man over to a new non-profit organization named the “Burning Man Project.”

Some pictures of Burning Man Festival :