A look back at Burn2 2011 using Storify

My second Storify attempt...what do you think?

Our Camp Got Finished for Burn2

We got finished. Whoo. Three levels with graphics and some freebies

Problems...there are a few

1. lag lag lag...takes a while for the textures to load, it's hard to move around, and music streams can't be heard by everyone at the party. SL has got to do something so events can attract more than a couple of people without everyone being stuck in lag soup.

2. Most people so far have been paying attention to the artists and scheduled music. I understand that attention..the art is gorgeous and well worth seeing. We had fun building...and that's all that's really important.

The first floor is the rites of committal...a passage tomb filled with items found in tombs in different cultures. There is a statue of Anubis, images of modern funerals, Indian cremation pyres, and Ghanese art coffins.

 The second level is rites of commendation...items and images of things we do to help the dead move on to or have a happier afterlife. There is voodoo and a senet game and images of the weighing of the souls by Anubis.

The third level is rites of commemoration...celebrations in honour of the dead. We have a family ancestor altar and images from the Day of the Dead and Asian festivals honouring the dead, including the Japanese Obon festival's ceremony with lit floating lanterns. There's a reincarnation wheel - click on it to see what you will come back as.

Playa Aesthetics

Burning Man takes up a big chunk of the playa. 50,000+ people, trucks, supplies, porta-potties, stages, radio station...it's a town..a city. That can be seen from space! Check out this image from the GeoEye satellite. Volunteers lay out roads, camp boundaries. They put up lantern stands for night time illumination. They lay cable for sound systems. They set up generators for electricity to keep the ice cold and the coffee hot.




They have this concept at Burning Man - MOOP which stands for Matter Out Of Place. I love that word. We've been playing around with it in between building cars and finding images for our camp. And we came up with the phrase..don't be a party mooper. Mostly because I always forget to clean up after myself when I'm building - bits of cars, stray prims with images are always left laying around when I am working. Would ya believe...I'm an artiste? hmmm..no didn't think you would. I'm just messy.

I found these entries on the Burning Man blog - their Moop Map - so you can check out their efforts to control/eliminate MOOP - http://blog.burningman.com/2011/09/news/moop-map-live-2011/
and
http://blog.burningman.com/2011/09/news/moop-map-live-how-the-map-is-made/

Turns out the playa gets inspected by the Bureau of Land Management and if it isn't MOOP-free, there will be problems with getting permits in the future.

So clean up after yourselves people. No party moopers allowed.

Got Distracted

I'm supposed to be researching ideas about the afterlife and death in different cultures, looking for images and artifacts. I found a Senet Table in SL (whooo...Thanks Rowena) which the Egyptians used as sort of a model for their afterlife. Marc took some pictures of a tomb and some marble memorials in England. But I need some ideas for what to put in the 2 levels above our tomb cave. Any ideas you can pass along?

But..I got distracted making bikes. Marc had an idea for a rocket car and made a great sculpty before he went on vacation. So I made a texture for it, added some sparks shooting out the back, and made a pose that makes ya look like you're hanging on tight to the rocket. Then I made one that's a surfboard. I put one of our Elvis poses (yes we made poses based on famous photos of Elvis) on it for the driver. They are a hoot to make and I have to admit that they look pretty cool too. I will clean them up, double check all the permissions this weekend and pass them on to the Dept of Mutant Vehicles, the DMV.

Here are a couple of pictures


Check out the galaxy tires..they spin as you ride the bike.

This bike holds two people..the standing driver and a passenger who sits all stretched out on the rear of the bike. It just has regular bike tires...maybe a little retro?

One Last ArtCar

Image by Michael Holden via FlickrThe theme of Burning Man in 2011 is "Rites of Passage"

I made a coffin car, because our camp is looking at death as a rite of passage.

We were joking about cars and i wanted to make a merry go round..then realized that could also be "marry-go-round"...since marriage is a rite of passage

I wanted to build a car where the driver stood still in the middle and the passengers rotated around them.. Well......that made driving tough because the car didn't want to turn to the right when it was rotating to the left.

So..a few adjustments, some tweaking..and here is the latest and greatest version of the Marry-Go-Round. The driver and passengers stand still and the church wall rotates around everybody. I still need to make a veil for the bride

Want to see some cars from Burns past? Check out these pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmom2k_darwin/tags/dmv/

Slide show of DMV pics

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Related articles

• Burning Man 2011: Rites of Passage (telegraph.co.uk)
• Burning Man Has A Thunder Dome (buzzfeed.com)

The temple burns tonight in RL

Here's some pics of the real temple as it burned. It was spectacular...i can't imagine what accelerants they put on that wood. It looked like the gas fields on fire in the middle east during the Gulf Wars. (for some pictures of the Man statue burning - because i forgot to take pictures - check out http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelholden/6111738368/in/set-72157627529205924)

So in SL we're partying on DeepHole..the burning man "administrative"sim. that piece of plywood was a media player if you were using LL's viewer 2 which I wasn't.

Art Cars for Burning Man in SecondLife

Well, it might be a little presumptuous to call my efforts art cars, but there ya go..that's what i'm going to call them. They are art cars for the SecondLife Burning Man (http://www.burn2.org). I hope they will be anyway; I have to submit them to be checked for script errors and terms of service violations.

I built 2 so far...The first, the coffin car, goes with the theme of our camp..death as a rite of passage. My machinima and research buddy, Marc, built a coffin car too; his looks like a 50s souped up drag car with some cool chrome exhaust.

Here are some pictures of my coffin car..that's me laying inside it. There's no steering wheel ..guess you're just "thinking" it around the playa.

My second car is a big teapot on a tray with 2 cushions for passengers to sit on. I got the teapot sculpty files the other day from a Midnight Mania board give away..whoo hoo. I used textures from Chipaholic and Sick Bubblegum. Think about it - a person size teapot = the ultimate never ending cup of tea. And instead of steam (which looked pretty cool), big yellow daisies come out of the spout occasionally.

Here are some pics of this car - i have got to learn to take close up..but check out that playa texture, with dusty car tracks to follow.

Burning Man in SL

I bought a plot with my machinima buddy, Marc, on the playa for the SecondLife version of Burning Man. We're also in the lottery to win a couple of additional plots. You can check out their webpage at http://www.burn2.org. The image is from their blog to announce the theme...Rites of Passage.

Marc & I previously discussed studying memorials in SL - so one idea for our camp is to look at rites of passage involving death. This idea, of course, put new life in the machinima I was making about death of the human behind the avatar. If we can finish it, we hope to show it at our camp. It depends on how the plots are set up...we might not be able to control the media settings, especially on a little plot. It's a good idea tho.


For me, being in this event is kind of a rite of passage. I've been moving from content consumer to content creator in SL.

• I used to make sculptures for me; now I have a store where I put them up for sale along with houses that I build. I'm learning about communicating in different ways in world.
• I used to watch machinima, laughing at the Divas and marveling at the art. Now I'm acting in them, recording voices, and writing and directing. 
• Last year we visited the camps, watched them burn the man - we went as spectators. This year we will be part of the action. This camp will be something we create. We will make things to give away. We will share the "death machinima" , as we call it. 

It's still a long time till the event. We don't even get our plots assigned till the end of August! Arggghhh. We need to decide if we're going to volunteer for one of the departments to help during the event. It depends on our plot idea develops. One involves a lot of updating throughout the day and interacting with the people who walk by - that might cut down on the volunteering.

We also discussed making some machinima there at the SL Burning Man. It would be interesting to see what you could record in one take with no editing. Or play around with a news format and have "man on the street" interviews. There will be live performers and street theatre and avatars dressed in their best weird outfits. So a lot of opportunities to shoot and practice editing (for me...Marc is already experienced)