Announcing: The BORG2 . . . and the bet . . .

Bob · Post by **Bob** » Sun Dec 05, 2004 8:24 pm

andi wrote:I don't speak for anyone but myself...

...there is not a Regional out there who wants to be labeled as one of Larry's franchises...

<sigh>

Whatever the extent of your psychic powers, the Regional entities are franchises of Black Rock City LLC by a legal definition. Read your contract.

Some people who do other events or who foster other communities inside or outside of Burning Man are party to this, and some people don't want to have anything to do with the org the rest of the year, for whatever reason. AFAIK the borg2 petitioners are taking nothing away from you or Larry other than reading time, at present. They want to work with Larry. But feel free to project whatever you want upon them, within the bounds of the eplaya TOS.

GlowScreen · Post by **GlowScreen** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 11:54 am

Chicken John wrote:"I guess I'm not asking for any answers. I just wanted to express to Jim Mason, Chicken John, Ladybee and everyone else that this has created quite a strange situation for artists. Do I have to choose a side?"

Don't be stupid, apply for as many grants in as many places as you can and put your thing wherever you want to and/or move it twice a day!!!! Build 2! Get a grant for something and build something else! Suprise somebody.... freak out.... play requetball in an evening gown... take a blind guy to a movie... learn to play the ukelale.... collect stamps.... I'm glad your not asking for answers.... I'm losing it.

I am not stupid. My concerns are well thought out. Your assumption that I am closed minded is way off base. I have been making interactive art for many years.

If you are losing it, then maybe that is why you were so dismissive of my legitimate concerns. I am trying to understand all of the issues involved here, including the financial aspects. It doesn't do much for my faith in your abilities to be called stupid the first time that I make contact with you.

amy

Rian Jackson · Post by **Rian Jackson** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 2:57 pm

I think it would be possible to both preserve some sense of 'one city' while having actual actvity happen in several 'city centers.' It's all about spatial dynamics. (Now i need to go draw some possible doodles.)

I see one thread that ties this all together: generally communities that are either anarchist or otherwise very community-based in their organising and decision making are smaller rather than larger. Whether or not any of you ascribe to an anarcho-vision really doesn't matter for this discussion; the point is that many of the best (IMHO) parts of 'having more say' and effective anarchist culture overlap. On a large scale it becomes very difficult to do, but then when you break society down in becomes manageable again.

What if these neighborhoods made their own rules about art placement and camp placemement? What if there was a central space for each one that a group of village leaders, guided by their village people (not the YMCA type) shaped in terms of space, art, and 'activities'? I'm just shooting from the hip here, so let's keep the flames low, but there's some potential in this.

The ideological question, it seems to me, is whether or not the community wants to intentionally and 'fully' segregate into sub-communities. It's happening anyway, and the BuMP has done it's own share of placing people according to their 'class' if you will, but it's another thing to create separate sub-cities based on this.

What i'd like to see, in the above case, is that other groups started their own rogue neighborhoods....

oh, and as a side note - fuck the man. next year let's get rid of him on wednesday. ourselves.

stuart · Post by **stuart** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 3:12 pm

I think this already happens. There are several large villages that return every year. Most of them do many of the things the org does on a city-wide scale. They collect funds and set up infrastructure, work on placement of art and camps, rules, activities, art, etc.. They also encounter the same grief that the org does on a larger scale, i.e., people bent about where their money is going, their placement, neighbors, those damn rave camps, etc., etc..

It's an odd paradox. If you organize into a larger village, the village then has more power over the neighborhood. But if you, as an indivual or individual camp, organize into a village you give up power. It's got to be like early aggrarian cultures. As a big ass group we can do more but individuals must sacrifice autonomy. I mean, clearly burning man is not really a temporary autonomous zone for most of us.

geekster · Post by **geekster** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 3:14 pm

Rian Jackson wrote:oh, and as a side note - fuck the man. next year let's get rid of him on wednesday. ourselves.

Not wednesday ... since they are still selling tickets until Thursday. Burn him at 12:01 AM Friday.

I like the idea of "clumps". Imagine if the design were changed just a little and instead of being an arc, what if there was a "clump" centered on center camp, and another "clump" around the twp pavillions, Berlin and Tokyo. The BORG2 could then maybe have a new "clump" maybe around a place called Cairo (reference to bumfuck egypt). You could have the "default" burningman experiance, or the alternative experiance.

stuart · Post by **stuart** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 3:33 pm

a while ago the concept of a city redesign came up. One person suggested mini-cities. I thought that was kinda cool.

geekster · Post by **geekster** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 3:48 pm

Well, it certainly shouldn't surprise anyone that the need for something on a larger scale than the current "villages" scheme might eventually evolve. You can't spread it out too much without having some form of transport, though. People need a way to get to Arctica and back before they die from heat exhaustion or the ice melts.

Zulegoona · Post by **Zulegoona** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 4:03 pm

Keep in mind 15,000 people showing up looking for a place to camp without any previous connections to any village.

I don't see how formalizing divisions will bind us into a single community. I do think more neighborhood connections are great but, even with neighborhood identity there needs to be something to bind the city together as a whole. To me the different kinds of people all together is part of what makes Burning Man what it is, It feels like formalizing divisions into autonomous zones would be heading down the wrong path.

III · Post by **III** » Mon Dec 06, 2004 7:40 pm

>mini-cities

back when i first heard em referred to as "donuts", i was soundly told that they'd never happen. things change though...

TheJudge · Post by **TheJudge** » Tue Dec 07, 2004 6:58 am

Call it what you want, but its just a potentially big-ass theme camp full of art. More power to the Borg2 people, though.

geekster · Post by **geekster** » Tue Dec 07, 2004 11:02 am

Zulegoona wrote:Keep in mind 15,000 people showing up looking for a place to camp without any previous connections to any village.

I don't see how formalizing divisions will bind us into a single community. I do think more neighborhood connections are great but, even with neighborhood identity there needs to be something to bind the city together as a whole. To me the different kinds of people all together is part of what makes Burning Man what it is, It feels like formalizing divisions into autonomous zones would be heading down the wrong path.

You got me to thinking ... and the process was something like this ...

Borg2 wants less hassle with the golf cart people (as just one example). So then I think, okay, why does Borg1 have golf cart people? Probably so a fewer number of people can cover a larger area without becoming a heat casualty. So why do they need the people? Well, the next thought was why does Borg2 think they are NOT going to need the people? I think they are going to need people to serve the same functions that the "golf cart crew (GCC)" serves but since they will have a smaller area to cover, simply wont need the carts. If they aren't going to need the people, then the question stands "why?".

Is borg2 going to somehow "screen" their participants so that they only get people that dont NEED the GCC to tell them where their camp is and the other stuff the GCC does? Are you going to need some process above and beyond what org1 does in order to "qualify" to be part of borg2?

One thing very positive I see coming out of it is an experiment in greater delegation of responsibility of certain things from org1 to a community group. This has the potential, if successful, to free up considerable resources from borg1 and to see its role evolve from one borg of several into Uberborg. The Uberborg could concentrate more on the abstract higher-level parts of the event and more of the nuts-and-bolts delegated to the community orgs. In that respect, Burning Man evolves from a city to a nation or a "world".

This has the potential to play well into the whole regional thing too. Regionals could form their own borgs and take on more responsibility along the lines of what they might do with a regional event only take a portion of their region to BRC which becomes a sort of "worlds fair" of BM culture.

Interesting possibilities ... if it works. And it will, eventually, I think. Maybe not the first year, but I imagine a lot will be learned.

sputnik · Post by **sputnik** » Tue Dec 07, 2004 12:25 pm

I'll say it again. Feudal cities with roads connecting them together. But what to do with LSSA? Maybe they go way out at the north end on the other side of the man and places like Hushville go way down at the south end. It would go a long way toward creating enough space between the spaces for sound to die down (and I think it would look cool from the air too). 5 of these cities could contain something like 7 to 8 thousand people each. A circle of radius 800ft, contains just over 2 million sq ft of space. This would give 8000 inhabitants 251 sq ft of space each, including roads and such. I'd do the math on the existing plan, but I don't have the dimensions. Our camp this year was 150'x50' and had 50 inhabitants, plus roller coaster. Thus we had 150 sq ft per person, which was more than enough.

sputnik · Post by **sputnik** » Tue Dec 07, 2004 12:51 pm

OK. I did find dimensions of the city and calculated out that the city itself contains roughly 30 million sq feet of space, some of which is 'public' land (ie roads and such). This means that the current city allows roughly 800 sq ft per resident, assuming 37K people. However, I know that the outer reaches were much more sparsely populated than the inner rings. If we lived with 150 sq ft, then my friends living out at Sedna and 7:30 probably each had something like 2000 sq ft available, maybe more. So maybe a more reasonable allocation per person is something on the order of 500 sq ft. That means a circle of radius 1100' can accomodate 8000 people.

Zulegoona · Post by **Zulegoona** » Tue Dec 07, 2004 1:05 pm

And you could have Queerville and maybe put a fence around it to,.. protect, the residence and they could wear pink and black triangles on there arms so those who don't belong could be identified.

There could be a parsing at the gate for first timers, the greeters could interrogate them as they came in and decide where they should be sent to camp. Even splitting up groups if the wrong kinds of people are traveling together.

You could have the city states forming alliances and on Saturday have an all out war between the groups sort of a mad Max, the Viking, and Mongol hoards all rolled into one and after the blood bath the bodies could be burned with the Man.

Yeah I can see how divisions are an entertaining thing.

sputnik · Post by **sputnik** » Tue Dec 07, 2004 1:12 pm

I don't see this as any different than allowing large scale villages like AEZ or hushville to block off large areas of the city for themselves. Besides, if this is to be an experiment in temporary society, then we ought to muck with the variables to see what happens.

Zulegoona · Post by **Zulegoona** » Tue Dec 07, 2004 1:27 pm

I think I'm responding to the physical separation as something that would be psychologically more fractious than the villages to date have been. With the separation come a more defined identity with the little city state. A competition ensues between the city states forcing even stronger identification with the burg your in, and it snowballs from there.

buckethead alien · Post by **buckethead alien** » Tue Dec 07, 2004 1:42 pm

What could be be done along the concepts laid out in the Pattern Language is to give the large villages identifiable borders or to conjoin several smaller ones into new entities. The adjustment in truth might be less difficult than it might seem, while yielding significant results. Most anyone who has camped outside of the villages in the undifferentiated burbs can attest to how impersonal things get by Thursday.

If the city were to gain some neighborhood definition, each sector would need to have a common ritual/gathering space, a radio station of its own, and space for art and performance of its own.

If you think for a minute about what helps define the "happening" neighborhoods in cities that you know, there is often a physical separation marking the transition from one place to another. Houston Street in New York City, a wide, nasty thing, helps give a sense of place to SoHo. Market Street in San Francisco gives definition to, what do they call it--SoMa?

In no way does this mean breaking BRC up into separate parts, it means giving the exisiting parts the architectural and landscape features they need to function as meaningful social space.

Zule, I have over the years I've been at Burning Man, found the villages to generally be inwardly focussed and not all that welcoming to people from outside. I am guessing that there may be a way to break down the wall through a little tweaking of the city grid.

Badger · Post by **Badger** » Tue Dec 07, 2004 7:13 pm

In no way does this mean breaking BRC up into separate parts, it means giving the exisiting parts the architectural and landscape features they need to function as meaningful social space.

I'm thinking along these lines as well. If we face the fact that the size and scale of the city is somewhat overwhelming for a good number of folks then why not encourage some level of ghetto construction/demarcation. It seems to me that it might possibly go a long way towards people investing more in an area that is familiar and intimate vs. one where they feel their contribution is swallowed/unnoticed/ignored or marginally acknowledged by the populace.

III · Post by **III** » Tue Dec 07, 2004 7:14 pm

mmmm. donuts...

sputnik · Post by **sputnik** » Wed Dec 08, 2004 6:33 am

I want to add something else on this subject. 04 was my first year on playa, though I've been following burning man for three or four years before that. I was camped at 7:30 and Esplanade and felt that folks over at 3:00 and Esplanade were in a whole different world. I didn't feel any sort of sense of community with them just because there was some relatively continuous line of stuff (tents, people, cars, etc) that made a tenuous connection between me and them. I felt more of a connection with the camps that were relatively close to me: Black Rock Roller disco, Asylum, Deep End, etc. Yes, I spent time over on the other side of the city and wandered the back roads, but the camps I felt were part of my neighborhood were those nearby.

BTW, I think other patterns could be just as impressive from the air (not that I see the city that way all that often).

geekster · Post by **geekster** » Mon Jan 17, 2005 6:41 pm

New development in the BORG2 Guest Curator race ...

A collaborative effort has just been formed between Draka Arts/Lisa Nigro and the Sisterhood of the Burnin'Bush for BORG2 position of Guest Curator. Don't know about the Sisterhood? It's a COALITION OF WOMEN ARTISTS -186 members strong. To meet some of these amazing and creative women, or to view their profiles, please go to burnin-sisters.tribe.net This powerhouse of women is excited about facilitating proposals and the production of art for BORG2 '05.

If this collaborative effort is accepted to the BORG2 Project, Lisa intends to take her six years experience of building art in the desert to the plate, and Co-Curate with both Sisterhood & Draka Arts members. Lisa and the Sisters of BB will concentrate specifically on bringing virgin artists to the Project and promise to guide them through every step of proposing, creating, installing, and tearing down of art for the playa. Lisa will be spending the next few months in San Antonio, Texas, and from there, she will gather creative talent from San Antonio, Austin, and Houston. With the assistance of both Draka Arts and Sisterhood members, Lisa hopes to attract new artists from all parts of the country. Lisa is also well versed in the Art Car Community that is strongly based in Houston, and wishes to dedicate a portion of her time and energy to working with Borg1 and the Borg2 Art Council on more fair and just treatment of Art Car Artists at Burning Man 2005.

If you don't know Lisa, here are some of her qualifications:

-She builds over-the-top, massive art, and in so doing creates community through creating art.
-She inspires others to do the same (and otherwise).
-She can operate as instructor, director, and/or mentor on art projects.
-She is the Founder and Organizer of the annual Burnin'Bush Fire & Metal Arts Festival at Adobe Flats Playa every 4th of July weekend www.burninbush.org
-She is capable of creating Structure out of Chaos, and vice-versa.
-She finds importance in breaking rules and re-structuring for the good of the ALL.
-She is Mother to Draka the Dragon and 3-1/2 yr. old Tymberline
-She is the Founder of the non-profit Draka Arts Foundation
-She was recently nominated for Who's Who in America

To view Lisa's credentials, please go to www.drakaarts.org/bio_lisanigro2.html

Thank you-
And cast that vote for Burnin'Bush, DA & Co!

spectabillis · Post by **spectabillis** » Thu Jul 21, 2005 3:15 pm

In the spirit of Holloween, I am going to resurrect this horse and look at its carcass.

Badger · Post by **Badger** » Thu Jul 21, 2005 8:17 pm

In spite of the acrimony surrounding the BORG2 project I think it's important to note that they've funded at least four very, VERY interesting projects that will undoubtedly add to one's experience on the playa.

Thanks Jim.

spectabillis · Post by **spectabillis** » Fri Jul 22, 2005 3:06 pm

I cant help but to agree with that and add my appreciation. Its not all about Jim and John, it became many people behind a group effort that is pretty damn rare in influence. They adopted and championed a cause to many people who would otherwise be clueless.

Other influences seem to be strong as well, like drawing attention away from the rave camps. There are a few groups that I think will reverse in thinking its all about a party, including DJ based ones and thier sound stages.