Assembling the Genie Bottle at Burning Man 2014

These are the photos I took of the assembly of the Genie Bottle at Burning Man.

We arrived to the Playa on Monday night, and on Tuesday, we were placed, found our trucker, unloaded the truck and put up some caution tape and lights. 

We had over 200 pieces to assemble. Fortunately, we had many helping hands.

This is Marty Kenney, working so hard, he trapped himself inside.

This is the dump truck that brought us decomposed granite (DG).  We covered the ground with a 3.5 inch layer of DG to protect it during the burn.

 While waiting for the ground stakes and DG to arrive, we organized all of the pieces.

Here's what the neighbors were doing at the same time.  This piece is called "Squared" by Charles A. Gadeken.

 This is Embrace by The Pier Group.

 After dinner, we built the deck.  Tiling a pentagon with rectangles is no easy feat!

 The next morning, we finished the top of the deck and raised the main struts.

 Everybody is strutting!

 Zelda Lin inside

 Adding walls.

 Hats off to Marty Kenney for making construction work look classy!

The crane came...

 ... while the sky put on a show for us.

A little dust storm blew through.

The crane lifted the top part onto the base.

While we guided the piece into place with long ropes.

That's Jim Crowley inside bolting the pieces together.

We worked at night to finish the last round of panels.

And then we added the interior, and it was done.

If you would like to see more photos and read about of the Genie Bottle at Burning Man, click here.  Thanks for looking.

Genie Bottle at Burning Man 2014

I recently returned from a long epic journey, camping in the Nevada desert, and making large art for the Burning Man Art Festival.

I was the lead artist for a 25 foot tall Genie Bottle, a furnished wooden gazebo and climbable sculpture made by a crew of over two dozen people.  The Genie Bottle was supported, in part, by a grant from Burning Man.

I worked on the Genie Bottle most days in some way since April, including 13 nights on Playa. Last week, my friends and crew mates burned down the Genie Bottle to ash, and we cooked s'mores over its smoldering hot coals. That was five months of creation burned away in less than a day. The art was ephemeral. It was a study in detachment. However, not everything about the Genie Bottle is gone. There remain numerous artifacts, including stickers, buttons, photographs, pillows, tassels, and the countless memories of festival goers who climbed in and around the piece, sat inside on its couch, enjoyed its light, danced on its pole, and watched it burn throughout the dark night.

Here is what it looked like at night.  It's a blurry photo, because that's how I remember it.

 Here's a clearer shot with The Man in the background.

This was the interior design.  Zelda Lin was chiefly responsible for leading the interior design crew.  She created those stencils on the pillows specifically for this project.  Sarah Leyrer painted the "By Struggletent" and other signs that decorated the interior.  You'll be happy to know that we removed the pillows, cushions, tassels, lights and signs before we burned the bottle.

The Genie Bottle had 20 facets per layer and 7 faceted layers, so a total of 140 facets.  Of these, 120 were laser cut with arabesque designs designed by Marty Kenney.

 The Genie Bottle stood 25 feet into the air.

It weighed approximately 4500 pounds, with about a quarter of that weight in the pentagonal deck.  The deck was bolted to the ground with 10 long ground anchors that took a special machine to hammer them into the ground and remove later.

We had to bolt the piece to the ground to keep it from falling over in high winds or when people climbed on it.  People climb just about everything at Burning Man, so it was important to make it safe.

We could see the genie bottle all the way from our camp, which was maybe a half mile away. (This photo was not taken from our camp.)  Here on the horizon, you can see The Temple and The Volcano on the left and Embrace on the right.

The Burn
We set the Genie Bottle on fire on a Friday night at Midnight.  We removed all of the interior decorations, the crown on top and the steel pole in the center.  We loaded it up with fire wood.  We strategically cut into some of the main struts to help control how the piece fell.  Then about 20 people formed our fire safety perimeter crew, led by Greg Whitehead.  We made a circle about 63 feet away from the ground deck in order to keep watchers at a safe distance.   By this time, a few art cars had parked and a couple hundred people waited patiently for the burn to start,  Mike Ryan added a few gallons of "accelerants" (that's a fancy name for diesel fuel).  Then Paul McGlaughlin threw a couple flares inside to ignite it.  The burn started with a BANG! More people amassed like moths to a flame.

Within minutes, the entire structure was engulfed in flames.

 

The laser cut, 3/4" plywood burned off first, revealing the 2 by 4s, 4 by 4s and the two upper decks.

Eventually, one of the main struts failed, and the washer deck (16 feet up) came crashing down to the ground.  It fell beautifully, with only one large beam falling outside the pentagonal base.

And then it came down completely.  Once our safety perimeter was released, a line of revelers danced circles around the fire.

Here's a little video to give you a sense of the mood when the perimeter dropped.  I simply spun around in a circle so you could see all the things going on.  Forgive me if it makes you dizzy.  Next time, I promise to bring a tripod.

The fire burned all night, and a small group of us stayed up to watch and tend the fire.  Once the fire died down enough to get close to it, we made do-it-yourself s'mores.  Dawn broke at about 7 AM with a red sun.

Then the Yin-Yang near us was set on fire.

And then at some point, I looked closely at our pile of coals and noticed foil wrapped potatoes.  Potatoes.  Somebody threw potatoes into our coals when we weren't looking.  Nobody tending the fire saw who did it.  I ate one.  It was a little dry, but I appreciated the thought.

Then I headed home and tagged in our Leave No Trace Crew to clean up the mess: coals, metal bits, and thousands of screws.  And potatoes.  Susan Staley and Mike Katell lead the crew of mighty genies (including Theresa Whitney-Corvino, Sarah Leyrer, and Marty Kenney).  They didn't finish until 3PM.  Next time, we need a larger crew to help. 

The Genie Bottle was a creation by an intentional community, collectively known as Struggletent.  We are multifaceted in our skills and contributions. Over two dozen "strugglers" helped with the Genie Bottle at some point along its creation and burn.  Many new friendships between crew members were created, many old ones were strengthened and, sadly, a few are now broken.  Through the ups and downs of this project, I learned a lot about my friends, and more about myself, and for these insights, I am grateful. I am also relieved to be home again, back to work, and I remain confident that I will continue to create beautiful and complex artwork for and with my community.

Here I am with some of my fellow genies. Christy Burback, Susan Staley, me, Theresa Whitney-Corvino, and Danielle Deckard.  All of these women did more than their fair share in this project.  Thank you ladies!

This is Paul Brown at the top of the Genie Bottle.  He was the chief engineer for the Genie Bottle.  Without Paul, this project never would have happened.  He was the one that turned my sketches into workable plans, with everything specified to the nearest 1/1000th of an inch (a mil) and 1/10 of a degree. 

This is me, lounging on the couch inside.

Other people's photos and videos of the Genie Bottle:
Techcrunch See #37.
Daniel Thornton 
James Addison
Abi Bell

Abi Bell (2)
Arin Fishkin
Arin Fishkin (2)
Arin Fishkin (3)
Video of day 1 of build
Video of day 2 of build
Video at Sunset
Video of the burn




Thanks for looking!

Genie Bottle Update 3

We are still working on building a giant genie bottle, big enough to sit inside and enjoy a few moments to make a wish or two.  We call ourselves Struggletent, the camp that struggles with our tent.

We are community of artist, engineers, designers and makers who are working together to build a 24 foot tall Genie Bottle at this year's Burning Man Art Festival. The Genie Bottle is supported by a grant from Burning Man.   As the lead artist on this project, I am also documenting our progress.  This is my fourth installment on this project.  Read Update 2, Update 1, and The first post.

Will Corvino cut more than 150 pieces on the laser cutter with Paul Brown's specifications.  Here you can see Paul, Jim Crowley, Will, and Melanie Schrader, genies in residence and members of Struggletent, posing with some of the panels that make up the outside of the bottle.

In cutting the panels, we are left with lots of letters, numbers and pretty flourishes, some of which are on the ground here.  You can also see the two doorways on the right.

We are designing the bottle in the spirit of Arabesque art, which includes a tradition of calligraphy.  So, what should we write?  Paul and I chose about a dozen of our favorite math and physics equations to decorate the panels that will be at eye level.  This is the Fourier transform.  (We lost the dot on the i.  Must remember to drill that out.)  We like to think mathematics are the wishes granted by the genie.

This is the washer deck that will be 16 feet off the ground on the finished art.  That stack in the background will be the mezzanine deck, which will be about 5 feet off the ground.

On top of this washer, we built one of the smaller levels as our test level.  Start small. Then go big!

The bottle has 140 side panels cut on a laser cutter into trapezoids.  Then, we have to cut all four edges of every piece to have a bevel so that the pieces will fit together at the proper angles.  Paul figured out all the angles, and we are using a table saw and a jointer saw to cut them.  Here Paul works the table saw, while I admire Marty Kenney's knotwork designs.

Assembling the pieces requires lots of drilling of nails, thousands and thousands of nails! Fortunately, Stuggletent has many helping hands and several power drills.  This day's drillers including Theresa Whitney-Corvino, Paul and Jim.  Will is in the background beveling two-by-twos on the jointer.  We use the two-by-twos to join almost every seam.

You can see some of the two-by-twos on the inside here.  The seams that won't be joined by two-by-twos will have either bigger wood or metal brackets.

The top level will have a crow's nest that Mike Ryan and Scott Anderson are making from rolled steel.

Here is Mike Ryan preparing to bend the steel pipe.  And here I thought that only Super Man could bend steel.  Maybe Mike actually is Super Man?!

Here we are leveling the ground for our test build.  The Playa will be very flat, and we need a very flat surface to build our sculpture.  Will ran the rototiller, then, Will, Theresa, Paul, Jim and I all helped with the raking and leveling of the dirt.  We will have just enough space for the ground level deck plus just enough room to squeak around each edge when it's built.

Here you can see how far we are today, two layers of panels and the washer deck.   Doesn't Marty's artwork in the cutouts look amazing? 

Thanks for looking! Here you can see photos of the finished Genie Bottle at Burning Man.