Urban Man

January 30, 2019

A week of city-wide, widely-accessible public experiences to bring moments of connection across cultural boundaries

Born of the incessant question “how might we integrate and share the open-heartedness, self-expression, and play from the sandbox of Burning Man with our broader communities?” Our goal is to create a pipeline to direct the collective creative energy that goes into Burning Man towards opportunities to support broader public and the places we live the rest of the year.

A group of 12 met several times over the course of a few months to conceptualize how to answer this. Some of the concepts included:

Work with non-profit leaders to brainstorm and design events, volunteer opportunities, or other collaborations with the Burning Man community to serve the needs of the non-profits
Hosting several prototype events with partner non-profits, invite the Burning Man community / theme camps as collaborators
Build relationships between theme camps and non-profits to galvanize ongoing year-long collaborations and support
Use week-long festival to showcase many different initial examples of how the Burner community can organize to start to change society

Prototype Website Snapshots

Source: http://urbanman.squarespace.com

The Art of Astral Projection

July 24, 2018

Experiential room for the 2017 Agape Halloween party. A meditative, collaborative creative activity, intended to be a portal from the liveliness of the event into a state of relaxation inside yourself.

Process (In Progress)

How might I SHOW this very simply?

Put All-Seeing Eye around neck, enter room at group of 6.
Sit on ottomon, close eyes, feel the vibrations of the chant energize your bones, joints, and flesh as you visualize your spirit separating from your form and floating into the Astral Plane.
Partner up, and use the Astral Projectors to cast your soulhette onto the Astral Plane. After your partner traces and captures your Form, recall your visualizations from the meditation and use the brush pens to recreate the energy.

Parts

The Astral Plane. Black art paper covering all walls, blacking out windows.
Moon-shaped light. The only light in the room, set dark enough so you can just see the figures of other people in the room and nothing else.
The Astral Projectors. Narrow-beam blue LED flashlights as the astral projectors, for casting shadows.
The All-Seeing Eyes. Necklaces with eye-shaped amulets containing LEDs, so dim you can only use it to gaze upon one projected soul at a time while close to the Astral Plane.
The Bass Ottomon. Self explanatory. Ottoman with infrasonic speakers, tuned into the singing of the souls in the Astral Plane (a.k.a. Gregorian Chant sound generator).
Metallic caligraphy brush pens
Fine point white gel pens
Rulers, protractors, spirographs