Burning Man is a week-long large-scale desert event focused on "community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance" held annually in the western United States. The event's name comes from its culminating ceremony: the symbolic burning of a large wooden effigy, referred to as the Man, that occurs on the penultimate night, the Saturday evening before Labor Day. Since 1991, the event has been at Black Rock City in northwestern Nevada, a temporary city erected in the Black Rock Desert about 100 miles (160 km) north-northeast of Reno. According to Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey in 2004, the event is guided by ten stated principles: radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation, and immediacy.
Philmont Scout Ranch is a ranch located in Colfax County, New Mexico, United States, near the village of Cimarron; it covers 140,177 acres (56,728 ha) of wilderness in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains on the east side of the Cimarron Range of the Rocky Mountains. Donated by oil baron Waite Phillips, the ranch is owned and operated by the Boy Scouts of America. It is a National High Adventure Base where crews of Scouts and Venturers take part in backpacking treks and other outdoor activities. By land area, it is one of the largest youth camps in the world. During the 2019 season, between June 8 and August 22, an estimated 24,000 Scouts and adult leaders backpacked through the Ranch's extensive backcountry. That same year 1,302 staff were responsible for the Ranch's summer operations.
Burning Flipside is an annual effigy burn, display of creative arts, and self-expression of performances staged in Central Texas near Austin. Modeled on and associated with Burning Man, Flipside was the first regional Burning Man event.
Maggott (Japheth) is a fictional superhero appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character was briefly a member of the X-Men.
Nowhere is a Burning Man regional event in Spain, the biggest such regional event in Europe. It began in 2004 and is held annually in July in the Monegros Desert, located in Aragon in north-eastern Spain.
Up Helly Aa is a type of fire festival held annually from January to March in various communities in Shetland, Scotland, to mark the end of the Yule season. Each festival involves a torchlit procession by squads of costumed participants that culminates in the burning of an imitation Viking galley. The largest festival held in Lerwick, Shetland's capital, involves a procession of up to a thousand guizers who march through the streets of Lerwick on the last Tuesday in January. The other rural festivals see lower numbers of participants in accordance with their lower populations.
David Best is an internationally renowned American sculptor. He is well known for building immense temples out of recycled wood sheets for the Burning Man festivals, where they are then burnt to the ground in a spectacle of light and heat.
Open space technology (OST) is a method for organizing and running a meeting or multi-day conference where participants are invited to focus on a specific, important task or purpose. The agenda and schedule of presentations are partly or mostly unknown until people begin arriving. The scheduling of speakers, topics, and locations is created by people attending once they arrive. A debriefing document is created at the end of each OST meeting, summarizing what worked and what did not. Harrison Owen created the method in the early 1980s as an alternative to pre-planned conferences, where conference organizers predetermined speakers and time was often scheduled months in advance. OST instead relies on decisions made by participants once they are physically present at the live event venue. OST was among the top ten organizational development tools cited between 2004 and 2013.
Playa del Fuego, also known as PDF, is a regional event held annually in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania. It is inspired by the annual Burning Man festival in Nevada. The event is held in the Mid-Atlantic U.S. twice annually. The spring event is held over Memorial Day and the fall event is held over Columbus Day weekend. The event draws national participation from Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and other states. The 2024 event is scheduled for May 23 to May 27 in Tamaqua.
Transformus is a regional Burning Man art festival in Stokes County, North Carolina, held on the third weekend of July and previously hosted on Marvin's Mountaintop in Masontown, West Virginia. The community forms a temporary city called Mysteria during the third weekend in July which includes art installations, neighborhoods, lively nightlife and camps which offer services to the community. Since 2006 Transformus has distributed over $207,747 in art grants to the community. It remains one of the most art-centric Burner events in the U.S. Transformus celebrates Burning Man's 10 principles of radical inclusion, radical gifting, radical decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation and immediacy. Transformus also focuses on consent as its 11th principle.
Apogaea is an annual collaborative outdoor arts and music festival held as a Colorado regional counterpart for the Burning Man event. Typically held in late spring in southern Colorado, Apogaea ("Apo"), establishes a temporary autonomous zone where radical self-expression, inclusiveness, and self-reliance are the hallmarks of its participants.
Dance Dance Immolation was an interactive performance piece by fire art group Interpretive Arson based out of the artist work space known as NIMBY in East Oakland. It is a modified version of Dance Dance Revolution where players are shot with fire if they perform poorly. Participants are not harmed since they wear a fire proximity suit with forced-air respirators. Numerous other safeguards are built into the system to ensure the players are not subject to direct flame exposure or inhalation of superheated air. The piece was premiered in 2005 and ran at various festivals and private events internationally. It was retired in 2013 at Burning Man, where all the components were gathered into a pile and a piano was dropped on it.
The Black Rock Beacon is a newspaper made by and for burners, or fans and attendees of the annual Burning Man festival in Nevada. It was started in 2005 by former staff members of the Black Rock Gazette when that newspaper no longer received funding from Burning Man LLC. It continues to publish annually. The newspaper aims to publish daily editions during the annual Burning Man event. The print paper is ad-free and is funded through donations, with all of its content is made available under a Creative Commons license.
Firefly Arts Collective is an American non-profit organization that facilitates the annual New England regional burner festival 'Firefly'. Firefly is a regional event inspired by the annual Burning Man festival in Nevada. Firefly is held in Vermont typically during July 4 weekend. Most of the organizers and participants come from the Boston metropolitan area and surrounding states including Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York.
Kiwiburn is a regional Burning Man event based in Hunterville, Manawatū-Whanganui, New Zealand celebrating principles such as inclusion, radical self-expression, gifting, participative art and culture.
Alchemy is a burn event operated according to the 10 Principles of Burning Man held annually in the early fall. Alchemy was first held in 2007 and grew quickly to become the largest regional burn in the United States and second largest in the world in 2012. In 2013, the event cap was lowered by approximately 1,000. However the 2014 cap was set at 3,200 participants as was the 2015 cap.
Midburn is a 6-day event held in the Negev Desert in southern Israel.
The Life Cube Project is a community interactive art installation based upon the creator's idea that if you write something down, it is far more likely to happen. The Life Cube installation encourages members of the community and the general public to decorate it with inspirational writing, paintings, drawings, murals, and tapestries for all its visitors to see. Through four iterations at the annual Burning Man festival in 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2015; hundreds of thousands of participants touched, climbed, inscribed, painted, and added their personal visions to the Life Cube. In 2014, the Life Cube Project made its way out of Burning Man and into its first major city in the United States as experiential and interactive art.
Blazing Swan is an annual regional Burning Man event held adjacent to Jilakin Lake near the town of Kulin, Western Australia. It is an experiment in temporary community and artistic expression, and is guided by eleven main principles, including radical inclusion, gifting and radical self-reliance. The event occurs around Easter each year, usually over a period of seven days. The event location is on bushland adjacent to Jilakin Lake, and is referred to as Jilakin Rock City. A wooden effigy is built and burned at the culmination of the event.
