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BORG2 is the major opposing faction to
Black Rock City LLC as to the direction the Burning Man event
should take.Controversy, which was
brewing for many years, came to a head in late 2004 when Black Rock
City LLC was accused of inadequately funding the art segments of
the event.BORG2 is a democratic fork off
the Burning Man enlightened despotism.
BORG2’s mission statement
states that “BORG2 is an experimental project designed to
demonstrate a radically collaborative community-based process to
fund and curate public works of art at the Burning Man 2005
event.”[ http://www.BORG2.org] BORG2
configures their mission as a “demonstration project using
MASSIVELY Collaborative DO-MOCRACY as a means to inspire,
facilitate, curate and fund public works of art for Burning Man. In
the process, we also intend to reaffirm the core truth of the
larger Burning Man experiment: Collaborative creative work, broadly
defined, is our main vehicle towards community.” [1435]
BORG2 is an attempt of
artists and long term community members to resolve more than one
issue.On one level, artists want to
regain control over the means of production, ownership and
distribution of their skilled labor within Black Rock
City.Since artmaking is a large part of
the participatory ethos of Burning Man, BORG2 members are also
attempting to rebirth the event to a state that existed before the
growing size of the city/project necessitated more political
bureaucratic structure and control.The
BORG2 event is planning to exist in a separate village within Black
Rock City during Burning Man.
Two long term members, Jim Mason
and Chicken John, founded the movement, circulating their speeches
and bluster through email lists and an online petition addressed
and received by Larry Harvey.Their
petition promotes art curation based on direct democracy instead of
the hierarchical curatorship model used by Burning Man:
“…the
"art curation" should be put in the hands of rotating "Guest
Curators" and all funding decisions should be made by "Direct Vote"
of the full community.The art should
also be well funded (10% of the gate) and not subject to creativity
squashing litmus tests for "theme compliance" and "mandatory
interactivity".” [1436]
In order to avert the
founders-as-despot-syndrome, Jim Mason and Chicken John formed a
means of electing a council and then stepped away from the
project.Volunteers interested in being
on the council posted their names and platforms on a web
site.This site supported a voting
mechanism, whereby anyone could register and vote on
councilmembers.Winners received majority
votes.
As of this writing, art council members have been
focusing on raising funds and organizing a web-based system for
voting on art proposals.Art council
members are physically spread throughout the country.They have weekly meeting through conference
call.
The art council is setting up
the political structure for BORG2 through common work on a
wiki.Following the path of many
political systems, initial content and structure is populated by
early adopters who set format and protocol.
This debate has been
covered extensively by the local San Francisco press.
Central to
the Burning Man event is the burning of a large
effigy.On the last night of the event,
the effigy is burned and Black Rock City expires for another
year.
Basic cultural principles of Burning Man include
participation, self-reliance, and the ecological principle of
‘leave no trace’.No cash transactions
are allowed.Participants engage in a
gift economy, although an underground barter economy is
apparent.
Everyone is welcome, although the price of a admission
ticket, which can run up to $350 during the event, can be an
economic deterrent.Banning does occur,
but is rare.Participants are
self-managed, and the type of participation they engage in is
self-determined.
Responsibility for one’s self is crucial in a
permissive society within the harsh desert environment, with
temperatures that can rise up to 117 degrees and winds that can
gust up to 50 mph.Every participant is
required to bring enough food, water, and shelter for their own
personal survival.Nearly every year,
Black Rock City hosts one or two accidental deaths.The entrance ticket reads, "You assume the risk of
serious injury or death by attending."
Black Rock City is
arranged according to polar coordinates.The city has a Department of Public Works, a Department
of Mutant Vehicles, public utilities, a fire department, a field
hospital, a public art program, over 20 radio stations and an
airport.A community group, known as the
Black Rock Rangers patrol the city to mediate
disputes.The urban infrastructure has
been described by the London Observer as a "beautifully zoned
tentopolis designed with a precision of which the Renaissance city
state idealists would approve.” Louise Brill, in a Leonardo
article, The Art of Burning Man, pointed out that Burning Man has
become “the largest outdoor art performance festival in North
America….In the greater scope of the
Burning Man Festival it has become an art incubator encouraging an
exploration of creative expression against unique physical
constraints and challenges of using a 20,000-year-old prehistoric
lakebed as a blank canvas of artistic expression.”
Black Rock
City has an official daily newspaper, The Black Rock Gazette, and
an alternative daily newspaper, called Piss Clear.In 2004, Burning Man saw its first street protest (of
one member).
At the helm of Burning Man and Black Rock City is
founder Larry Harvey, the event and city’s enlightened
monarch.Larry Harvey has stated the goal
of Burning Man as "a project dedicated to discovering those optimal
forms of community which will produce human culture in the
conditions of our post-modern mass society” [1437]
As with many projects, initial
conditions were determined by early adopters who set format and
protocol.Much of the organization and
protocol of Burning Man is supervised by the Black Rock City LLC,
or BORG, short for Burning Man Organization.The BORG has roughly five members other than Larry
Harvey.During the earlier years of
Burning Man, Black Rock City resembled the “Temporary Autonomous
Zone” or TAZ of anarchist theorist Hakim Bey.A TAZ could subvert the system and its commodification
of every possible experience by seizing land.A community could commandeer some part of the public
environment and create their own reality, and then melt away before
the authorities showed up.[1438]
The scale of the event has
increased enormously, and Black Rock City has in turn become more
structured.Floods of new participants,
arriving with superficial knowledge of the event and its basic
ideals, unskilled in the community's norms, challenge the structure
of the organization and force the event to focus on its civic
protocol.
Although the society is inclusive, permissive, and
self-managing, political authority and social hierarchy evolved
once the city grew to a certain threshold.Some artists and long-term attendees believe the
underlying freedoms and concepts of the Burning Man event have been
reduced or eliminated by these developments, leading to criticism
of the current event as being too structured and controlled.
As
a society, Burning Man is politics in a petri dish.Some theorize that the city follows an accelerated
evolution due to its existence for only one week per
year.
In 2004, a group of Black Rock
City artists critical of the Burning Man organization, specifically
the art curatorship and its effect on the Burning Man event as well
as the control issues mentioned above, chose to fork.They created BORG2 and a concurrent call for more
democracy in the political organization of Black Rock City and the
Burning Man event, especially in the selection and funding of
artwork.
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