AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man

The Burning Man Festival is a weeklong spasm of radical self-expression held annually just before Labour Day since 1986. In late August 2003, more than 33,000 participants converged in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert for this counterculture event staged as an experiment in temporary community. The participants gather to rid themselves of the conventional structures of their life and to ‘sample’ the alternatives in hundreds of theme camps. The climax of the festival comes when attendees erupt into cheers and applause at the burning of a forty-foot-tall human effigy described as ‘part pre-technological idol and part post-technological puppet’. Both Lee Gilmore and Mark Van Proyen have attended Burning Man annually since 1996.