Images of Burning Man

Carnival of Mirrors~Burning Man 2015

Burning Man is held in the Black Rock Desert outside of Gerlach Nevada Theme and text by Larry Harvey and Stuart Mangrum. Animation by Hugh D’Andrade. “The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation that is mediated by images.” – Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle This year’s theme is about mirrors and masks, mazes and merger. It will be a kind of magic show that takes the form of an old-fashioned carnival. This Carnival of Mirrors asks three essential questions: within our media-saturated world, where products and people, consumption and communion morph into an endlessly diverting spectacle, who is the trickster, who is being tricked, and how might we discover who we really are? Classic carnivals, as theaters of illusion, upheld a very strict dividing line that separated carnies, cast as showmen, from members of a naïve public who were labeled chumps and suckers, marks and rubes. Our carnival, however, will perform an even more subversive trick — its motto is Include the Rube. The wall dividing the observer from observed will disappear, as by an act of magic; through the alchemy of interaction, everyone at once can be the carny and the fool.