The discussion forum for a camp in the making, as explained in the homepage for this forum, where you will find the navbars for the webrings this forum is on.
Café Satan
The discussion forum for a camp in the making, as explained in the homepage for this forum, where you will find the navbars for the webrings this forum is on. |
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Josephus Caesar, emperor of this mighty board (ie. the moderator)
 Jun 13, 05 - 1:53 PM |
Self-defeating themes (reposted from the old bmorg ring freeboard, posted 2004)
(Posted at the original location for this article on Apr 27, 2004 at 2:19 PM, Pacific Time, I believe) This year (2004), the theme at Burning Man is "the Vaults of Heaven". The introduction of the theme got off to a bad start as one quickly discovered that many burners didn't even know what the expression meant, thinking that it was a rehash of last year's theme of "Beyond Belief", which referred to religion. "The vaults of heaven" is an old expression for the sky - one which should be obvious to anybody who grew up in a Western culture, given where Heaven is pictured as being in folkore, albeit not with great seriousness these days. BMORG then pushed the theme in an interesting, but probably futile direction, talking about the wonders of the Universe on their site. Astronomy is, indeed, a fascinating subject for those who take the time to study it, but how realistic is this idea? What is built at Burning Man is not a real city, and couldn't be. Consider the realities of home ownership - one spends 30 years paying off the mortgage on one's home, usually. 30 years to pay for one home, in effect. Picture youself trying to build and burn one such home every year. Where could you possibly find such money for such an extravagant idea? Black Rock City is built cheaply, of necessity, and during the day one can't help but see the plywood. This, perhaps, is one reason why blacklight and other glowing things are so popular at BRC - at night, as the shadows hide the plywood and canvas, one can play with light and shadow to create the illusion of something a little more luxurious than that which is really there. But again, we're talking cheap, relative to what one would find in a real city. Were it otherwise, only Bill Gates and a few of his friends would be able to afford to come. Let us now consider what must be done to at all create a convincing extraterrestial environment. Industrial Light and Magic charges megabucks to do this in films - for just one such enviroment, and we'd want many. What you would be looking at would be many, many times as expensive as a real city, and would require major - read, highly improbable - technical breakthroughs at that. The images one sees in a "space opera" only appear on the celluloid going out. Mark Hamill did not, for example, find himself in the middle of an illusionary city in the clouds while shooting "The Empire Strikes Back". He was off on a soundstage, using his imagination. If one were to look at one of the matte paintings used, one would see paint on glass, not a convincing landscape. In order to pull this off, then, people will need to do what the major motion picture producers can not. That floating city would pale by comparison to what is really out there - the glowing sulfur lakes and constantly erupting volcanos of Io, the crush of stars at the heart of our galazy as they are torn apart and their glowing remnants sucked through distorted space and time to a place arguably not part of this universe, pouring over the event horizon, suns coming to life in their dusty stellar nurseries as their planets coallesce aroud then... Lots of luck. This, obviously, is not going to happen. Nobody would be up to doing this theme right. The results are most likely going to look very, very shabby and more than a little sad. |
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Josephus Caesar, emperor of this mighty board (ie. the moderator)
Jun 13th, 2005 - 2:06 PM |
Re: Self-defeating themes (reposted from the old bmorg ring freeboard, posted 2004)
(Adding this on Apr 27th 2004 at 3:05 PM) As I refer to myself as "Caesar", I am, of course, engaging in self-mockery. I know how unimportant this little board is in the scheme of things. The problem is that thoughts of this nature seldom seem to occur to BMORG, which has allowed its 15 minutes of fame to go to its collective head, leaving it to see that which is grandiose instead of that which is beautiful or fun. Consider, for example, the "floating world" theme of 2002. There's a perfectly good Japanese cultural reference to be found in that - it refers to the period portrayed in many Japanese woodcuts, more than a few of which are to be found in the Asian Art museum (nee Avery Brundage collection) located next to the de Young museum in San Francisco, probably. The Art Institute of Chicago has a nice collection of these, itself. One has the cultural reference, the literal aquatic meaning, and the endless possibilities a double entrendre can bring. Did BMORG run with that? No. Lets take a look at what they did go with, instead.
OK, now how does one build a camp around that big, nebulous concept? Nobody did. This part of the theme gave participants nothing to build on, but it certainly gave BMORG a chance to be impressed with itself. Once one got past the vaguely New Age-ish pseudophilosophy, one was left with a theme that narrowed the creative horizons of the participants instead of broadening them - all that remained was the aquatic aspect of the theme. What BMORG doesn't seem to want to accept is that art doesn't have to be about grand things that will wow one's friends at the coffeehouse. Monet did a series of paintings of a group of haystacks, studying their look in the twilight. Rembrandt did not feel himself above painting the interior of a slaughterhouse. Anton Chekov often wrote stories about peasants and workmen. All of these humble subjects inspired works that have endured and been loved for generations, right up until the present day. Art should be done for the love of what it is, not as an act of oneupsmanship. Were BMORG to accept this, we might see themes that we scaled down a little closer to earth, things that the participants might reasonably be expected to build on in a creative way. But, some people in San Francisco are treasuring their 15 minutes of fame a little too much to be able to consider the possibility of thinking in those terms, and so the theme remains one of the "thousand grand ideas, poorly executed". What a shame. |
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