BM14 – Our 10 Year Caravansary

Sunshine Goes Way Outside The Box – Again!

  All WriteNo Graffiti

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After so many playa art installations at Burning Man, Sunshine took the year off in 2014 to celebrate Playatech’s 10th caravansary of rocking the playa with fake ads and real furniture. So we made THIS instead – a real website.

You like it? It is light years ahead of the old one, with lots of new product designs and a real shopping cart system. It is also much easier to update so look for more designs to come!!! Special thanks to Mariano Perez (Manuk) of Buenos Aires, Argentina, a burning web developer who answered Sunshine’s call for help and spent over a year on this project.

A new web site wasn’t radically expressive enough for Sunshine’s 12th burn, so he launched an experimental artistic attack on the problem of graffiti on art at Burning Man. And it worked!

We Burners create a city of extreme paradoxes. If we write “F— Everyone” on every inch of our most precious temple, our city will console us. But if we write “I love you” on the next art installation over, it could be a crime, a serious breach of our 10 Principles inviting ejection from the event, and a memory of sadness for the artist – been there, done that!

So, how do we learn each artist’s intention about tagging their art? A simple rule like “Don’t Mark The Art” is just impossible for BRC. So Sunshine’s experiment used two stickers, one inviting radical self expression and the other demanding we leave no trace. ARTery offered artists one or the other sticker at check-in to express their intentions on or near their art, and the principles of civic responsibility plus communal effort took over from there. A call for help brought Margaret “Meps” Schulte, a graphic artist who worked wonders turning Sunshine’s crazy ideas into art worthy of gracing art all across the playa. Thank you Meps!!

Artery and the artists really liked the program, so for BM15, we’re expanding this “Friends Of The Art” program to further raise awareness of the tagging issue and this simple visual communication solution – and instigate more art! Sunshine really likes instigating out-of-the-box art…

PI Tagging Sign

Playatech – Who Else Would Fight Graffiti By Inviting Artists To Tag Their Own Works?