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

In an amazing example of crowd funding, The People of Burning Man hardcover book has just been self-published due to the collective efforts of many investors worldwide.

Considered a book too controversial to print via traditional book publishers, photographer Julian Cash launched a grassroots book publishing Kickstarter fundraising campaign at the beginning of 2011 to let the people decide if it should be printed. They spoke loud and clear by overfunding the book’s production costs by over $11k by campaign’s end. When we first posted about the campaign in January 2011, the book still far from its goal but just over a week later, it was 100% funded.

The book release party for The People of Burning Man happens Saturday August 13, 2011 at the Jellyfish Gallery in San Francisco, California. Book’s photographer Julian Cash has collaborated with storytelling crackerjack Dixie De La Tour of Bawdy Storytelling to bring a “magical series of six 10-minute anecdotes of Burning Man shenanigans from veteran and iconic Burners” to the release party. Many of these stories will be told by people represented in the book.

The book is now available for online pre-order and signed copies will be available for purchase at the book release party.

images via Julian Cash

Burncast assembled a collection of Burning Man Tickets from 1995-2011, the most difficult one to obtain being 2011.

Tickets for Burning Man 2011 are have sold out in advance of the event and no longer available. Tickets will not be available at the gate or Walk-In Outlets. This is the first time in its 25 year history that this has ever happened.

Tickets for Burning Man 2011 have sold out. For the first time in 25 years of holding the Burning Man event, we have had to cut off ticket sales before the event. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which oversees the Black Rock Desert National Conservation Area, requires us to manage growth in line with the previous year’s population in order to comply with our use permit. As a result, Burning Man has exercised its oft-stated right to cap ticket sales.

photo by John Curley

poster design by Miss Scorpio with art Molly Crabapple

Two big fundraisers for being planned for Saturday, July 16th to help raise money for The Temple of Transition at Burning Man 2011, Get Funked Up at CELLspace in San Francisco and The Lost Circus presented by Gemini and Scorpio at Irondale Performing Arts in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

At 120′ high and 220′ wide, the Temple is a peaceful, contemplative and deeply emotional installation within which participants both leave messages to and totems of their loved ones, yet also celebrate deep connection with each other. As the spiritual heart of Burning Man, the Temple provides the Community with focus and an outlet for emotions that cannot typically be explored or safely experienced at any other festival – the Temple is completely unique to Burning Man, and we are honored to have been chosen to build it.

Existing for a single week on the pristine Black Rock desert of northern Nevada, the Temple is a place of pilgrimage for Burners where they leave their sadness, their loss, and their promises. At the end of Burning Man, the Temple is burnt to the ground in complete silence in front of an audience of over 40,000 people: a moment of release, of catharsis, and one of the most powerful and profound emotional moments one can ever experience.

If you can’t make it to either event but want to help, contributions can be made via IndieGoGo.

San Francisco photographer Barbara Traub has re-released her wonderful book Desert to Dream: A Dozen Years of Burning Man Photography, with a brand new printing that includes 16 more pages and 24 additional photographs.

The Black Rock Arts Festival (otherwise known as “Burning Man,”) has become an annual pilgrimage for a generation of artists to the dry, desert, alkali flats of northwestern Nevada during the last days of summer. So many people from around the world gather to celebrate human imagination that Burning Man now qualifies as Nevada’s fifth-largest city. Then it culminates Labor Day weekend with the burning of a four-story tall wooden sculpture of a “man”.

This book is a groundbreaking visual document of a dozen years of Burning Man celebrations — from its infancy as a performance art exhibition in the late 80′s to its explosion as a pop culture, community-driven phenomenon today. Photographer Barbara Traub captures the sacred and profane through photos of otherworldly artifacts, structures, and costumes that defy description.

Barb will be relaunching her book with signing on July 7 at The McLoughlin Gallery in San Francisco, in conjunction with “Every Reverie”, an exhibition of her black & white and color photography which will be on view through July 30.

“Tympani Lambada” is the next big flaming thing from San Francisco fire arts group Flaming Lotus Girls. The 64 foot long sculpture, which will debut at Burning Man 2011, is inspired by the vestibular structure of the inner ear and will incorporate flame, sound, and LED light effects. Flaming Lotus Girls are raising funds for the project on Kickstarter.

From a distance, bursts of fire outline sensual curves in the sky. Fiery arches intrigue and invite approach. Soaring at impossible angles and creating a slight sense of vertigo, the sculpture’s undulations echo with subtle rumbles and hums. Bulbous shapes on the ground glow red and roar with intense colorful fire flickering in their depths. Tendon-like structures stretch over the interior space of the sculpture, forming an intimate gathering place. Controls scattered throughout allow interaction with fire and light elements, accompanied by sound effects.

“Rites of Passage”, a new Burning Man 2011 poster by Cory & Catska for this year’s Art Theme.

Artists Jon Sarriugarte and Kyrsten Mate of Form & Reform, makers of the wonderful Golden Mean snail car, are building two giant kinetic sculptures, the Serpent Twins, for Burning Man 2011. Inspired by Norse mythology, the fifty foot snakes will be able to move about the playa and shoot jets of fire. The artists are raising funds for the project on Kickstarter.

These twin sculptures are the embodiment of the Serpent mythology that exists in numerous cultures throughout the world. The first is Jormungand, a dark harbinger of doom that Thor fights to save the human race in Nordic myths. His body comprised of blackened steel, he shoots fire from his mouth to prove his dominance over mortals. His twin, the bright Julunggul, shines in the sun and lights the night from within its 50′ body. She serves man by swallowing boys and spitting them out as men. They should both be fantastical in the old fashioned sense of the word!

photos by Eric Peterson

photo by Don Cochrane

“Bliss Dance” by Marco Cochrane is a 40 foot tall sculpture of a dancing female figure composed of geodesic struts with a skin of steel mesh. Currently residing at the Great Lawn on Treasure Island near San Francisco, the sculpture originally debuted at Burning Man 2010 festival. Black Rocks Arts Foundation is hosting an opening reception for Bliss Dance on May 26, and is raising funds to extend the sculpture’s stay, which is currently scheduled to end in October.

The sculpture, of a dancing woman, stands 40 feet tall, weighs 7000 pounds and is ingeniously constructed of triangulated geodesic struts. By day, the dancer’s ‘skin’, made of stainless steal mesh, shimmers in the sun. By night, it alights brilliantly with a complex array of 1000 slowly changing l.e.d. colored lights. Viewers may interact with and manipulate the lighting effects with an iphone application. The dancer’s delicate, graceful form precariously balances on one foot, adding to the astonishing impression of imminent movement and lifelike presence.