I had the honor to help out with one of my friend’s art installation for burning man this year. It was a lot of work both before and during the burn, but it allowed me to experience burning man in deeper way and was incredibly rewarding!
The Art
The art piece itself is called “The Heads”. Basically, it is 9 mannequin heads sticking out of the playa, seemingly out of nowhere. At night they would light up too.
At the bottom of each platform is a small camera, which allows the heads to track the position of people as they walk by. If you walk close enough, the heads would turn to face you and begin to talk to you through speakers mounted inside the platform.
In comparison to the other pieces of art at burning man, this was definitely more subtle and easy to miss. As a result, if you do come across it, it is most likely that you will be there alone or with just your group, and your experience interacting with the piece would be quite intimate. For many, it can also be quite creepy and scary.
The Build
Now there is a lot more to the art piece than meets the eye.
The most important is this control box, which houses a bunch of electronics. The most important ones being the controller for the solar panels and batteries (which supply power to the heads) and a wifi router (which allows the heads to communicate).
Getting this box away from the main art piece itself was a big challenge. This required us to dig a giant trench to hide all of the cables connecting the box to the art. Fortunately we had some support from Art Support Services, who came in with this giant trencher.
The giant trencher basically laid out the major artery, and we had to manually trench the rest.
Speaking of the solar panels, that was probably what we spent the most time prepping before hand. Here we are stripping wires and connecting them up to test.
This whole support infrastructure had to be built at the site. Working with wires and small screws proved to be much harder on the playa in the middle of the night than on back home. And we had to work mostly at night because it was way too hot and sunny during the day.
And we had to leave safety lights around our work station so people wouldn’t run into it at night.
We were there a couple days before the event officially started and it was magical to see the city come alive. Being part of the build process was such a memorable experience.
Monitoring the power output of our solar panels to make sure our batteries don’t explode. It’s one thing to work out the voltages and amperages on paper. It is a completely different thing having to actually connect those wires by hand.
After all that supporting infrastructure was built, we finally moved on to setting up the art itself. Here we are lining up the stands. Each one of these stands needed to be lag bolted into the playa.
For obvious reasons, we could not transport the Art piece whole to the playa. So we had to actually assemble each piece on site. Unfortunately, the heat ended up melting and deforming some of the 3d-printed connector pieces which made it very difficult for us to assemble. A lot compromises and last minute changes were required to get this over the finish line.
A mini head used for testing.
Debugging.
The end result
A unsuspecting customer checking out the art while I was checking on the solar panels. I think he liked it as he stayed for about 15 minutes!
