Nomad Codes

surrounding trance music. (This explicitly psychedelic dance music, characterized by invariant beats and squiggly, heavily flanged melodies, has only recently begun to lose ground as the dominant party genre of Black Rock sound systems.) Although the digital mixtures of abstract graphics and mystic iconography associated with the trance scene rarely rose above candyflipping kitsch, a smaller group of sound-and-video artists continued to push the experimental edge, exploring modular programming tools and complex algorithms to massage and plumb new patterns of hypnotic abstraction.
    But the screen only gets you so far. Given the ubiquity of LCDs and cathode ray monitors in our everyday lives, and the impossibly high production values that go into mass consumer simulations like Hollywood movies or Middle Eastern wars, a truly viable cult of flicker must reclaim the visual space outside the box. This is perhaps Burning Man’s greatest aesthetic triumph: the creation of an immersive and chaotically collaborative arena of expanded cinema that marries a wide range of visual media, both fancy and crude, with the most powerfully archaic flicker tech of all: fire.
    From the burning bush to Viking funerals to the iconography of hell, fire carries an intense symbolic load. But the true greatness of fire lies in the fact that such symbolism is nothing more than cardboard and Kleenex in the face of the blazing thing itself. We are all metaphysical children before arc lights or bonfires or propane explosions, fascinated by fire’s all-consuming alchemy of beauty and threat. This fire-lust burns at the core of consciousness itself. Twenty thousand years ago, when the Black Rock Desert was bathing beneath tons of Pleistocene sea, our ancestors had already spent untold generations with fire. Its shadow dance must have formed the visual track to oral tales and goddess knows what manner of ancillary rites. We often hear that modern consumer culture has replaced the hearth with television, but we seldom draw the full implications out of this received notion, which is that fire was the old ones’ TV . Some of that hypnotic power continues to animate the fire-twirling that remains (despite its formal limitations) Burning Man’s signature performance art. For spectators, these highly ritualized performances function as a syncretistic cult of flicker and flesh; for twirlers, they offer an elemental encounter—a dance of power and risk, a mutual seduction, an erotic opportunity to lick and swallow an incorporeal flux that feeds on matter itself.
    As the festival’s early madness gave way, perhaps inevitably, to the demands of safety, the destructive potential of Big Fire was significantly curtailed. Burning Man’s central event has now become a controlled fireworks display far less immersive than the fearsome and toxic rites of earlier years. In the Debordian sense, fire has become increasingly spectacular in these latter days of the Burn. For Debord, the spectacle—the totalizing pseudo-world of technical mediations that support the capitalist system—profoundly alienates us from actual life through its endlessly circulating images. Though Burning Man works against this alienation and scrambles its relationship to capital through a gregarious potlatch, the central event of the Burn, whose neon conflagration mingles with a myriad of camera flashes, reminds us that the festival is also shaped by postindustrial circuits of technical mediation. But perhaps Debord’s situationist critique cannot really touch Burning Man’s Big Fire, because the spectacle of fire itself is so deep and ferocious and old that for a spell its excesses consume all frameworks.
    Although Burning Man has gentrified fire, the festival has also intensified the technology of flicker. Though screens are relatively rare in Black Rock City, the nighttime playa-scape has itself evolved into a vast, three-dimensional display of artificial lumière . At night we find ourselves navigating through the after-images of a friendly arms race of lighting designers, who continue to push the envelope on relatively new (and increasingly cheap) technology like lasers, electroluminescent wire, LEDs, glow sticks, and computer-controlled strobe lights. Myriad lines, dots, and blinky lights dance before your eyes, many forming specific icons like hearts or Mayan pyramids or mobile jellyfish. Burning Man’s lightscape also serves as an open museum of classic visual phantasmagoria,