Although most people define Burning Man as a celebration of artistic expression, the event is really far more broadly focused and varied. Those who go to the festival, sometimes known as "Burners," have several motivations for doing so from creative expression to community involvement to celebration. Consequently, instead of having a single goal, the festival centers on ten basic ideas that the central organizing body adopted and shared on internet. These principles comprise radical inclusiveness, gifting, decommodification, extreme self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leave no trace, participation, and immediacy.
Contextual Background History
Held in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, Burning Man is an annual creative event with as its main idea great community involvement. Unlike a typical art event, Burning Man welcomes radical inclusivity and strives to inculcate a set of basic ideals among its several attendees. The week-long event offers a range of intriguing participatory frameworks to help to reach this goal, from consensus decision-making and a culture of volunteerism to interactive artwork and even the joint building of a city.
Burning Man started in the summer of 1986 when co-founders Larry Harvey and Jerry James, together with few friends, started a little bonfire ritual. On the summer solstice, they gathered on a San Francisco beach and torched a 9-foot-tall wooden man—a behavior they dubbed an act of extreme and unplanned self-expression. Legal issues stopped the beach burn in 1990, and Burning Man relocated to Black Rock Desert, a sizable and far-off dry lake in northwest Nevada the next year. 1991 also was the first year Burning Man had a legal permission from the Bureau of Land Management.
Attendance from a few hundred to several thousand people surged quickly in the mid-1990s. To oversee the growing event was a central organization created. A municipal grid plan was created and certain safety regulations were enacted as the Black Rock municipal campground's population swelled. Every year the celebration also started to have a certain theme, one that affects the design of the immobile Man as well as the artwork of attendees. The popularity and prestige of the event grew over the past ten years; annual attendance surged from 10,000 to more than 50,000 between 1997 and 2010. Every festival today runs a full week, beginning on Monday before Labor Day and ending on the holiday itself.
Originating entities and financing
Legal obligations forced the organizers of Burning Man to form Black Rock City LLC, therefore starting a formal company in 1997. Since then, this body has grown considerably more regimented in order to handle the growing event scale. Setting policies, supervising important financial decisions, and rendering any judgments directly affecting Burning Man's survival fall under its purview. Underneath this group are departments, sub-committees, various consultants, and Burning Man's senior staff. Senior staff members handle daily financial management and compile the Burning Man budget. At last, the festival depends on many independent volunteer groups, including service organizations inside the larger community and artist groups. Burning Man has worked in recent years to avoid become too bureaucratic or hierarchical. Black Rock City LLC has actually pushed a "dissemination model," whereby volunteer groups and autonomous regional organizations take increasing responsibility for event preparation and newcomer training. In 2011 Larry Harvey revealed Black Rock City LLC has started the process of moving its management to a new non-profit known as the Burningman Project.
Black Rock City LLC manages the important financial components of Burning Man planning. The public finds the event's accounting quite open; following the conclusion of every festival, an extensive financial expenditure chart is available online. The official policies of the company forbid commercial or corporate sponsorships in the event. Funding thus comes solely from ticket sales and contributions, which create a total annual budget of $10-20 million. Burning Man's expenses mostly consist in Black Rock City's infrastructure, payroll, outside service fees, and administrative expenses. At the 2010 tournament, total expenses came to $17.5 million.
Participant Finding and Selection
Consistent with the core values of Burning Man, festival attendance has always been open to anybody who wants to and self-selected. Still, registration and tickets are needed and can be found online. 2012 ticket prices ranged from $240 to $420. In 2010, attendance skyrocketed beyond 50,000, momentarily ranking Black Rock City among Nevada's biggest towns. Legal limits as well as Black Rock City LLC's own worries about too rapid development limited participation to 50,000 in 2011. Tickets sold out totally for the first time in the history of the event; in fact, all 27,000 discounted tickets were claimed within less than two days after they were offered.
The quick sellout caused the organizing body to undergo major reforms in 2012. Black Rock City LLC set up a multi-round, random-selection ticket distribution mechanism for the first times. November–December 2011 saw the pre-sale for the first 3,000 tickets sold. These $420 apiece tickets were distributed using a lottery-based system needing pre-registration. Operating in the same approach, the next 40,000 tickets were distributed in the main sale (January-February 2012). In March, the open sale sold all of the last ones. Additionally distributed were a small number of tickets through a second low-income ticket program. Black Rock City LLC requested, and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management additionally issued a special recreation permit allowing 60,900 persons to attend the 2012 event, an increase of more than 10,000 attendees from the year before.
Participants come from somewhat different personal backgrounds. Burning Man compiles and releases an annual census report to track populations. According to 2010 figures, 56% of participants fell between the ages of 18 and 35. Though just 1% of guests were under age 18, over 14% were 50 years or older. According to the census, the most of the attendees—55%—had at least a Bachelor's Degree. In addition, the great majority of Burning Man attendees—76%—were unmarried and classified as Caucasian (74%). Fascinatingly, the Burning Man event attracts people from an amazing range of socioeconomic backgrounds. While nearly 24% of guests claimed salaries of above $80,000, around 25% of attendees said their annual income falls between $10,000 and $30,000.
What Went On: Participation, Interaction, and Process
Burning Man is one of the most unusual events since participants are in charge of organizing rather than just passive consumption. Almost everything about the celebration is thus quite cooperative. First, despite physically demanding circumstances, volunteers help to create and destroy a working metropolis. Before the festivities begin, makeshift shelters, tents, small theme parks, portable toilets, emergency fire and medical facilities, and electric generators must all be set up. Usually arriving a few days before most Burners, volunteers quickly build the city only to bring everything down barely one week later. Local rules force Black Rock City LLC to organize these activities and guarantee a safe camping design. Black Rock City's urban design, a vast arc spanning several kilometers in circumference, has been developed by the central organization starting in the mid-1990s. Including a short airfield, the whole site spans around 13 square kilometers.
Effect, Influence, and Results
The success of the Burning Man festival itself is the most direct result of such broad participation. Tens of thousands of volunteers working together every year produces a functional city, participatory art, and execution of community projects. Consensus-building has also shown really good success. Not a single official vote has apparently ever been held in the history of Burning Man; disagreements are almost always settled with universal approval. Participants in the event, despite its ever-growing scale, say their sense of community and solidarity is still quite strong. Most astonishingly, too, this whole act of involvement occurs in the middle of a merciless July desert.
Examination and Learning from Experience
Burning Man is unique in that, like every event of its scope, it calls for a large-scale organizational framework, while the basic ideas of the festival mandate exactly the reverse. For many attendees of Burning Man, the attraction stems from exactly the absence of structure or bureaucracy. Burning Man takes great satisfaction in stressing collectivist ideas from consensual decision-making to adaptable regulations to a gift economy. The festival must thus find a careful mix between formal organization and free will, between volunteers and exact division of work. Katherine Chen explores the unusual organizational systems underpinning the Burning Man Event as well as the dangers of both under- and over-organization in Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization underpinning the Event. Her research reveals that attendees of Burning Man have different ideas on the degree of formal management presence should be there. Many guests see the development of any routines, norms, and hierarchies as incompatible with the festival's policies as well as being harmful to participatory cooperation. Cofounder Jerry James even concerned that participants' excitement and attendance would undoubtedly decrease if Burning Man started to seem as too bureaucratic. On the other hand, many other Burners consider formal organization to be very necessary for a vibrant creative community. They feel that inadequate control contributed to automobile accidents in 1996 that claimed one volunteer's life and seriously wounded three others. Government agencies have also pushed Burning Man toward more hierarchical management and tighter rules. Black Rock City LLC was founded in 1997 in response to permit criteria, and new safety regulations that all participants had to abide by also helped to inspire their development. Burning Man still struggles, in essence, with this fundamental conundrum: how much "chaos" should be accepted? Under what organizational settings unrestricted self-expression is possible without causing utter anarchy?
You May Follow Below Links:
- What Is The Burning Man Festival Known For?
- How Is The Investigation Into The Death Of A Woman On The First Day Of The Burning Man Festival Proceeding?
- What Is The Significance Of The 'Man' In The Burning Man Festival?
Read Also : What is the Burning Man festival known for?
Mercado Wolski
Although most people define Burning Man as a celebration of artistic expression, the event is really far more broadly focused and varied. Those who go to the festival, sometimes known as "Burners," have several motivations for doing so from creative expression to community involvement to celebration. Consequently, instead of having a single goal, the festival centers on ten basic ideas that the central organizing body adopted and shared on internet. These principles comprise radical inclusiveness, gifting, decommodification, extreme self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leave no trace, participation, and immediacy.
Contextual Background History
Held in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, Burning Man is an annual creative event with as its main idea great community involvement. Unlike a typical art event, Burning Man welcomes radical inclusivity and strives to inculcate a set of basic ideals among its several attendees. The week-long event offers a range of intriguing participatory frameworks to help to reach this goal, from consensus decision-making and a culture of volunteerism to interactive artwork and even the joint building of a city.
Burning Man started in the summer of 1986 when co-founders Larry Harvey and Jerry James, together with few friends, started a little bonfire ritual. On the summer solstice, they gathered on a San Francisco beach and torched a 9-foot-tall wooden man—a behavior they dubbed an act of extreme and unplanned self-expression. Legal issues stopped the beach burn in 1990, and Burning Man relocated to Black Rock Desert, a sizable and far-off dry lake in northwest Nevada the next year. 1991 also was the first year Burning Man had a legal permission from the Bureau of Land Management.
Attendance from a few hundred to several thousand people surged quickly in the mid-1990s. To oversee the growing event was a central organization created. A municipal grid plan was created and certain safety regulations were enacted as the Black Rock municipal campground's population swelled. Every year the celebration also started to have a certain theme, one that affects the design of the immobile Man as well as the artwork of attendees. The popularity and prestige of the event grew over the past ten years; annual attendance surged from 10,000 to more than 50,000 between 1997 and 2010. Every festival today runs a full week, beginning on Monday before Labor Day and ending on the holiday itself.
Originating entities and financing
Legal obligations forced the organizers of Burning Man to form Black Rock City LLC, therefore starting a formal company in 1997. Since then, this body has grown considerably more regimented in order to handle the growing event scale. Setting policies, supervising important financial decisions, and rendering any judgments directly affecting Burning Man's survival fall under its purview. Underneath this group are departments, sub-committees, various consultants, and Burning Man's senior staff. Senior staff members handle daily financial management and compile the Burning Man budget. At last, the festival depends on many independent volunteer groups, including service organizations inside the larger community and artist groups. Burning Man has worked in recent years to avoid become too bureaucratic or hierarchical. Black Rock City LLC has actually pushed a "dissemination model," whereby volunteer groups and autonomous regional organizations take increasing responsibility for event preparation and newcomer training. In 2011 Larry Harvey revealed Black Rock City LLC has started the process of moving its management to a new non-profit known as the Burningman Project.
Black Rock City LLC manages the important financial components of Burning Man planning. The public finds the event's accounting quite open; following the conclusion of every festival, an extensive financial expenditure chart is available online. The official policies of the company forbid commercial or corporate sponsorships in the event. Funding thus comes solely from ticket sales and contributions, which create a total annual budget of $10-20 million. Burning Man's expenses mostly consist in Black Rock City's infrastructure, payroll, outside service fees, and administrative expenses. At the 2010 tournament, total expenses came to $17.5 million.
Participant Finding and Selection
Consistent with the core values of Burning Man, festival attendance has always been open to anybody who wants to and self-selected. Still, registration and tickets are needed and can be found online. 2012 ticket prices ranged from $240 to $420. In 2010, attendance skyrocketed beyond 50,000, momentarily ranking Black Rock City among Nevada's biggest towns. Legal limits as well as Black Rock City LLC's own worries about too rapid development limited participation to 50,000 in 2011. Tickets sold out totally for the first time in the history of the event; in fact, all 27,000 discounted tickets were claimed within less than two days after they were offered.
The quick sellout caused the organizing body to undergo major reforms in 2012. Black Rock City LLC set up a multi-round, random-selection ticket distribution mechanism for the first times. November–December 2011 saw the pre-sale for the first 3,000 tickets sold. These $420 apiece tickets were distributed using a lottery-based system needing pre-registration. Operating in the same approach, the next 40,000 tickets were distributed in the main sale (January-February 2012). In March, the open sale sold all of the last ones. Additionally distributed were a small number of tickets through a second low-income ticket program. Black Rock City LLC requested, and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management additionally issued a special recreation permit allowing 60,900 persons to attend the 2012 event, an increase of more than 10,000 attendees from the year before.
Participants come from somewhat different personal backgrounds. Burning Man compiles and releases an annual census report to track populations. According to 2010 figures, 56% of participants fell between the ages of 18 and 35. Though just 1% of guests were under age 18, over 14% were 50 years or older. According to the census, the most of the attendees—55%—had at least a Bachelor's Degree. In addition, the great majority of Burning Man attendees—76%—were unmarried and classified as Caucasian (74%). Fascinatingly, the Burning Man event attracts people from an amazing range of socioeconomic backgrounds. While nearly 24% of guests claimed salaries of above $80,000, around 25% of attendees said their annual income falls between $10,000 and $30,000.
What Went On: Participation, Interaction, and Process
Burning Man is one of the most unusual events since participants are in charge of organizing rather than just passive consumption. Almost everything about the celebration is thus quite cooperative. First, despite physically demanding circumstances, volunteers help to create and destroy a working metropolis. Before the festivities begin, makeshift shelters, tents, small theme parks, portable toilets, emergency fire and medical facilities, and electric generators must all be set up. Usually arriving a few days before most Burners, volunteers quickly build the city only to bring everything down barely one week later. Local rules force Black Rock City LLC to organize these activities and guarantee a safe camping design. Black Rock City's urban design, a vast arc spanning several kilometers in circumference, has been developed by the central organization starting in the mid-1990s. Including a short airfield, the whole site spans around 13 square kilometers.
Effect, Influence, and Results
The success of the Burning Man festival itself is the most direct result of such broad participation. Tens of thousands of volunteers working together every year produces a functional city, participatory art, and execution of community projects. Consensus-building has also shown really good success. Not a single official vote has apparently ever been held in the history of Burning Man; disagreements are almost always settled with universal approval. Participants in the event, despite its ever-growing scale, say their sense of community and solidarity is still quite strong. Most astonishingly, too, this whole act of involvement occurs in the middle of a merciless July desert.
Examination and Learning from Experience
Burning Man is unique in that, like every event of its scope, it calls for a large-scale organizational framework, while the basic ideas of the festival mandate exactly the reverse. For many attendees of Burning Man, the attraction stems from exactly the absence of structure or bureaucracy. Burning Man takes great satisfaction in stressing collectivist ideas from consensual decision-making to adaptable regulations to a gift economy. The festival must thus find a careful mix between formal organization and free will, between volunteers and exact division of work. Katherine Chen explores the unusual organizational systems underpinning the Burning Man Event as well as the dangers of both under- and over-organization in Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization underpinning the Event. Her research reveals that attendees of Burning Man have different ideas on the degree of formal management presence should be there. Many guests see the development of any routines, norms, and hierarchies as incompatible with the festival's policies as well as being harmful to participatory cooperation. Cofounder Jerry James even concerned that participants' excitement and attendance would undoubtedly decrease if Burning Man started to seem as too bureaucratic. On the other hand, many other Burners consider formal organization to be very necessary for a vibrant creative community. They feel that inadequate control contributed to automobile accidents in 1996 that claimed one volunteer's life and seriously wounded three others. Government agencies have also pushed Burning Man toward more hierarchical management and tighter rules. Black Rock City LLC was founded in 1997 in response to permit criteria, and new safety regulations that all participants had to abide by also helped to inspire their development. Burning Man still struggles, in essence, with this fundamental conundrum: how much "chaos" should be accepted? Under what organizational settings unrestricted self-expression is possible without causing utter anarchy?
You May Follow Below Links:
- What Is The Burning Man Festival Known For?
- How Is The Investigation Into The Death Of A Woman On The First Day Of The Burning Man Festival Proceeding?
- What Is The Significance Of The 'Man' In The Burning Man Festival?
Read Also : What is the Burning Man festival known for?