Height of Man: 80 feet – Man stands upon a 40 foot Lighthouse
Location: Black Rock Desert
Participants: Monday: 7,328 Saturday: 28,979
- Theme: The Floating World
- In March, Burning Man rolled over its volunteer management tool to a new database called the People’s DB. Created specifically for Burning Man’s purposes, the new DB added greater functionality and scalability to the database and created a more customized volunteer management environment.
- The Regional Contacts program gains more momentum than ever before, as more and more Burners reach out to connect in their own communities all year long. For the first time, three regional communities are featured in the Burning Man summer newsletter.
- The hard-packed, cracked playa surface returned, along with some of the most delightful weather in the history of the event. With the exception of a short whiteout on Friday night, BRC enjoyed warm, mild, and clear weather all week, right up until Tuesday after the event, when a five-day dust storm rocked clean up crews and greatly impacted their ability to clean up and tear down the city.
- A new ticket vendor is selected prior to the start of ticket sales in January. The new company is a smaller, burner-owned operation, which allowed us to develop better relationships with them overall. A new system was developed which was highly specialized to the needs of Burning Man, and the ticket process improved enormously.
- The counterfeit ticket issue was almost completely obliterated, as the new vendor offered a foil-stamping technique that made counterfeit tickets extremely difficult and expensive to reproduce. As a result, not one confirmed counterfeit ticket was presented at the gate. The new tickets also had artwork on their face, creating a perfect Burner keepsake.
- In the year leading up to the 2002 event, the media team dealt with and resolved roughly 100 issues relating to trademark infringement.
- Nearly 300 media outlets attended the event – the largest number ever. About 30 film proposals were rejected in an effort to reduce the number of film crews on the playa.
- More participants than ever chose to create and be a part of theme camps, with a total of 445 camps registering for placement.
- Burning Man goes to court: in an attempt to stop the sale of unauthorized nude videos shot in Black Rock City, Burning Man has entered a suit against Voyeur Video requesting an injunction against the distribution of their unauthorized footage from the event.
- In response to the growing number of motorized vehicles over the years, the standards for art cars were greatly strengthened and enforced, out of concern for dust abatement and public safety.
- For the first time, the Burning Man Technology Team webcast the event and the burn without contracting an outside company, instead using in-house resources and an ad-hoc public networking infrastructure, constructed largely by The Oregon Country Fair crew and by PlayaNet, which exists for the benefit of all Black Rock City participants. This allowed for complete control of the presentation of the stream, delivered within pages designed by the Burning Man Web Team.
- The BRC Airport was larger than ever before, and about 70 airplanes and helicopters spent at least one night.
- The “ancestors” returned to the burn in the form of towering whirls of flame and smoke that spun off the base during the burn. Five hundred members of the Fire Conclave spun in the procession before the burn, some on elevated platforms to increase the visibility for the viewing audience.