STUART: 

Hey everybody, Invisible Friends. This is still Burning Man Live. I’m Stuart Mangrum and I am speaking with a good friend of mine. Joining us from Helsinki is Dr. Jukka-Pekka Heikkilä. He’s a researcher at Aalto University in Finland. He’s a visiting scholar at Stanford and Harvard. 

He’s also the main brain, I would say, behind the Burning Stories project. That’s a very ambitious multi-year effort to talk to Burners all over the world, to take their stories and to turn it into data that we can have some kind of scientific fun with. 

He’s also a volunteer leader of the Burning Nerds community, which is a loosely organized group of scholars in every discipline you can imagine who are studying Burning Man and its impact on people, on society. 

Hi, Jukka-Pekka. How are you?

JUKKA-PEKKA:

Hi Stuart, hi everyone. I’m doing great considering it’s October in Finland, which is not the best, but thanks, and nice to be here.

STUART: 

Well, I’m glad you could join us. 

I’m sad that I didn’t get to see more of you in Black Rock City this year. Lots of things happened. It was an eventful year. I missed a lot of stuff. And one of the things I really, really wanted to catch, and wasn’t able to was the Burning Nerds event in the new, the brand new Center Camp. Thank you for stepping in and helping put that together. Tell us just a little bit about what happened there when you put the call out to Burning Scholars to come out and do… What did you do?

JUKKA-PEKKA:

Yeah, this was what Burning Nerds is all about, is experimenting. And this was indeed experiment as a part of Future Friday initiative, which was organized in Center Camp. And after open call for research groups about ongoing research, it ended up that we had five different groups presenting basically a poster session. Which means that the poster is, that it carries, it can be ongoing research, can be concluded research, and in some cases it’s an idea. 

So we had different groups on from MIT, and University of Southern Denmark, and then we have even artistic performance about management, and then Estonian Academy did a counting carbon presentation, and then…

STUART: 

I’m sorry, did you say performance? Was a poster performed by a clown? 

JUKKA-PEKKA: 

Yeah, yeah, exactly by a clown. Karoliina Jarenko was a clown. Yeah.

STUART: 

Is that standard in Finnish academia to have presentations done by clowns? 

JUKKA-PEKKA: 

Nope.

STUART: 

No, okay, it is experimental?

JUKKA-PEKKA: 

Yep.

STUART: 

Go ahead, I’m sorry.

JUKKA-PEKKA: 

Yeah, and the intention was that it brings science closer to everyone. I was personally surprised how much people there was on a Friday in Center Camp, like without the coffee thing. It was great in that sense. And we had a kind of ad hoc poster stand built, and yeah.

STUART: 

Rather than giving presentations, you put up a visual and have people come up and ask you about it. That sounds perfect. 

I want to hear more, a little bit more about a couple of those groups. But first, I want to talk a little bit more about your research. There’s something we haven’t ever talked about. Tell us a little bit about the Open Strategy project, and what that means and what it has to do with Burning Man. What’s Open Strategy?

JUKKA-PEKKA: 

Open Strategy, it’s something that is related to transparency and inclusiveness. And what is meant by this that usually organization, can be a company, it can be an NGO, is that when it decides a future direction, it’s usually done by a small group of top management team, or people who are basically running the organization.

In the Open Strategy theme, it’s done internally with employees or externally with, for example, with communities. It’s tapping into wisdom of crowds. And in order to do that, it gives power basically to the people. And that’s the philosophy behind it. 

Why do organizations do it? When thinking about it, decision making is outsourced, be it to employees or to communities, it’s that solutions to problems tend to be quite novel. It brings out new ideas, and it makes quick adjustments possible. 

And in our research project, we have four cases, which is two leading tech companies, and then Wikimedia (which is Wikipedia), and Burning Man. And we are doing that together with, in Aalto University, together with University of Oxford.

STUART: 

This sounds to me like taking a human-centered design approach to larger issues of organizational direction and strategy? Is that a reasonable comparison?

JUKKA-PEKKA: 

Yes, indeed it is. 

And why it’s becoming so popular is that it has shown clear evidence on people’s commitment. The people commit to an organization, be it for-profit or non-profit, obviously that’s a great asset. 

And also that it enables different types of corporations; when, for example, it’s let’s say employees are doing future direction strategizing together with communities. And one of the problems of it is that, well, if you think about it, in history, then decisions have been done by a small team of management, top management, and then suddenly the power needs to be given away. And so that creates a lot of conflicts of them. 

And also that these need to be communicated in a fairly transparent manner why something is done and how it’s done. 

With the Burning Man case, it’s very exciting, what we are doing and it’s rather unusual. So we are studying the history of Burning Man — and not the Burning Man Project, but Burning Man community as a whole: What decisions made Burning Man, Burning Man? And we are looking into history, and fairly early history, and also what were the kind of critical, really critical decisions that influenced what it is now.

STUART: 

That’s fascinating. The Burning Man community is so large and so diverse when you look at it on a global scale, I imagine you might be talking with the Nordic Burners from the Borderland team because they have certainly crowdsourced a lot more of their operation than other events have.

JUKKA-PEKKA: 

Yes, Borderland is one among many. 

Our first interest is in the history, and for that we’re interviewing the, let’s say, the older crew of Burners. And also I’ve been in the Reno museum which have been very helpful in terms of opening the archives. And our second main stream at the moment is: How is decision-making done with communities? So basically talking the interaction between Burning Man Project and the Regional communities within European Leadership Summit, as an example. Like those decisions what are made there obviously influenced the future directions or dialogues that are done there.And we were in Tallinn, where we hosted the most recent European Leadership Summit this year with a team of four scholars, it was extremely fascinating. And also we gifted our expertise in one workshop which we felt honored to, honored to do. 

STUART: 

Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about some of the research that was brought out to the playa this year, either in the form of a poster, or a poster interpreted by a clown, or whatever…

One of the projects was the University of Southern Denmark. We were actually able to speak with Bryan Yazell and Patricia Wolf of that project about their research. But first, Jukki, I know you’ve spent some time with them both before and during the event.

JUKKA-PEKKA: 

Yes. The argument is that because we are seeing future in so negative light, why don’t we imagine it in a more positive light with the communities that tend to be very innovative? They hosted two different workshops where people imagined that, okay, something happened in Black Rock City that ended up as a very positive future. They are collecting these narratives from various locations, and it seems to be going very well. It’s fantastic, very exciting project on stories.

 

BRYAN: 

I’m Bryan Yazell and I’m associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark, and English and American Studies, and also a fellow at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study, which is here in Odense in Denmark. I’m from California originally. I’ve been in Denmark for seven years, and my research is largely concerned with speculative fiction, especially about climate change, so how novels in particular depict climate change as something that will impact us both on an individual level, but also societal level, and how that might help us prepare for these changes.

PATRICIA: 

I’m Patricia. I’m a full professor of Innovation Management at the University of Southern Denmark. And I’m also together with Bryan a PI of a Climate Elite center, which is called PACA. It’s a climate elite center that tries to identify post anthropocentric root narratives that help us to mass mobilize climate action because we know that when we talk about climate mitigation, necessarily, it’s perceived as negative, and that doesn’t mobilize people. That’s the idea.

STUART:  

You guys came out to Black Rock City and did a pretty interesting project. Tell me a little bit about the research.

PATRICIA: 

We thought that the Burning Man community would be one of the communities that already consists of people who have thought about climate mitigation and who would be therefore very interesting for us to ask about their visions for climate future. So when we came there, we assumed that people who are there, they already believe in that we can do something for climate mitigation, and we wanted to know what drives them.

So we wanted to know their visions, and the workshops were actually about eliciting their visions. Hopeful climate futures.

BRYAN: 

Yeah, we’ve been working with high school students in Denmark, and we’ve been asking them to imagine the future of climate change in the form of telling stories. And what we’ve seen in those stories is that almost universally these teenagers have, ah, very negative expectations for the future, largely because of climate change. And that’s not surprising. And so the question we’ve been asking ourselves is how we can develop tools to assist them to think about more hopeful futures or to conjure these futures.

It was a kind of almost a moonshot idea to go to Burning Man because the idea was, as Patricia said, this is probably the most visible community in the world where people are enacting the type of society they want to live in, that they are dedicated to sustainability, and if we’re going to ask any community to help us envision a hopeful future as we felt like that was the community to ask.

PATRICIA: 

We did one workshop where we asked people and facilitated them to write stories, climate future stories in the future, 40 years from now. Then we analyzed them. We identified four clusters of stories that were similar, and for those we then made musical triggers, because we had also asked the participants about what kind of soundtrack would your story have?

And then we made participatory play, so improvisation theater workshop, where they brought in two of these life-worlds to the stage.

STUART:  

Now I can see immediately how this kind of an experience might benefit the participants to kind of help them shift their mindset. How does it benefit the rest of us? And how do you extract that as data and turn that into a wider solution?

BRYAN: 

Yeah, that’s a really good question because we really were experimenting with a new method. We, at this case in Burning Man, asked people to specifically be hopeful and positive in their orientations, to try to be radical in their envisioning of these futures. And so, the way we’re trying to use this as research would also give back to people who need this information, is to sort of pilot in a type of module we want to use in the future.

So, as you said before, working with young people about imagining climate change, perhaps some of the templates and narratives that we developed here with the participants of the playa might be helpful for us to think about frameworks, narrative frameworks, that we can use in other settings. So rather than ask a teenager to be optimistic, we can say,”Well, here’s some narratives that we’ve actually crafted, some frameworks that have been developed that might be helpful for you to craft your own story. So work with this as a template,” for example. 

We’re in the act of putting these stories online, and the workshop details, to try to at least share the research in an immediate sense, and not just do the typical academic thing where we publish it in some obscure journal and it’s not really considered beyond that. So we want to be as forward and public facing as we can be.

PATRICIA: 

Yep, and the report that we had made, which contains all the stories that we have gathered in Burning Man, is now online so we will distribute it now back to the community, so that everybody has access.

STUART:  

Excellent. We’ll make sure that gets in the show notes.

BRYAN: 

Okay.

PATRICIA: 

Something else that happened afterwards, actually, yesterday, was that we have been asked whether we would want to do, or to repeat, what we have done at Burning Man at the Klima Folkemødet in Denmark on Bornholm.

BRYAN: 

The “Climate Peoples’ Meeting” that they have every year.

PATRICIA: 

So it seems as if this format is inspiring other people and other communities. So I think maybe we will then spend some time in describing also the format, maybe a bit more so that people can be using the same thing without us, maybe in other places.

STUART:  

It seems like just the process of imagining the future has gotten more problematic, certainly since the pandemic, but actually over a longer sweep of that. I’m old enough to remember a more modernist view of the future, where it was somewhat optimistic and forward looking. And now I look at pop culture and sci-fi, and I see zombie apocalypse and I see the cli-fi, the climate fiction of Paolo Bacigalupi, which is terrific, but his last series was a young adult series, right, of people living in a pretty ravaged world.

BRYAN:

Dystopia.

STUART:  

…because of climate change.

BRYAN: 

Yeah.

STUART:  

It seems like that’s almost an overwhelming cultural force. How do we get past that?

PATRICIA: 

Well, Bryan might have another perspective from the humanities.

From a social science perspective, I would say we bypass that by not asking people to reproduce what they have already heard, but we are giving them, in the two minutes when we ask them to write stories about the future, they don’t have time to think. And that’s a method that tries to access the visionary part of the knowledge that we all have but that we usually don’t access, and you can only access it in creative action or in spiritual activity, or in meditation. 

We have used flash fiction, we have given people triggers for their stories, like a starting point for their story. And we have said: It’s at Burning Man, you have one person, it’s in 40 years. And then we have given them the start of this story and then we have given them two minutes to continue the story. 

And it was about flow writing. So getting them really in the flow and not letting them think. And that of course – you will find images that are in the media and so on. We find them because they are also part of our language and our thinking. But I don’t think that what we have found relates so much to those things that we have in the media and in the cli-fi. 

BRYAN: 

Yeah, I mean, it’s something that I think about a lot and as you said, I have my own sort of literary studies perspective, but…

You brought up Paolo Bacigalupi and he’s said in interviews that he wants to to mobilize people, and he wants to not only inform, but to activate people’s concern. 

And dystopia is popular precisely because it is such a powerful imaginary form, that people do respond to dystopian stories. And so it’s a coincidence that everywhere you look in science fiction, the future is kind of dark and, you know, cyberpunk-esque. 

But then the issue I think that we’re running into is that once it becomes so normalized, they don’t really have that activating power anymore because they’re sort of mundane, right? Everyone can imagine a dystopian future. So how does that do anything? How does this get us concerned?

It’s not so different from what you were saying, Patricia, but I think my sense of it is that there is a kernel of concern within dystopia that even when people are perhaps fearful for the future or imagining these dark scenarios, in doing so, they’re acknowledging concern, and they’re perhaps even identifying specific areas that need to be fixed or addressed. This idea of a ‘critical dystopia’ is a term that we often use to describe this. 

What we could do as scholars and in general when we tell stories is to somehow make us aware of our perhaps um, monopolized imagination when it comes to dystopia and how we can still acknowledge there’s something there that can be activated.

STUART:  

Yeah.

BRYAN: 

Another author, Kim Stanley Robinson, talks about, you know, dystopia is good for the present. Ideally we’d be in utopian thinking, but until we get to utopian thinking, dystopia will serve us because it can get us there, by fighting our attention for things that need to be fixed.

PATRICIA: 

On the other hand, we must also say that if we want to make conscious choices and if we want to make the right decisions, that then means that we need a vision on where we want to go. And that should be ideally with a topic like climate change, a long term vision. So I think the hopeful futures, they really are also important and maybe they should be circulated also in the public discourse a bit more.

STUART: 

Dystopian fiction seems to me to express a bit of the cynicism of postmodernism. Is there anything after – what is the post-postmodern world look like, meta modern? Are there narratives that emerge out of that, that acknowledge that risk but also provide some possibilities of changing?

BRYAN: 

Something that I think is very current and very new that we talk about actually quite a lot in PACA is this idea of reworking the contours of the dystopian or cyberpunk imagination to stress positivity, regeneration, and sustainable futures. And they often refer to this idea – like solar punk, for example. So you still have this emphasis on DIY, on free-thinking individuals who band together in these communities, but it’s about, you know, farming, it’s about creating sustainable energy. 

And here in Denmark, actually, there’s some examples of communities and communes that are producing their own solar punk fiction, and also trying to use that as a way to engender this positive imagination. It’s very fringe obviously, but that seems to be something that at least is getting people interested in how we kind of go to the post-postmodern imagination.

PATRICIA: 

And also there’s reasons for why people tend to publish, or to hand in, dystopian stories in our climate fiction modules in the Danish high schools. Once somebody interviewed, and we asked him, “Why did you hand in a dystopian story and not something positive?” And then he said, “Yeah, you know, I really want that something changes, so I think, so that people take what might happen serious, it needs to be a dystopian story that I should publish.”

STUART:  

That idea of solar punk is really interesting. Yeah.

I want to know more about what people imagine. Actually, tell me about the methodology of Flash Fiction. That might be a concept that our listeners are not super familiar with. How does that work?

PATRICIA: 

Flash Fiction is a concept where you ask an audience to write in a very short time frame, so two to three minutes, stories. They should flow write it. And usually where they can get in the short timeframe is 150 to 300 words. It’s very minimized stories. We also tell them that they should focus on one actor, one situation, so no sidetracks. And they should just flow write. And when they get blocked, then they should just write “and then” the name of their protagonist, so, for example, Bryan, and then the next thing that comes into their mind, so for example, “took my pen and threw it out of the window.” And so that they get into this flow and that they don’t start to rationalize. 

What is also important, we ask them to write these stories by hand. You will see this also in the report. We scanned the original handwritten stories because there are something that is called Hand-Mind Relationship, and you get more into flow if there’s no technical medium like a computer or something between it.

STUART:  

There you go, demonizing technology again.

PATRICIA: 

No, not demonizing.

STUART:  

It does get demonized along with industrialism, right, a little bit too much. That notion that technology for all of its evils might still offer some hope for the future is something that it’s interesting to see emerge. 

I want to know what kind of themes popped out of some of these exercises. What did people envision in that exercise?

BRYAN:

So we looked at the stories, and we grouped them based on the kind of world they built and the assumptions that govern this world and what change was directed from. And so basically the four categories we found, one was — we called it “After the Bubbles,” after a really memorable line in one of the stories. This is a group where basically inspired by the environment at Burning Man and the exposure to kind of free-thinking and innovation. People are mobilized to go out and be innovators in the wide sense and to find solutions in the band together. But at the same time, there’s this sense of playfulness and joy, bringing this to the fight to make a more desirable future. The stories didn’t necessary say how this thing happened, but basically the idea is that if you get about 5 to 10% of people dedicated to change, then that change will happen.

PATRICIA: 

What is very important about this one is that it’s a scenario that doesn’t require us to sacrifice anything. This is also why it’s called ‘After the Bubbles.’ So this is the story that we are quoting is saying, yeah, and then we’re going to kind of save the world because we implement what we learned at Burning Man, but only after the bubbles, right? So let’s first have a party.

BRYAN: 

The second other big group that we saw was about more collective action. And so these stories imagine these scenarios where basically everyone at all levels of society contributes to radical change with whatever skills or opportunities they have. As opposed to this first cluster where it’s more about, you might take a visionary class of people, this was about what we think of the more sort of traditionally as collective action, just mass movements of people who are fed up and they just dedicate their energies to something more desirable. That was another major cluster.

PATRICIA: 

And we find technology in this cluster also, and there it assists the sustainable practices. So we have, for example, intelligent assistance, I.A., in one of these stories.

BRYAN: 

The other ones that were not as prevalent as you might have thought going in – but that’s why it’s so nice to work with people to develop these stories because you can’t necessarily anticipate what they’re going to write. There were a few that were more traditional sci fi utopian scenarios. I think at least one or two involved like interstellar travel or, you know, resettling on another planet, and basically starting over from scratch. And this time things will go right because we’ve learned our lesson, is the assumption. 

And then the other one that also I would have thought would have been more common, but did show up, was this idea of essentially people reconnecting with previous generations, so like ancestral knowledge or indigenous knowledge, where you do have narratives and worldviews about how you can live sustainably. And we sort of re-remember these things and that leads for a wide scale transformation. That appeared in several stories as well.

PATRICIA: 

And there, technology doesn’t play a big role at all. So what saves the world in that sense is the power of connection that you establish or reestablish.

STUART:  

As with the collective action thread, too, which, it doesn’t surprise me that Burners would come up with that one up. 

This project was also a bit of collective action. There were a larger group of you out there. Tell us about the group that traveled together to Black Rock City.

PATRICIA: 

We also had Christoph, Christoph Kunz, who’s a researcher from Germany. He’s a professor in Business Information. And he then made the soundtracks for the play with AI, which was fascinating for us. We have never seen something like that, right Bryan?

BRYAN: 

Yeah, it was really impressive, yeah.

PATRICIA: 

One of them even came back. Ella, who’s the fourth researcher we had with us. She was humming it like two days later, and I was like, “I know this song!” And then I recognized, ah, my God, it’s one of our music triggers. So yeah. 

So Ella was also there. Ella is a research assistant. She’s also from the University of Southern Denmark. She supported us. 

STUART:  

Had any of you been to a Burning Man event before?

BRYAN: 

No, It was all our first time, actually.

STUART:  

So how did that go? Just the action of going from halfway around the world to the middle of nowhere, tell us about that.

BRYAN: 

Yeah. I feel like it was such a long journey. When the previous Burning Man was going on, we conceived of this plan to go the next year, and essentially it was a year in the making. And so it went from excitement and just this the sense of anticipation when it was about eight months away. And then, of course, when you’re about two months and then one month out, it becomes logistical planning, planning the shopping trips you have to do, making sure of supplies, making sure we have a place to, to do the actual workshop.

And then getting there, I don’t know about you, Patricia, but when I got there and we were on the playa for the first day, it was just like kind of mouth open, like, “Can we believe that we actually made it happen? I think we actually had a toast to actually making it happen, something that we just conceived of kind of wildly, and it just felt so surreal to be there.

PATRICIA: 

It was really nice. I mean, in the beginning it was kind of an idea, right? So then we wrote up a proposal and we had a meeting with you, Stuart, and Kirsten, and all of a sudden we recognized this also is something that you guys thought was nice.

Then we had this incredible support by Kirsten, who then connected us with the Burners Without Borders camp. And then we got affiliated with them. And then we had discussions with Breedlove and all these people. So I’m so incredibly grateful for this support because it kind of made this feeling, “Oh my God, what are we doing there? We don’t know this environment. Can we actually do it?” And so on. It kind of kept it relatively low because I had the feeling we’re in good hands. 

So there’s people who help us. We have the right environment. Of course, weather, you never know what happens, and so on. Wild activities that we expected to happen there, but still it felt safe, and I’m super grateful for this.

BRYAN: 

Yeah. The support yeah the support was incredible from the camp and everyone else who just really banded together with us to make this happen, because I could easily imagine a scenario, where we just showed up from Denmark, never been to Burning Man before with our, you know, tents or RV and just some plans to get people to do this research project with us. It could have been a disaster. Probably an entertaining disaster but…

STUART:  

OK, that’s a good way of describing a lot of Burning Man. It’s an entertaining disaster

BRYAN: 

Yeah.

STUART:  

What I’m curious about is that you picked 40 years into the future as a milestone. I only mention that because I’m sitting here trying to come up with next year’s Burning Man theme. And guess what? This is our 40th year. So I’m thinking about what’s another 40 years on top of that? That’s Burning Man 2065.

PATRICIA: 

But you can read a lot in our report from these scenarios about that, how it will be.

STUART:  

Okay. I look forward to it, actually.

So do you have plans to continue this research at any other Burning Man events or anywhere else?

BRYAN: 

We are in very early actually stages of trying to do a similar workshop at Borderland, which is the, the Scandinavian Regional Burn. 

At Burning Man several people had said that of the regional Burns, they felt that that was the most committed to sustainability. Hopefully this summer at least a few of us will go and do the same workshops there. And this again, will help contribute to our methodology to develop these frameworks that we can use in other contexts. So using a similar demographic, a similar set of self-selected people, to really help us develop these tools.

STUART: 

Okay, Jukka-Pekka, another one of your poster children (Can I use that term?) who brought a research poster to Black Rock City was Matt Zook from the University of Kentucky. We had an interesting follow-up conversation with him too.

JUKKA-PEKKA: 

Yes. He’s looking into urban planning in terms of Black Rock City being temporal future city. It’s a very ambitious project in a sense that there is a call for other research. Clearly, it follows the stream of Black Rock City as urban planning and I think that really deserves its own special issue or something like, because it is more and more like a future city that has a lot of wisdoms to be shared.  

 

MATT: 

My name is Matt Zook. I’m a Professor at University of Kentucky in geography. I study the internet. I study digital geographies. I study how cities are changed by the way the internet is intertwined with our daily activities. I’m also very interested in the way that people can interact across distances, and also just sort of how that changes both our socialization but also our economies, our society, cultures, all that sort of stuff. 

STUART: 

That’s super interesting because I mean one depiction of Black Rock City is in a town that exists both digitally and physically, depending on what time of the year you are. In fact, I think one early writer back in the late 90s described it as a physical manifestation of the internet. I never understood that, but does it have any legs for you? 

MATT:

It actually has legs for me. Black Rock City being the physical manifestation of the internet – it gets both the sort of physicality, the materiality… You know, all these fools are going out in the desert year after year after year, that must mean something. At the same time, there’s all that interaction that we have during the rest of the year through WhatsApp, Facebook groups, you know, whatever you would have. And both are really important in building the Burning Man community. 

STUART: 

So tell us a little bit about your research on playa this year. 

MATT: 

Yeah, well, the title I’m working with right now is just simply “Unfixing the City.” My PhD is in city and regional planning, so I’ve always been interested in how cities work. And the unfixing part really comes out with a pretty simple question: “What is a city?” And when you start with a simple question like that, you start going off into more complex questions, you start looking at the phenomenon. 

For Burning Man, it’s such a wonderfully interesting phenomenon where it’s a city that does not exist for most of the year, at least physically. It exists for, let’s say, a week or two, longer before and after in terms of the work. But it also exists in the rest of the year in all kinds of interaction. 

The fact that we’re having this conversation, even though we’re thousands of miles away from each other, is just another example of how Black Rock City comes to be, how Burning Man comes to be, in ways that aren’t what we normally would think of as a city. 

STUART: 

It’s funny, when we first decided to call it a city, it was considered something of a bold move. There were a number of years there where we didn’t know what it was. It was an art festival one year. It was a camp. It was a happening. But really it just, from my point of view, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. We just put a sign outside that said, “You’re in a city now.” 

But I know that’s overly simplistic. Nowadays, when people ask me, I have proof points, I say, “Well, we have an airport. We have a post office. We have a hospital.” Is that what makes a city, or..? 

MATT:

I was sort of laughing when you were saying that you put in a sign out, that says oh, it’s a city, and it sort of manifested itself after that. That’s sort of what we think about in terms of cities; the airports, the hospitals, the various city government functions and things like that — all this physical kind of function of the city.

I’m coming up from the opposite end. When I first came to Black Rock City, I got much more interested in sort of the non-physical aspects of it. This is the whole unfixed part of the city. You have an airport, you have these communities, you have neighborhoods, but they exist only temporarily or they exist in a repetitive kind of way every year. 

But then what happens to that kind of community? What happens to that kind of interaction in different times? This juxtaposition between the territoriality of Black Rock City — we’ve been there, we see it, we know it’s there — but then also knowing at the same time that right now it’s not there, except it does exist in this other form, this sort of relational form, these digital connections. We can talk about it in all kinds of different ways. 

STUART: 

So, that is another way of looking at a city. It’s a network of relationships essentially, right? 

MATT: 

Yeah. 

STUART: 

It’s the people that make the city, and not the buildings. 

MATT: 

I grew up in a Christian church and they used to always say that the church is not the steeple, it’s not the building, it’s the people that come by. And I’m no longer in that faith or in that religion, but there’s still that still importance of the community. It’s not just the physicality. It’s the people that come together. 

STUART: 

Now you’ve been studying cities for a long time. What was it about Black Rock City that you found particularly attractive for this phase of your research? 

MATT: 

It’s just all the work that goes into making a city function that caught my interest at first. Everything from the DMV, to the hospitals, laying out the streets, all that is sort of classic city planning. But at the same time, it’s also just the dynamism. It’s how much that comes out from the individual. It’s not just a centralized planning exercise, the bare bones of it, enough of a skeleton that then people can come by and then flesh it out in all kinds of wonderful and creative ways that we see every year at Burning Man. It’s sort of that contrast. That’s a very sort of unique kind of event. 

The other thing that really struck me with Black Rock City and Burning Man is it’s always nice to study phenomenon at their most extreme. You could study more typical cases, but when you study something that’s at the most extreme, things that would not be so obvious, in sort of, say, a normal city, really come to the forefront. STUART: 

Interesting. What form did your study or research take on playa this year? 

MATT: 

What I’ve been doing has mostly been participant observation. It’s a more systematic way of observing / interacting with what’s taking place on playa. So for me, that really involved having a notebook, just writing down physical notes, a lot of sort of picture taking, sort of that kind of data gathering. 

I’m hoping to start doing a series of interviews with people about their sense of community, their sense of why they’re going to Burning Man, perhaps even doing sort of a survey, though that makes most sense doing it through the Burning Man organization. There’s already the Census and the Census has been a really nice resource for me, just getting the basic demographics, but it doesn’t really get at those sort of questions of motivations, how people are sort of envisioning the city.

I can imagine even doing like some sort of simple mental mapping exercises where people draw their maps of what the playa is for them. You’re going to see all kinds of, you know, some people are going to be out by the sound camps; some people are just going to be by Center Camp, and things like that. That’s what I’m hoping to do in the next couple of years. 

STUART: 

Don’t ask me because I will draw you a map of Paris. Because I’m a situationist, and I really am a big fan of psychogeographical shenanigans.

MATT: 

Well, I would love… we could talk about psychogeography for the next couple of hours because that’s also one of this inspirations, or, inspiration is probably a long word, but it’s actually immediately one of the theoretical framings I went to when I was thinking about how to think about Black Rock City and Burning Man, that whole ‘discover the world around you anew. Don’t take anything for granted…’ 

Actually, two years ago, I actually made a psychogeography wheel for our camp that involved people spinning the wheel, and me giving a coordinate somewhere on playa, and then being told, okay, that’s where you’re sort of going, but it’s not really the destination, it’s the journey. See what you discover along the way. So yeah, I think Psychogeography is a really excellent way of thinking about Burning Man as well.

STUART: 

Okay, but there’s research yet to come, so there’s still hope!

MATT: 

Yeah, we’ll see. And maybe the task is that we’ll just take Burning Man to Paris and, you know, and invert the Situationists there!

STUART: 

Or just inject a little bit of nonsense; it’s the uh spice of life. 

So what conclusions, if any, have you come to so far from the study of Black Rock City?

MATT: 

Some of them are more about sort of theoretical conclusions or how we might think about cities. These are not necessarily new ideas coming just from me. These are sort of conversations that have been going on for decades within urbanists and, you know, sociologists and things like that.

But I think the real one is, the way we can think about cities that does not put materiality to the forefront. Now, I don’t want to say materiality is not important, I mean, I like a good sewer system as much as the next person does; really, really important roads, really important, buildings and all that sort of stuff.

But it’s also particularly as we’ve moved into — I know what we call this era, the Zoom era, the digital era, there’s different words for it — that location where we’re at, materiality is no longer necessarily the most important thing about our daily lives. It could be, and for lots of people it really is. But there’s also all these other aspects.

The fact that we’re having this conversation right now, I mean, this is going to be the highlight of my day. I don’t normally get to have these kind of conversations, and we’re only able to do this because of this digital technology. We’re able to make this sort of relational connection between us that wouldn’t exist otherwise. And that’s a really different way of living one’s life.

We’re not getting rid of materiality. I would say we’re enhancing it in some really interesting ways. The best example why materiality is important: We’re all going out to the middle of the desert, which is not an easy or necessarily comfortable thing to do, but we keep on doing it because there’s a real importance in coming together that we crave. We crave that kind of community. We crave that kind of interaction with other people.

STUART: 

So what value do you think there is to other cities and to the wider world in learning more about the way Black Rock City operates?

MATT:

The biggest takeaway really goes to this sort of dynamism. Lots of people have talked about this. Mimi Sheller and John Urry talked about this idea of a new mobilities paradigm. The sort of ideas of places in motion, that it’s not just the place, it’s not just the people, that people are interacting with that. There’s some other theorists, Rahul Mehta wrote and talks about what’s known as a kinetic city, and that’s really trying to get at this fluid ever changing urban environments that we inhabit.

And I think that’s really the lesson that Burning Man and Black Rock City can really take back to other cities, particularly city planners. There’s a tendency to try to make everything fixed, fix all the city’s problems, and that’s often thought about in static terms. We’ll fix this, and then we don’t have to worry about it. And the real lesson is there’s always something changing. 

The other real lesson is the importance of community, the way that community comes together. Not this year, but the previous year when the deluge came in and the community would come together and make things happen in a way, even though the local conditions weren’t ideal. That’s, again, a real sort of lesson for that resiliency.

There’s also sort of the joy and spontaneity. You were talking about the Situationists. There’s a spontaneity, there’s a discovery, there’s a playfulness with Black Rock City, with Burning Man, that often gets lost in regular cities. That’s a really important thing that can be taken back to what we might call… I’ll call them default cities. Why not?

STUART: 

Okay, fair enough.

So where are you going with this research? What does the end product look like for you?

MATT: 

At the big annual conference for my discipline we’re going to have a panel from people who’ve gone to Burning Man, some people involved in some of the Regionals. So we have a panel discussion, and that’s what I’m really hoping, my short term goal, try to find other like-minded people interested in talking about this. And, you know, it’s always more interesting working on a research project with other people. We’ll see what comes out of that. 

The classic output for an academic is journal articles, and so they’ll probably be journal articles as well. 

The other thing I’m trying to make sure I don’t do is make going to Burning Man just another field trip or field work project. That would be a shame. So I’m trying to balance it so I can do something, in terms of academics, but it also does not become just another part of my job.

STUART: 

Well, when that panel discussion happens, I hope somebody turns on a recorder so I can listen in on that.

MATT: 

Okay.

STUART: 

One other thing. It occurs to me that there’s a weird dichotomy to me that in one sense, everyone in Black Rock City is a newcomer. I mean, statistically, well, yeah, I think we’re up to past 40% first-timers every year, but also just the fact that everybody’s been away, right? 

MATT: 

Right. 

STUART: 

So it’s essentially a temple of strangers, and yet it has that small town vibe of where everybody says hi to everybody. How does that work?

MATT: 

I think you hit a lot of really interesting points. Every year we go to Burning Man for the first time, because every year we’re going to a different Burning Man. It’s the same place. It’s got some of the basic features, and there’s some camps that we all know or look for, but in a really real sense, it’s completely new. 

The other really important thing is it’s temporary. And I think that temporariness is also an important part of what makes Burning Man such a thing. We know it’s not going to be forever. There’s a real sort of value in having that limitation.

We might be living in the coolest city in the world in our day to day life, but we always know it’s going to be there, so we don’t really appreciate it in the same way. I mean, you never go to the museums or the tourist places where you live until someone’s coming for a visit, because you can always go to them; it’s always available. But with Burning Man, you’re like, well, it’s only going to be here for this week. I have to go see it. I gotta do it. 

So I think that newness and that knowing that it’s not going to last forever gives it a different kind of atmosphere. That also ties into why people are more open, more of a small town feel.

It is a place apart as well. That’s the other aspect of Burning Man; we’re going there not to live our regular lives. We’re going there for that sort of different experience. 

I think the real trick is to what extent can we keep that newness, that understanding that nothing lasts forever, and that’s unusualness? We’re coming back to the Situationists now, again. How do we keep that kind of sense in our regular life outside of Burning Man as well? And I think that might be another lesson that we can take in Burning Man. That’s more for the individual Burners, thinking about what they do when they go back to the default world.

STUART: 

Yeah. 

Another potential dichotomy that I don’t quite understand; one possible reason for that ease of socialization and that lowering barriers between people might be that our third places are all commodified, right? It’s not the same thing walking into a bar or restaurant and meeting people as it is walking into, essentially people’s homes that they’ve invited you into.

But on the other hand, when we took away the coffee concession from Center Camp, we had a huge hole in the playa there that it took several years to fill back in. Did you experience the new Center Camp this year? And I’m wondering if you see any parallels to other central city renovations or reimaginings.

MATT: 

Yeah, well, no, some great things to think about. In some ways this actually also points to the real way that Black Rock City is a real city. I mean, even though it gets taken down and rebuilt each year, it’s still going through urban renewal. There was a problem within central camp, the sort of existing use, buying coffee, was no longer allowed, and so it was a matter of trying to figure out how to make something else happen there. What would that be? How do you go about doing that, adjusting people’s behavior?

So it’s actually really interesting to me that a place like Black Rock City had a ‘brownfield development,’ in sort of regular urban terms, where there was an existing service, you know, usually an industrial service that’s getting replaced by something else. And that still happened. Cities are built around people’s expectations and things like that. 

Now that said, I thought Center Camp worked pretty well this year. The previous year I camped with Kentucky Fried Camp, and we were at Center Camp the previous year, and it was rather quiet. There wasn’t a whole lot going on, compared to this year there was a lot more activity. I actually went to Center Camp multiple times and saw a lot more action going on. 

I do want to just respond also to the lack of commodification. It is a big change to how we use space. Yeah, there’s not the expectation we’ll see in cities that, you know, if you go out to a downtown, where can you hang out? You hang out at a coffee shop. You hang at a bar. There are a few public spaces that we might be able to hang out: libraries, public parks, and so forth, but those are also made more complicated by other sort of social issues in terms of the unhoused, policing, other sort of things as well. So it’s a very different kind of public space than we generally encounter in our daily lives, and in the US, I mean, let’s be honest, we don’t have the same kind of public space that a lot of other places in the world have.

STUART: 

All right. This has been great. Anything else you want to add, Matt?

MATT: 

Oh actually, one last thing. Another really interesting way that Burning Man and Black Rock City really sort of exemplifies the city is the way in which everyone’s experience at Black Rock City is different. That sounds kind of trite, but it gets at this deeper idea that, because of who we are, what we look like, what our backgrounds are, how we’re feeling about it, we can be walking down the street right next to each other and have a very different experience of the city; thinking about, say, San Francisco or New York or whatever city you want to think about. That is something we tend to ignore. The fact that there’s a different city for each of us that we experience based on our resources, how we look, and so forth. But it really comes to the fore at Burning Man because it is such a celebration of the individual. You’re talking to the people who are going off and doing all these very different things, radically different kinds of experiences, even though you might be camping right next to each other having a very different experience.

 

STUART:

Hey, before we go, Jukka-Pekka, I want you to bring our audience up to speed with some of the recent work that you’ve been doing with the Burning Stories project.

JUKKA-PEKKA: 

Burning Stories, it’s a rather exciting phase. We have been collecting transformative stories since 2018 with different methods. With the story sharing cubes, around a total of 13 Burns. And then we have had a survey in the beginning, online survey where people said stories, and then we’ve done a few interviews related to the topic. 

And now we transcribed all of those, and then we uploaded them to an AI portal that we’ve been gifted. And then we also indexed all Burning Man research to that portal. And we did index all the podcasts that this series has been.

STUART: 

Well, that doesn’t sound very scientific to me!

JUKKA-PEKKA: 

No, it doesn’t. But it is in a sense, it is a very scientific experiment in terms of data repository. So what I mean by it is that once we go live, all Burning Man research can be, for example, all the abstracts can be downloaded from one place. That’s a fairly powerful scientific database for that. 

When you think about it, that it has the transformative stories, it has the research, and then it adds the podcast that tend to be from the core community or people with a lot of variety of experiences. We invite people to share their stories, and then people can download the stories. So basically that it stays as an eternal story database. And then you can chat with it! So that’s the kind of the magic we want to give.

STUART: 

It looks like this is a very limited and discrete data set that this AI has been fed, right? It’s been raised on nothing but Burning Man. So I’m excited to see how that turns out and where it might be useful. 

The idea of just simply getting all of the academic papers in one place again and making them indexable, searchable, I think that’s actually a huge win for the community of those of us who are interested in learning more about what Burning Man is all about. 

JUKKA-PEKKA: 

As an add on layer, AI expert Kiana Kiser and then artist Luca Delgado, they’ve made art from this. And that’s fairly interesting that when a story or a research piece becomes an art piece — first by AI and then a human is painting on top of it — it tends to be fairly powerful story or research communication. 

We are very excited and anyone can go and look: burning-stories.com. We are explaining the process there. Because it’s AI art, especially it’s fairly complicated, and also much hyped, we want to bring forward that this is touching the wisdoms of communities in a very new way.

STUART: 

All right. Thanks, Jukki. 

JUKKA-PEKKA: 

I really like this. Thanks a lot for asking. This is good fun. And also it brings clarity. Okay, this is what we’re actually doing now. This is what the direction is now. And so it’s really a win-win.

STUART: 

Yeah. Well, you are on your way to becoming, I think, the science correspondent for Burning Man Live, and I appreciate you very much.

JUKKA-PEKKA: 

Thanks. See you soon.

 

STUART: 

That’s a wrap on this episode of Burning Man Live. 

Hey, I just want to say, if you are listening to this and you happen to be a scholar, an academic, a researcher, working on anything related to Burning Man or Burning Man adjacent, drop me a line and let us know about it. That would be academics@burningman.org. If nothing else, I can connect you with other people who are doing related types of research, get you into the Burning Nerds circle and who knows, maybe see you out there on playa next year when we have our Burning Nerds meetup. 

I want to thank everyone who helped put this episode together. Thanks very much to Jukka-Pekka and my guests. Thanks to you, Vav Michael Vav, my amazing producer, director, and story editor. Thanks to the whole production staff, to kbot, to Allie, to Action Girl, to DJ Toil. 

And thanks to you, dear listener, for helping out wherever you can, either by sending us a note at live@burningman.org, by telling a friend about the podcast, reviewing the podcast, giving us more stars, or dropping a dollar or two in the slot at donate.burningman.org. We appreciate you. 

Thanks, Larry.

I’m Stuart Mangrum. 

See you next time.

 

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