abstract: The Burning Man Festival, a free-spirited yet highly sophisticated social experiment celebrating "radical self expression and radical self reliance" is well-known for its large-scale and highly interactive public art installations. For twenty-five years, Burners (as festival participants are called) have been creating and displaying amazing works of art for the annual event, which currently takes place in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. In the desert, Burners build a temporary city, appropriate the open space to serve as their "tabula rasa" or "blank canvas," and unleash their creative potential in the name of "active participation" and social civility. In the process, they produce public art on a scale unprecedented in United States history. This dissertation, a visual and narrative ethnography, explores the layers of aesthetic and social meanings Burners associate with public art. Told in narrative form, this project utilizes "in situ" field notes, photographic field notes, rhetorical analyses of art installations, thematic analysis of Burner storytelling, and writing as a method of inquiry as means for investigating and understanding more fully the ways Burners create, display, and consume public art. Findings for this project indicate Burners value public art beyond its material presentation. Preparing for, building, celebrating, and experiencing aesthetic transformation through the engagement of public art all are viewed as valuable"art" experiences at Burning Man. Working in tandem, these experiences also produce profound feelings of connection and collaboration in the community, suggesting Burning Man's methods for producing public art could serve as model to follow, or points for reflection, for other groups wishing to use public art and other forms of material expression to bring their members closer together. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Communication 2010

abstract: Black Rock City is a temporary city existing for one week in the harsh desert of northern Nevada. It plays host to the Burning Man festival with over 300 large-scale art installations and is considered to be the largest interactive art festival in the world. Besides the main burn, smaller local regional events have developed. These regional events encompass many of the same tenets as Burning Man including the presentation of large-scale art. Burn2 is the regional event held on the virtual world, Second Life. In 2013, both events used the theme of Cargo Cult as a stepping off point for the artists. Through the lens of spectacle, I used art criticism as a way to gain understanding of the artworks. Art criticism is a means of interpreting and appreciating artwork and is often used in the art classroom. Edmund Feldman's method promotes a deeper understanding of art and consists of four steps: description, formal analysis, interpretation and judgment. Using Feldman's method, I analyzed three artworks from the 2013 Burning Man festival and three works from Burn2. From interviews, photographs, and personal observations I analyzed the artworks. I used external analysis to compare the literature on similar festivals and the artworks with other events held in the real life and virtual world. I found in both events very similar concepts and themes. Artists had specific subject matter in mind when designing their installations. Artists used the theme as a stepping off point for rationalizing their content. Art made to be displayed at Burning Man was expensive; funding was a concern for all the artists. Burn2 artists were free from funding concerns even though there were expenses to making art in Second Life. Emerging themes were use of building materials and color, use of electronics and computer technology, art installations in festivals, spectacle, collaboration, and interactivity. Further implications included teaching about the engineering of structures, critical thinking about festival themes and the individual art installations, visual culture, and art making with these emerging art forms. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Curriculum and Instruction 2014

Once a year over the week leading up to and including Labor Day, tens of thousands of people drive hours into Nevada’s barren Black Rock Desert to build an ephemeral city equal to “the size of downtown San Francisco.” This place, Black Rock City, home of the annual Burning Man event, only exists for a fraction of the year. For one week, participants gather together at Burning Man and operate under its ten guiding principles, including “radical self-reliance,” “communal effort,” “radical self-expression,” and “participation.” Everything, with the exception of porta-potties and ice, must be brought in and packed out by individuals. The decommodified, volunteer-run city is what its inhabitants make of it. At Burning Man, attendants are their own event planners, food providers, structure builders, gift givers, and activity coordinators. On the penultimate night of the event, an effigy of a forty-foot man is set aflame, a ritual left open for interpretation by participants. Two days later, the entirety of Black Rock City is torn down, leaving scarcely any trace that it ever even existed. Burning Man has gained social traction exponentially since its launch in 1986, leading to the formation of dozens of individually organized regional burns across the United States of America and internationally. Scholars from many disciplines have flocked to the event attempting to unpack its distinct subculture. While publications have analyzed Burning Man’s ethos, logistics, business organization, community, art, rituals, fire, and performances, only two have considered sound worthy of focus and few have addressed the regional burn network. “Aural Substance: An Ethnographic Exploration of Regional Burn Soundscapes” analyzes Burning Man’s regional network, expanding on sound artists Stephan Moore and Scott Smallwood’s brief initial study of the national event's sound by way of ethnography and field recording. From June 2016 through February 2017, I conducted fieldwork and collected fifty-five hours of field recordings at seven different regional burns. I employ ethnomusicologist Steven Feld’s concept of “acoustemology,” or “sound as a way of knowing.” Through my observation, analysis of recordings, and interviews, I consider how the sounds at regional burns can signify the time, date, and location to burn participants. Sound-studies scholar David Novak writes that “noise is a crucial element of communicational and cultural networks.” In this study, I analyze how noise at a burn is not solely a by-product of participants’ “anarchistic freedom,” but a key part of the burn that relays information about regional burn values, public and private spaces, and burners’ lived experience. / Music History / Accompanied by one compressed .zip file: Archive.zip

Projection mapping, a subtopic of augmented reality, displays computer-generated light visualizations from projectors onto the real environment. A challenge for projection mapping in performing interactive arts is dynamic body movements. Accuracy and speed are key components for an immersive application of body projection mapping and dependent on scanning and processing time. This thesis presents a novel technique to achieve real-time body projection mapping utilizing a state of the art body tracking device, Microsoft’s Azure Kinect DK, by using an array of trackers for error minimization and movement prediction. The device's Sensor and Bodytracking SDKs allow multiple device synchronization. We combine our tracking results from this feature with motion prediction to provide an accurate approximation for body joint tracking. Using the new joint approximations and the depth information from the Kinect, we create a silhouette and map textures and animations to it before projecting it back onto the user. Our implementation of gesture detection provides interaction between the user and the projected images. Our results decreased the lag time created from the devices, code, and projector to create a realistic real-time body projection mapping. Our end goal was to display it in an art show. This thesis was presented at Burning Man 2019 and Delfines de San Carlos 2020 as interactive art installations.

Syntheiströrelsen (The Syntheist Movement) kan förstås som en konsekvens av individualismens framfart, kommersialism, globalisering och framväxten av IT-samhället. Syntheiströrelsen strävar efter att återupprätta en kollektiv gemenskap de upplever gått förlorad genom att själva skapa ny religion relevant för samtiden och framtiden. Benämningen deriveras från grekiska – syntheos, den skapade guden. Med avstamp i Den mediterande dalahästen: Religion på nya arenor i samtidens Sverige (Frisk & Åkerbäck 2013) för uppsatsen ett resonemang kring hur Syntheiströrelsen kan förstås utifrån teorier om samtida religion och religiositet. Syntheiströrelsen förklaras mot bakgrund av en mindre intervjustudie med tongivande medlemmar i stockholmsförsamlingen samt undersökning av näraliggande material.

The Granville Bridge, Vancouver, Canada is an unsafe, uncomfortable and uninteresting crossing for pedestrians. Neither does it possess an identifiable or memorable image. Although the City of Vancouver has identified poor crossing conditions for pedestrians as an issue that requires addressing, the current design for the City's preferred solution - a suspended crossing attached to the side of the Granville Bridge - the current design for this structure does not address how to make the bridge an imageable element in the city landscape. Using the Black Rock Arts Festival - commonly know as Burning Man - as a case study, the potential for an interactive landscape design to create an identity for the Granville Bridge is examined. Although Burning Man fails to create a community that integrates with its contextual landscape, its use of interactive art is successful in creating community among participants. Through the contextual use of interactive art in conjunction with the proposed suspended pedestrian crossing, a design is proposed that celebrates the Granville Bridge as a conduit of motion by revealing the presence of pedestrians. The proposed design includes design components under the north and south ends of the bridge to conceptually ground the image on the north and south side of False Creek, and unifies the total design with the metaphorical and literal use of dance. The design shows that interactive art can be used to make the Granville Bridge an imageable element in the landscape, thereby making it an integral part of the Vancouver landscape. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA), School of / Graduate