Temporal Decomposition, which wasn’t unveiled until Saturday, took the cake as far as conceptual art pieces go. My hat goes off to the artist. (One of the great things about Burning Man was the anonymity of the artists - recognition that we can all be artists was a sublime understatement) If you picture some artist(s) who go out into the desert, bring lots of materials to build a 20 foot sphere-shaped mold, a big chilling unit, and enclose the mold when they’re finished building it in a casing of hay bales and then start filling it with water and miscellaneous found objects while the water begins to freeze and continue filling and freezing till the entire mold is full then you start to get the picture. Now picture unwrapping it all in 90 degree heat to the pleasure of all of those people sweltering in the heat looking for something cold to do. A more appreciative crowd could not be found. People touched it, rubbed themselves on it and took naps underneath it. I understand that it was expected to take over 20 days to melt completely. Really cool. Literally.
On Friday night Jason and I tried to figure out how we were going to put on a laser show without having access to a sound system in our Republic, not to mention where we were going to put up a screen. We struck out on both counts, though not for lack of trying - we started trying too late for it to happen that night and ended up putting the projector up on top of the cargo van we had rented and doing some lame beams into the night sky and onto the Monkey Palace. This was only fun for a little while, until we noticed that the projector was getting dusty fast and realized our gas supply was finite.
Then came time for the Blessing of the Bicycles, Group Wedding and Critical Mass ride at the base of the Man. I got there five minutes late and missed the Blessing and Wedding but got to ride around the man with a few hundred other cyclists. Everyone would ride clockwise for awhile until someone would yell "SWITCH" and everyone would gracefully switch directions. No casualties, of course, because there were no speed demons. Then someone would ride against the grain for a few laps swerving through the oncoming traffic, before someone would shout "SWITCH" again. This went on for about fifteen minutes and then, for no apparent reason other than the group mind was probably getting a bit dizzy and a little bored, the circle dispersed and everyone went off riding in different directions.
