Ash Ruiz, a former member of Latin boy band Menudo (1990s), has launched his solo “electroganic” pop music career with Burn (One Love), a song that addresses the 2012 Burning Man ticket situation (it encourages people without tickets to “create the experience” at home). Los Angeles-based Ruiz is a past participant in the annual Burning Man festival. Here is a rough cut preview of the music video for Burn (One Love) from his 7-song debut EP titled Electric Innocence. The final video, which is directed by Elevate Films founder, Mikki Willis, will be posted by Ruiz on YouTube on June 12, 2012.

From the press release on PRWeb:

Despite Burning Man Festival’s efforts to create a smooth ticketing process for the 2012 late-summer festival after last year’s sold out festival crashed online ticket sales, this year’s lottery system instead created an unprecedented crisis. The massive desert lake-bed festival, capped at 50,000 people by contract with Nevada land management authorities, relies on experienced veteran attendees (called “burners”) each year to create the extensive fusion display of art and music. The lottery system failed to account for that need, and thousands of essential veteran burners have been unable to secure tickets for the approaching sold-out festival.

Ash’s Music Video for his original song, “Burn (One Love)”, addresses this with an up-tempo invitation for those who cannot attend the festival to create the experience in their own homes and communities. Given that the Burning Man culture has always encouraged people to bring its ethos of joyful – and responsible – human expression out from the desert and into mainstream, Ash’s video works to visually create what that can look like. Ash says, “When people watch this video, I want them to be inspired to live everyday like the fabulous creative beings they are!”

Ash Ruiz at Burning Man

Ruiz is also looking for band members to “rock the planet with electroganic vibes”:

via Joseph Pred

images via Ash Ruiz

At Burning Man 2012, The Temple of Juno will be constructed to serve as the “spiritual refuge where thousands gather to reflect and to mourn their loss.” Longtime Temple builder, artist David Best, will once again create the “emotional centerpiece” of Burning Man. A fundraising campaign has started on Kickstarter to bring The Temple of Juno to Black Rock City this year.

This year’s temple is also known as ‘The Temple of Juno’. Why the name? The theme for this year’s Burning Man event is ‘Fertility 2.0′. Juno was a Roman goddess who had many roles and epithets; among those that she held were as a fertility deity and overseer of childbirth, a protectress of women and the community, and a preserver of marriages.

Over on the Burning Blog, our friend Evil Pippi explains in detail how Krug Champagne exploited the Burning Man 2011 event with a publicity stunt where they staged a photoshoot in the form of an elaborate dinner party by the trash fence, with food prepared by NYC chef Phil Winser of The Fat Radish. The feast was setup in order to promote their champagne and they invited “society bloggers” to cover the event, which was written up by Notes on a Party and Taryn Cox The Wife. The event was also featured in serveral publications including Town & Country and W Magazine (since removed).

Evil Pippi writes:

Krug, a centuries-old luxury champagne house, and its publicity machine, staged and hosted an elaborate dinner party at the trash fence on Friday night of the 2011 event. Pre-event, Krug’s PR agency pitched members of the media to photograph and report on the staged dinner for publications such as Town & Country and W Magazine. They invited society bloggers to the “exclusive” champagne dinner with the expectation of getting even more coverage, and pro photogs to shoot it. And it worked. The organizers of this event brought paid photographers to the playa and had them falsely register with Media Mecca saying they were there to cover general art and playa happenings, instead of telling the truth; that they were there to act as representatives of Krug – obviously knowing that if they had told the truth, they would not have been allowed to photograph. They then pulled the dinner off entirely under the radar, had the dinner covered both by their captive media and the general media, and managed to get product placement articles published.

The event was called The Zoo Camp and Krug Champagne at Burning Man and it was organized by the creative events agency Silkstone based in NYC. Here’s how they described it:

In addition to catering breakfast and dinner for the Zoo Camp (120 people spread across 30+ RVs), we built a dinner table for the 120 Zoo Camp guests and hosted a seated three-course meal (accompanied by Krug Grande Cuvee) out on the playa. We began the build on Wednesday the 31st and completed it just hours before the first course went down the following day, with string lights, lanterns, and a walkway leading guests to the long table. Our head catering chef, Ana Morris, spent all day prepping the dinner back at the campsite, located about a mile away from the dinner site. Just before the dinner, our team drove our refrigeration van out toward the dinner and plated all the dishes from a makeshift kitchen space we created just next to the table.

Burning Man has always been a non-commercial event and all media has to be approved in advance via the Media Team at Media Mecca, which Krug went out of their way to circumvent. Making things worse, they did not clean up after the dinner, leaving the table, food and trash on the playa for others to clean up, an affront to Burning Man’s long standing policy of “leave no trace”.

Of course at this point the damage to their brand will end up being much greater than the promotion gained by their stunt. The Burning Man community is outraged to say the least and has been going after Krug on Twitter and Facebook.

Here’s the full story on the Burning Blog: How Not To Burn: Commodifying Burning Man

The story has also been picked up by MetaFilter, SFist, Inside Scoop SF and Burners.me.

UPDATE: Bret Bernhoft has written up a really great case study and timeline of the Krug Champagne Burning Man PR Meltdown.

photos via Silkstone & Taryn Cox, video by Raquel Baranow

Milktropolis, a giant milk carton and cereal bowl art car is for sale on Craigslist. It is a modified 1992 Ford Explorer that features a 10-foot diameter fiberglass cereal bowl filled with 80 custom-made cereal-shaped pillows. The bowl seats 10 or more people and its 25-foot tower seats 4 passengers. To enter the vehicle, you climb a spoon ladder and you leave by exiting down a slide. While it is not street legal, it could be used as a Mutant Vehicle at Burning Man. It was conceived and built by Jon Zensius, Bob Dow, Natalie Zensius and Stephanie Rose at NIMBY in Oakland, California. Their website has many images of the vehicle including ones showing the extensive documentation of its creation process.

photo 1 by Milkman Amok

images via Milktropolis

Last week while I was in San Francisco I stopped by to see my old friends at Burning Man. I was really involved with the organization years ago, as one of their first employees, working on the original Web Team as well as helping out with Media Mecca.

Last year Burning Man moved into the historic David Hewes Building, located at 995 Market Street at Sixth Street in Mid-Market, built in 1908. They are located right next to Zendesk and just down the street from the new Twitter offices.

While I was there Marian Goodell and Danger Ranger gave me a tour of their multi-floor offices, which include roof access with awesome views of the city.

Photo Gallery: Burning Man Headquarters in San Francisco

photos by Scott Beale

The First Friday Las Vegas art festival burned a 20-foot all art effigy named Lucky Lady Lucy at their March 2, 2012 event. It marked the first ever public art burn in the city of Las Vegas. More images of the event can be found at Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Lucky Lady Lucy (LLL)1.0 & 2.0, the 20ft tall showgirls! LLL1.0 thrived all summer long in Las Vegas and proceeded to Black Rock City for Labor Day 2011 to participate in the Burning Man Project as part of the Circle of Regional Effigies (C.O.R.E.). C.O.R.E. is a program that encourages groups from around the world to create effigies that surround the Burning Man statue. LLL 1.0 arrived in parts was put together and then burned a week later, along with 24 other effigies, in the largest planned art burn ever attempted.

Las Vegas Review-Journal quotes Burning Man’s executive director Larry Harvey (who was in attendance) as saying:

“It is actually really elegant it is in Las Vegas,” he said. “Our event is about self-reinvention. Vegas is always reinventing itself and reinventing itself.”

via BURNcast and Las Vegas Review-Journal

image 1 via First Friday Las Vegas

photo collage by Susan Tosches-Deneau

On Saturday, March 3, 2012, Burning Man presents their annual celebratory event: Flambe Lounge. Burnal Equinox is the 2012 theme for this event and attendees are encouraged to “help bring the playa to SF and embody your own unique “cross-pollination” of imagination and boundless reality.” Flambe Lounge: Burnal Equinox 2012 is a 21+ event which begins at 7 PM and goes until 3 AM at Public Works in San Francisco, California.

Join us to celebrate the mid-point in our burning year for a seriously mad-capped cultural PETRI DISH of a Burnal Equinox! Burning Man is a fertile “petri dish” of the Self and Community, where people bring bizarre and marvelous ingredients of self-expression and collaborate to create new expressive forms and ways of life. We can now scarcely be contained in the Black Rock Desert and our experiment is spilling over into the larger world at an alarming rate. We invite your imagination to spill over, too! Get in touch with your inner mad-scientist-art-splicing-bio-blingy-socio-cultural-reinvention-badass-funtastic-truly-amazing-self and BRING IT! Your art, your ideas, your creative spark and wild-eyed passion for what’s possible!

Simon Pearce and Mary Elise Chavez created this Burning Man LEGO Set, a fake LEGO product that is an “instant theme camp in a box” featuring a mini version of the Spacecats’ Hammock Hangout camp.

We were sad when we got no tickets this year, so we decided to create a mini-burn out of legos! Then it got out of hand…

Check out the amazing details:

image via Simon Pearce

After selling out last year, Burning Man organizers decided to launch a new lottery system for distributing tickets for the event. Unfortunately, many longtime event-goers did not secure tickets through the new system and the belief is that professional scalpers hold the majority of them. Organizers have responded to the situation and have implemented a “directed ticket solution” to get tickets into the right hands. In a humorous response to this ongoing story, Burning Man participant Stefan Pildes at GrooveHoops has put together a video and website promoting Crazy Bernie’s FreeBurningManTickets.com, an entity that is headed by a fictional and very exuberant scalper named (“Crazy”) Bernie Mann. The site appears to actually be giving tickets away and now, they have opened an online retail shop that is selling All Access Panties and other “Crazy Bernie” branded items. They also run the “Burning Man Tickets Debacle 2012″ blog.

That’s right, We’re so overstocked on Burning Man Tickets that now Crazy Bernie is Giving Them AWAY!!!

All Access Pass Panties

Look, Your Showing It Off Anyway, Might As Well Let It Get You INTO some Trouble!

via Jon Alloway

Burning Man: Rites Of Passage is a two-part film from Brooklyn-based photographer Ahmed that shows “a short glimpse” of the 2011 Burning Man festival experience in day and night.

images via Ahmed

Based on the children’s book by famed author Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!, co-directors Teddy Saunders, Parker Howell and William Walsh bring us the film short, Oh, the Places You’ll Go at Burning Man!. The film was shot entirely on a Canon 7D at the 2011 Burning Man festival and follows a fun cast of characters through the desert as they recite the book.

Based on Dr. Seuss’s final book before his death, this is a story about life’s ups and downs, told by the people of Burning Man 2011.

Mark Day shot an awesome video of Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple being played on a Flamethrower Guitar at Burning Man 2011.

For 14 years, 1996 to 2010, photographer Philippe Glade documented the unique architectural structures found at the Burning Man festival. Black Rock City, NV: The Ephemeral Architecture of Burning Man is Philippe’s new book where he showcases 196 of these “ephemeral dwellings”. His blog, This is Black Rock City, has Burning Man architectural photos from the past as well as from the 2011 event.

Black Rock City is a unique urban experiment in the American landscape.

For one week 50,000 people deploy treasures of ingenuity to survive in style (or not) and leave no trace in one of the harshest environment of the USA. Home of the Burning Man festival, the artistic nature of the event calls for one-of-a-kind solutions mixed with open source creations and off-the-shelve gear.

From 1996 to 2010, photographer Philippe Glade documented more than 170 ephemeral dwellings, camps, structures of BRC.

This book presents for the first time a comprehensive selection of those solutions.

via Jon Sarriugarte

photos by Philippe Glade

The 5:04 PM mutant art car, a back-end crushed 1978 Olds Cutlass Supreme, was created by Michael Michael (aka Danger Ranger) and its fun history begins with the San Francisco Bay Area Loma Prieta earthquake.

On October 17, 1989 at 5:04 PM, the Loma Prieta earthquake struck the San Francisco Bay Area and a brick wall collapsed on the rear half of an Olds Cutlass parked by Clayton and Page streets. Michael Michael saw it there and the creative wheels began to turn. “I bet that will still run”, he mused, and he placed a note on the car offering to buy it.

Within a few days, the car had changed hands, and with the addition of a new paint job and a license plate bearing the exact time of the earthquake, it became a conceptional art piece and a testament to the powerful forces of nature…

In 1991, 5:04 was the first “art car” to make an appearance at Burning Man, beginning a trend that has grown to epic proportions.

The 5:04 PM (aka the Earthquake Car) is now sporting a shiny new paint job and, as it was Burning Man’s first art car at the desert’s festival, is on display at Mutant Rides: Origin of a Species Burning Man art car and costumes exhibit at the National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nevada. The exhibit opened October 7, 2011 and runs through July 25, 2012. Artist Kevin Evans took a photograph of The 5:04 PM at the 1991 Burning Man which shows its original color and condition after the earthquake.

photos by Eric Baron and Michael Michael

Bliss Dance, a 7,000 pound sculpture of a dancing woman, was created in 2010 by Marco Cochrane for the Burning Man festival. Visitors can download the Bliss Dance iPhone app to interact with the lighting of the LED-filled 40-foot tall piece, which currently resides on The Great Lawn at Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay Area.

via The Burning Blog & Wired

Timelapse-icus Maximus, a wonderful tilt-shift time-lapse of Burning Man 2011 by James Cole.

via Coilhouse

Hannah Hart made special episode of My Drunk Kitchen while attending this year’s Burning Man.

Playa Time: Dust to Dust, a beautiful time-lapse video of Burning Man 2011 by Matthew Goodman.

From dust to dust, this time lapse covers over 5 weeks including the preparation of the event, from before the trash fence erection and after basically everyone except for DPW trickles out. Other than a few occasional pauses, the main event goes by at a rate of 3 hours every second.

via Burning Man

Cheech and Chong are off to deliver a ’70s van full of “magic brownies” to the Flaming Pole desert festival (just don’t call it Burning Man) in this Fiber One 90 calorie brownies advertisement titled Cheech & Chong’s Magic Brownie Adventure. The joke, of course, is that a new kind of “magic” is needed in their brownie as the stoner comedic duo get older: fiber.

It’s been 28 years. And they’re back. In the greatest magic brownie epic in the history of the world.

Thanks to Michael Lyons for the tip!

images via Fiber One

The 12th annual Burning Man Decompression 2011 Heat The Street Faire takes place Sunday, October 9, 2011 in San Francisco beginning at Noon until midnight. This year’s street party event will celebrate the 25th year of Burning Man with “a full twelve hours of art, performance, fire, dance, theme camps, circus arts, live music, DJs, Burning Man 2011 imagery” and more.

image via Burning Man

Mark Day shot video of some interesting vehicles at this year’s Burning Man including, “El Pulpo Mechanico”, a magnificent Steampunk Octopus by Duane Flatmo as well as an awesome Dalek Art Car.

Thanks to Mark Day for the tip!

Michael Holden shot some great photos of last night’s annual burning of the man at Burning Man 2011.

Here’s Michael’s full gallery of amazing photos from this year’s event.

via Burning Blog

photo by Michael Holden

Live Broadcast of Burning Man

Ustream is doing a live broadcast of Burning Man 2011.

The Burning Blog

photos by Michael Holden

Burning Man’s official blog The Burning Blog provides great coverage of what’s happening in Black Rock City.

Photos

Throughout the event thousands of photos will be uploaded to Flickr live from the Playa.

Twitter

Burning Man has two official Twitter accounts: @burningman & @blackrockcity

Facebook

Burning Man also has a Facebook page, featuring event updates, along with photos and video from participants.

Burning Man Information Radio (BMIR)

photo via BMIR

You can listen to a live audio stream of Burning Man Information Radio (BMIR) throughout the event.

IRC

For those of you old school geeks, the Burning Man IRC channel is located at #burningman on irc.freenode.net.

The Bold Italic has some tips for a Burning Man staycation for people in San Francisco who are not going this year.

2011 is turning out to be a very big year for those closely tied with the Burning Man festival, from a first ever advance ticket sell-out to a new nonprofit organization named The Burning Man Project which launched on August 5, 2011 in San Francisco’s UN Plaza. This new venture will bring the values and mission of the formerly once-a-year event to a year-round audience worldwide. By incorporating the tried and true methodology of the event (for years run by a private LLC), moving it over to nonprofit status will allow them to forge positive alliances locally and make changes in communities globally through six core programs. Burning Man’s values will span well beyond an event in the Black Rock Desert in a way that will allow “new opportunities for partnerships, affiliate relationships and fundraising activities”.

The primary purpose of The Burning Man Project is to uphold and manifest the values described in the Ten Principles of Burning Man, specifically: Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-reliance, Radical Self-expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Leaving No Trace, Participation, and Immediacy. “Burning Man” is understood not as an event, but as referring to a way of life lived consistently with these Ten Principles. The Burning Man Project provides infrastructural tools and frameworks that will allow people to apply the Ten Principles in many communities and spheres of endeavor.

The Project will apply their Ten Principles of Burning Man by revitalizing their own community within San Francisco’s Central Market area, first and foremost, with plenty of help from volunteers, local businesses and City officials including Mayor Ed Lee. One of the principles, participation, is key to the Project’s success and support is sought worldwide.

image via The Burning Man Project