Blog Archives

Finally, An STD To Prevent STDs! 

Playatech’s new Social Transmission Depot (STD) was born of Covid as a way to support socially transmitted goods, services, and connections without socially transmitted diseases (STDs). Because it never was about social distancing at all, just aerosol transfer reduction. 

Our STD turns 3 sheets of plywood into a sturdy 3’x6′ counter at convenient 36″ height, topped by a banner sign 9′ in the air to ensure visibility. That gives it a bit of wind load so consider staking in high-wind locations. 

With enough storage below the counter to camp there and sign posts strong enough to secure a plexi panel that takes peoples’ breath away, the STD is perfect for anything from advice booths to UN food programs. 

Playatech – The Best Treatment For Slotting Disease Is Make More Slots! 

The Dopest Way To Delight Your DJ! 

Ok, we hear you! For years, the Black Rock Bar has been the most popular DJ booth around, and it caused a bar shortage. Now Plitchenette DJ booths are causing a kitchen shortage, and we’re fed up with plywood abuse! So here is a dope-ass table designed to stop DJs from mis-using our food & beverage products…

Playatech’s new “DJ Dope” was optimized with DJ inputs from CA to NZ, and every DJ who’s tried it said “that’s dope!” so we know it’ll move you! It spins out of your hatchback to provide a work space over 5′ wide and 25″ deep at 40.75″ height, complete with cable guides, high rails to hide your jack junk, a lower shelf for cases, and wide side wings to keep drinks & dope away from the decks at 5AM. You can even modify the table height, or cut the top edge into a flame shape – all from exactly 2 sheets of plywood with no MOOP and no part larger than the 69″x28″ tabletop! 

If you really wanna get cool, add a cut-out design to the front panels and backlight it. Or tell us how to improve the design until there is nothing else a DJ could ask for. Except treats in the green room of course…

www.Playatech.com – Slots That Rock. And Rap. And Thump!

 

Our New Playavator Will Really Get You High…

It can be hard to get a rise out of anyone at Burning Man. We know; we’ve tried for 15 years and finally figured out how! We want you all to get a rise out of everyone, so we’re sharing. With a story of course. 

Prepping for Burning Man 2019, our friends at Crossroads asked if we could design ship-flat steps for performers to get up onto their 4’ high stage, and then from the stage up to elevated platforms. Having once enjoyed the thrill of performing live on the Crossroads stage as well as the scarier thrills of getting on and off alive, Sunshine said “of course we can do that”! 

So, he sat down with his sketchpad and the Playavator was born. Made from just one sheet of 3/4” plywood with no MOOP, it is the best way to get a rise out of anyone. Just slide it together anywhere, and get taller in 60 seconds.

The last time we tried to get people high on the Playa was a decade ago, when we designed Leave No Bleachers so you and 12 friends could get upwardly mobile and watch burns from premium seats. But it took six whole sheets of ply to get it up. Now, you can get yourself up and take a friend, for just one sheet! Who would have thought Playatech follows Moore’s Law?! 

Download the Playavator and make one today; it’s easy. Just be warned that we have never tested it for weight (nor even built one at all) so its capacity rating is “radically self-sufficient”. That means if you fall or get a splinter, it’s all on you – just like it is for the other 50 designs we’ve shared to get your camp up, down, moved, stored, and rockin’ it. 

Playatech – Helping You Get It Up For 15 Summers

Download PDF Here: http://playatech.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/PLAYAVATOR-REV.A.pdf

The perfect seat to keep perfect strangers perfectly strange

Have you ever wondered why airports use seats that face people away from each other instead of towards each other? We have.

Modern airport seating is part of a giant conspiracy to eliminate community and connection so we can be controlled from above. And we always figure “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em – with slots!”. So we made seating that’s simply ideal for international airports worldwide…

Just like you can build an 8’ long Playa Pew to match our 4’ wide Playa Love Seat by using two sheets of plywood instead of one, now you can build an Airpart Seat that’s identical to two 8’ long Playa Pews back to back, using exactly four sheets of ply not two.

Just in case you need to furnish an airport, train station, border crossing, passport office, or any other dehumanizing waiting room experience.

Ok, so we didn’t actually design this for airports. We designed it to be the torso of a 20’ tall robot that transforms into a seating area for 30, shaped like an infinity sign with the Airpart Seat/torso in the middle. Yes, really.

Why? Because we plan to launch an army of robot couches to take back all our airports and make them community gathering spaces! And because plywood is too heavy for actual airplane seats.

 

The Playatech Airpart Seat – make one today, and transform an airport tomorrow….available only from:

Playatech – Fly The Friendly Plies

 

 

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A Potting Bench, Kitchen, Workbench, Standing Desk, Or…?

You know you’re a Burner when: your wife wants a potting bench for Mother’s Day, and after seeing the long parts lists of online DIY options you design one from exactly 2 sheets of plywood cut into 8 parts – then as you make it, you realize it will be a great playa kitchen! Or workbench. Or standing desk.

Whatever it is, we think it will make your day! And, like every design we share, building one for BRC leaves invisible extra parts inside you: Larry’s 10 Principles, that will always live on.

The Plitchenette offers a 60″ x 30″ work surface at convenient counter height, plus two lower shelves and an upper one. Also included in the plans is a suggested sink cut-out location, enabling you to add all the features of our iSink or Dish Delight designs to provide a fully-equipped camp kitchen – see those pages for links to water gear. Then, just add a camp stove on the counter, ice chest under its shade, and coffeemaker up top to become a playa master chef! We tried to make those from wood too, but not everything we try works.

For potting bench use, you can make the sink hole without installing a sink basin, place several open bins on the shelf below the counter, and slide any bin into place below the sink hole to collect soil, gravel, sand, or other materials spilled on the counter.

 

Whatever you do with it, please send a picture. Whoever sends a pic of the most ridiculous application will receive their choice of plans for any 3 designs you like. With thanks to Wristy for endlessly turning Sunshine’s chaotic graph paper sketches into plans you can use…and to Larry for turning us all into artists…

Playatech – Don’t Leave For Home Without It

 

 

 

 

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The Ultimate Dishwashing System For Large Camps and Gatherings

While designing our breakthrough iSink Water Ritual System, we faced a conundrum: it would be perfect for washing hands, but rather small for washing dishes! And if there is one thing we don’t need at festivals besides skanky hands, it is skanky dishes. So we designed a different water system specifically for dishes – LOTS of dishes! As in your camp of 100+. Here’s how we did it…

Besides needing a larger sink basin that can fit big platters and cookware, we also considered process design for cleaning dishes versus hands – water is scarce in the desert, so anyone with a lot of dishes can use water efficiently through a 4-step cleaning process using four bins (thanks to Jazzi for pioneering this approach at Red Lightning): 

1) Scrape all food wastes off plates/cookware into a waste bin. Perhaps wipe eatery items down with a recycled napkin and throw that in the waste bin too, to enable the water used in remaining steps to go MUCH farther. The waste can go to compost…

2) Scrub the eatery item in a basin filled with soapy water.

3) Rinse the eatery item in a basin filled with clean fresh water. 

4) Sanitize the eatery item in a basin containing a weak diluted bleach solution. 

So, we began with the notion of 3 iSinks in a row, with larger sink basins for #2-4 and an extra bucket at the start to handle #1. How much larger? A 5 gallon sink basin is not much larger than a 2 or 3 gallon basin as used in the iSink, so we settled on 10-gallon Roughneck bins because they are strong enough to pick up and move to a gray water disposal area, even half filled. 

Holding up 3 ten-gallon bins filled with liquid & dishes plus another 3 five-gallon supply bottles above them turned into a giant contraption weighing hundreds of pounds and requiring at least 2 sheets of plywood. So, we copped out and and designed a 1-sheet table-top solution intended to sit on a typical 6’ long folding table. The food waste bin even has its own cute floor stand! 

The key to Dish Delight is that for dishes, we do not need water faucets with a constant flow function like hand washing requires, so you can buy the lowest-cost faucet valves for screw-top or crown-top 5-gallon bottles, and we can hold the bottles at an appropriate angle using a slotted plywood device designed like a wine rack for big fat 5-gallon bottles. 

Logistically, you might only use 2.5 gallons in each 10-gallon sink basin, so each 5-gallon supply bottle may fill its wash basin twice if that. Therefore, you’ll want a way to quickly refill water bottles from your camp water supply and then load them onto the Dish Delight, such as a small transfer pump at the supply side. Similarly, each Homer Bucket drain capacity is only one 5-gallon water supply bottle and only half the max capacity of its sink basin, so you’ll want an efficient way to dump the sink basins before refilling – the 10-gallon basins we chose come with covers, so we think you can carry them to a gray water disposal tank and use a sump pump there, skipping the Homer Buckets entirely (sorry Homer). We do recommend you label your water supplies and roughneck bins “soap”, “rinse”, and “bleach” to avoid mixing them up. 

Now you know how we designed Playatech’s new Dish Delight – the ultimate dishwashing system for larger camps and temporary kitchens. Just put one near your iSink Water Ritual System for hand washing, and your playa soup line is ready for action. We think. Like everything Playatech and indeed everything about Burning Man itself, this is an experiment…

Playatech – Testing Half-Baked Products On Unsuspecting Burners Since A Decade Before That Musk Guy

To Keep The Health Cops Away, Build an iSink Today!

 

Ever wondered why everyone you meet at Burning Man hugs you instead of shaking hands? You THOUGHT it was our ecstatically friendly culture, but it is subconscious survival instinct: your hands are SKANKY! And the health department knows it – their rules even show a hand-washing station as the most important element in any temporary public food or drink establishment. 

Playatech eliminated skanky playa couches way back in the year of The Psyche, and to celebrate Radical Ritual we will eliminate skanky hands in all of yours, by finally making humanity’s most ancient water ritual “easy anywhere”!

Behold – the iSink hand washing station, featuring the three key components of civilized plumbing with all their chakras in proper vertical alignment: controllable water source, sink basin, and drainage. Crude looking, but functionally elegant in true Playatech style, and guaranteed to keep the health department away when used as directed (or return the parts for a full refund:) 

The iSink is a modular system that functions with any type of 5-gallon water dispenser – to achieve health-cop hand-wash nirvana, make sure yours includes a “constant flow” valve that stays on while both hands are in the water stream, like this or this. And use soap! 

For the sink basin, a typical 12 quart dishpan will do, or an 16 quart for splashy folk, or get fancy using a camping sink with working drain – whichever way you go, you can remove our sink basin for remote water rituals from foot washes to hair tinting – just try THAT with your fancy RV sink! And of course for drainage, we used the classic “Homer Bucket” – let’s do this! Figuring out where to pour THAT is up to you (hints: be self sufficient, and leave no trace!). Links to order various water gadgets are highlighted above, or find/make your own. 

But wait, there’s more! Connecting with people to make Playatech and share it at Burning Man is a process meticulously designed to engage you in all 10 Burning Man Principles – yes, we are a Burner factory, not a furniture company! To celebrate that, the wizards of Playatech squeezed two iSinks onto one sheet of 3/4” plywood, so you can make 2 and gift 1 – please pay forward the gift of good health to the planet. Or at least the next camp over. 

Ok, hurry up and build the iSinks today, so I won’t catch something nasty from your skanky hands tomorrow! But please don’t stop hugging your favorite Playatech Hottie just because your hands are clean…Sunshine’s favorite Playatech hottie today is newbie Tyler Baumgardner for putting the iSink in CAD. Maybe his playa name is destined to become “Water”; we’ll see…

Also available NOW: the radically novel Dish Delight, a crack 4-step dishwashing system for larger camps – integrating scrape, soap, rinse, and bleach stations the size of the deep playa….only from: 

 

Playatech – BRC’s Fake Corporate Monster Relentlessly Eating Playa Problems

 
Disclaimer: “iSink” is NOT a trademark of a fruit company that sells phones. At least we don’t think so. So “TM Playatech”; it is ours now the minute someone outside CA downloads these plans. If the digital fruit company ever gets into plumbing after self-driving cars, we look forward to having a meeting. At Playatech’s annual users conference and showcase in Black Rock City. On Tutu Tuesday…why not, we met the Defense Department that way once!  
 

The Man Asked For A Confessional, and Got A Home For Radical Ritual

In the Dark Ages (Burning Man 2005), we instigated a Renaissance in seating that eliminated skanky couches from festivals. Then our ultra-secret ZaVinci Labs alchemized bars, bike racks, and stages into radically efficient art. Now, we take our slotted structural Renaissance to the next level by sharing the secrets of the Burning Booth – a modular construction system for rapidly deploying small structures used in radical rituals or habitation.

In true Renaissance form, we first built a church for Burning Man 2016. Well, it looks like a little church, in the Mission Style that will not be re-invented for 300 years. Commissioned by the information dissemination office of the high government of Black Rock City, all of the high priests and priestesses of the Burning World were commanded to perform a radical ritual: confess in this little church to a video camera at the 2016 Global Leadership Conference.

To fairly honor this high purpose, the “Burning Booth” is the first Playatech design that has ever contained the highly guarded and globally feared word “Burning” (with a capital B); a word that has crushed the titans of industry. You can see how easy this church is to assemble here, and we share its construction plans with the world for a mere donation of $20 to the art gods that will enable little churches everywhere. It integrates a bench on one side and an altar on the other, but you can change either or both easily into whatever your ritual requires.

Yet the Burning Booth is but a Trojan Horse, destined to unleash full structural enlightenment upon the masses. It heralds a new era in construction techniques that can enable even the poorest peasants of the land to build a structure for radical ritual or own a home. A strong, safe, solid home that muskets cannot penetrate.  A home constructed in the magical time of one hour, at the magical cost of just one silver dollar per square foot (about $20 US).

Until then, the Burning Booth is:

  • – 18 cubic feet of wood, alchemized into this 3D puzzle in minutes with nary a fastener
  • – A magic box that can change to a photo booth, DJ booth, projection booth, or chapel in moments
  • – A modular system enabling furnishings, fixtures, windows with counters, or anything you need
  • – A fun playa-scale construction kit for grown-up kids: design your own parts to dial in your details
  • – Proof of concept for a 110 sq ft Playatech nano-home built in one hour for $1k – furnished
  • – A creation of Playanardo ZaVinci, sculpted by Sunshine & Wristy of ZaVinci Labs

 

We hope the masses will come in from the cold and dust, and make a memorable ritual in this box…

To preview the assembly instructions before ordering, click here.

 

Playatech – The Only Brand The Man Can Stand, And No One Else Crazy Enough To Try

 

 


 

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The Baddest Bar In the Black Rock, Bar None!

In 2005 we built the Glimmer Bar. It worked great in the 5 Elements Pavilion except for one problem: you can’t dance on it! For 2007, we’ve created the ultimate Black Rock Bar to solve that.

Made from about two sheets of 3/4″ ply, each Black Rock Bar module is four feet wide by two and a half deep, with a shelf inside. Just perfect for one bartender and one dancer! For large bars, they instantly connect to make your bar as long as you want. And of course, they instantly assemble or collapse on command so you can tend bar anywhere on the planet.

Check out Silicon Village’s Hair of the Dog camp at happy hour during BM07, and you’ll see eight Black Rock Bar modules, with Coyote Ugly Dancers on four of them. They’ll be far from ugly! But they will kick your drinks into the deep playa.

Playatech – Raising the Bar on the Black Rock Lifestyle

 

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The perfect place to mix your fix

Desert survival guides stress liquids but largely ignore food, so we suspect half the drinking establishments in Black Rock City will use these as back-bars. But it’s a kitchen, honest, at least on the playa. At home, it’s an 8′ wide credenza for your dining room, entertainment center, office, or … well, just build two!!

Playatech is especially excited about this ploduct because it was designed by Sawdust, who built a bunch of Sunshine’s stuff and then decided to come up with his own awesome kitchen solution. It rocked the Burning Silicon 5 Elements Pavilion at BM05 so hard we destroyed it before getting good pix. As a result, we strongly recommend sealing the horizontal surfaces to protect against spilled liquids.

Just compare the Pledenza to a conventional camp kitchen, and you’ll run from IKEA.

Plans are available NOW on our orders page, so what are you waiting for? The plans fully utilize 3 sheets of ply – but add/subtract some to put shelves wherever you want! If you decorate one nicely, it will look great in your home. And will someone please make a narrow version from two sheets and send in the plans? Maybe we’ll declare you a Playatech Master Creator like Sawdust, and hotties will stick to you like sawdust.

The Pledenza – something tells us this will be our ticket to free drinks at every bar on the playa

Playatech – We Really Know How To Cook With Wood

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A Really Cute Table & Seating For 2-4!

Our friend Wristy made this table and a pair of these benches from a total of two sheets of 1/2″ plywood – that’s about twenty bucks! It is cozy and solid, and demonstrates that even a flat tabletop surface can be achieved without fasteners by using Playatech methods.

Nice work Wristy!

Playatech – Shareware You Can Sit On

 

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All You Can Eat From Just One Sheet

Here’s another cool design from the early 70s book “Nomadic Furniture” – a complete kitchen table and four stools, all from just one sheet of ply! And you get two choices of base style.

If you make the table and stools square instead of round, you’ll save some work and leave no moop – how’s that for Playatech before its time?!

Playatech – Rewriting The Book On Slotted Plywood Design

 

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A most basic storage solution

Generally we prefer form over function, and to be perfectly honest, you can probably buy stronger shelves at IKEA or OSH for less than you’ll pay to build these yourself. So, why would any sane burner build Plykea shelves?

1) Because there are no sane burners.

2) Because any dollar to IKEA supports commodification instead of art.

3) Because plywood is way more earth-friendly than plastic!

4) Because we don’t pay our workers slave wages.

5) Because we eliminate all packaging MOOP so you don’t have to.

6) Because our stuff assembles and disassembles without tools.

7) Because no other shelving system will match the rest of your playa furniture so perfectly!

Each 8 foot tall, 4 foot wide, 2 foot deep shelf unit containing 4 shelves can be made in a few minutes from 2 sheets of ½” ply. It will hold a lot of gear but not a ton. We’re almost embarrassed at how obvious they are, so we offer them at just ½ the usual royalty – that’s right, you can build a Plykea Shelf for $5. Only $2.50/sheet, even less than the cost of BM’s porta-potties.

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Playatech – supporting asses and the arts since a few weeks ago

 

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You Know We Just Had To Do It!

Massage tables are expensive. You could spend $200 on a half-decent one at Costco – or just $20 for the Playatech version! They both ship in the same amount of space – theirs folds, but ours collapses – only when you tell it to of course.

This one was created by Wristy, who used it at Mystic Massage last year. Girls, you might want to check out Mystic Massage this year. As you can see from his work, he is really good with his hands.

Playatech – Where Asses Meet Art


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The first and only desk designed to save burners fuel

Believe it or not, a lot of burners hold desk jobs on playa. And many of these white collar workers still use those antique metal government desks!

How many old boat anchors will we see on freecycle when everyone finds out that our new Miss Direct Desk provides 30% more desk area, and you can ship 24 of them in the volume required by just one rusty metal clunker? For a large playa enterprise, a desk that ships in 2.4 cubic feet can mean the difference between driving a pick-up truck and a semi.

Each Miss Direct Desk can be made from exactly two sheets of ½” ply, and we suggest the desktop sheet be sanded to minimize splinters. The desk is a full 8’ wide x 3’ deep, and includes some shelves to one side that can hold two plastic bins for hanging file folders. It also features an optional keyboard tray, pencil shelf, or ergonomic foot rest the full width of the desk, and could be used for two people or on both sides. The desk design is easily modified to add additional shelves, privacy panel, cup holders, or pretty much whatever you want. Our famous Playa Love Seat is easily converted to the best desk chair you’ll ever have by cutting the arms down to fit below the desk.

The Miss Direct Desk is coming soon, but due to capacity constraints in our drafting and prototyping departments, Playatech can only discuss volume orders at this time – contact our major accounts sales department today at sunshine@playatech.com if you need to build a lot of desks.

Just another way to reduce/reuse/recycle in unique Playatech style…

Playatech – We don’t make your camp; we just make it collapse.

 


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A 21st Century modular bar system for Black Rock proprietors

Black Rock City only really needs three kinds of furniture: seats, beds and bars. We’ve got the best seating and convertible beds this side of Reno, so before IKEA can challenge our dominance in Playa furnishings by exploiting a hole in our product line, we decided we’d better design a collapsible, burnable bar!

Here it is – it will collapse only when requested to unless it is subject to forces beyond our control. It should work with most any bar top your artistic staff might create or scrounge (you can use plywood for the bar top as shown in the plans, but that would be so damn boring).

Cut the rectangles first like you do for all our other fine furnishings. Clamp several pieces together to cut the curves quicker, and assemble. The cutting drawings here yield four bar supports with one shelf and an 8′ bar top from three sheets of ½” plywood, but this is the kind of project that invites you to lay out the modules however you like!

The top and front views in the plans illustrate one of many ways a corner can be made using interlocking shelves to increase structural support. Some configurations may benefit from additional modifications to the standard parts, such as extra slots, shortening shelves, making 8 foot long shelves by cutting your ply the long way, or adding foot rests. Do it pre-playa to avoid sawdust moop. Secure the bartop to the assembled supports and shelves using angle brackets or whatever else you like. We recommend you seal the bar top and shelves, or they may delaminate and warp with that heavy spillage we know goes on in the wee hours.

Like all our innovative products, we request a $5 royalty for each sheet of plywood used, paid to www.blackrockarts.org. We also request a mail to sunshine@playatech.com illustrating your design and indicating the planned location of the bar at Burning Man. This will enable our expert staff to make an inspection visit and ensure your bar passes our stringent engineering requirements and stress tests, which will be memorialized with a burned Logo logo. Unregistered Glimmer Bars found at Burning Man constitute a Playamark violation and may be stress tested without notice. Note that it is a violation of Burning Man event policy to burn your bar in place if doing so will create a danger, and forms are required just to try.

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Playatech – We don’t make your camp; we just make it collapse…

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It’s a Plane… No, it’s a Flop!

We admit it: every once in a while we create something really useful, but it just doesn’t come out well enough to properly represent the vaunted Playatech brand. This is one of those times.

In 2005 we wanted a great little coffee table to go with all those love seats and pews, so we thought we came up with the perfect design from exactly ½ sheet of ply. It even looks cool enough to fly!

The problem is that the little wing is only stable if the slots that hold it are sized really really accurate. More accurate than we ever bother with. So, we cheated! Yes, we prostituted ourselves at the church of screws and attached some 1×1/2 stock under the wing to keep it steady. And it still isn’t steady!

When we have time, we’ll lower the wing, cut large circles in it, and make it a drink holder. That’ll fix it, yeah. In the meantime, try the plans and fix it any way you want…

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Playatech – Someday, Everything Will Be Plywood

 

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Billboards For Burners

Finding camps in blinding dustorms can be a challenge, but it would be easy if every camp had a Plaprietor Sign! In Old Europe, every shopkeeper did, and cities felt like villages. Go on, build one. It takes a few minutes, and will help you strut your stuff…

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Playatech – We Do It The Old-Fashioned Way

 

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Having Your Hundred Closest Friends Over For Dinner?

 

In 2010, Feed The Artists asked to come over for dinner. With 100 artists. And they wanted tables for floor seating. So we designed a commemorative table just for them, made from just (go figure) one sheet of 3/4″ plywood! Then we built a dozen, added 100 pillows, and burned our logo into the table-tops – voila, table service for 100 radical creatives! A dozen can fit in the under-storage of a modern RV, and they work at 15″ or 27″ height – try that IKEA!

Get the ply that’s sanded on both sides for this easy project. And don’t try to cook dinner for this many artists yourself. That took more work than furnishing the whole dining hall…

Playatech – When Art Calls Home, We Answer The Phone


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Special Order For The Almighty’s Empathy Oasis!

In 2012 we got a special order for a very special purpose: to raise up the throne in God’s Empathy Oasis – where God answers calls from a Talk To God Phone in a remote phone booth, to anonymously provide mere mortals with purpose and direction.

We had to create something special of course!

So we made this 12′ diameter octagonal stage, from 7.5 sheets of ply. On this we raised the throne, and God held court there with some angels, and God said, “let there be Burning Man”. And so it was…

The plans aren’t too polished for this one, but you ought to get the idea if you’ve made Playatech before. Just use some simple hardware to secure the stage surface to the support structure, or you might fall from God’s graces …

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Playatech – Yes, There Really Is A Stairway To Heaven

 

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Whatever Happens On Playa, Stays On Playa…

 

Way back in about 2006, our friend Soundman modified a Black Rock Bar to add a raised sign panel, mounted a couple whiteboards, and called it the Whatever Booth.

Brilliant! Anyone who wanted to radically participate or express can define the booth’s purpose with markers, get behind it, and light up some silly magic. Oh what fun it is…

We found a couple pictures, and figured it is worth its own page. We don’t have any formal plans for it, but if you can build a Black Rock Bar, you can probably figure out how to make this yourself. You will need to slightly modify the bar top with two slots, and relieve the rear support to accept the risers. Also make two ~6”x4’ risers with slots near their bottoms that slot into the bar top and fit against the side supports. Then add a 4’x1’ board on top slotted to the risers. Mount the whiteboards however you want – we can’t think of everything! 

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Playatech – The Playa’s #1 Way To Make Whatever

 

For our UniFire extravaganza at BM13, we needed a 24’x12’ fire performance stage. We could have made a bunch of Simple Stage modules and slotted them together, but we wanted to make an enlarged OctoStage with angled corners instead. Why? Cause it seemed cooler!

The OctoStage design appeared too complex to extend, so Sunshine radically simplified things into a modular repeating pattern that could extend to any size stage. Then complicated things again by adding a rear step for performers and a space under the front for a subwoofer.

The result became the MegaStage. It can easily be made 1’, 2’, or 4’ high – we chose 2’ to limit wood costs. It took a bunch of folks a day to fabricate but on-playa, it slid together in about 1.5 hours with 3 people – numbering every part helped. Except for a few warped areas, we skipped installing the planned “L” brackets at the ends of the support boards because they weren’t needed. We screwed the stage surface to the supports in a few places, and voila! A MegaStage that can take hard wear, using hardly any hardware – for less money than renting a conventional stage.

The fire performers rocked it BTW…

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Playatech – Turning Industrial Art Into Performance Art One Fire At A Time

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