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Teleport Festival

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Mark your calendar for June 16-19. The Teleport Art Car Festival has an obvious bias, but they still honor theme camps and art installations. This event is held near California City, CA on a dry lakebed that feels like the one at Black Rock Desert where Burning Man is held, but the site is superior to Burning Man for a number of reasons:

  1. Cheap tickets! In the $80 range. This basically covers human waste services.
  2. Closer to Los Angeles and San Francisco where the majority of the digital music festival patrons reside.
  3. Held on private land, which avoids all the restrictions that plague events that fall within the public lands jurisdiction of BLM.
  4. Site is near BLM land, so people can tour the public playa at will and retreat from it if federal operatives become problematic.
  5. Near two areas with ample access to groceries, hardware and other services (California City and Ridgecrest, less than 40 minute drive to either)
  6. Participants can come and go as they please, none of that lockdown nonsense you find at Burning Man and their regionals.
  7. Outside services are available. There’s more than one vendor available to rent porta potties from and have them serviced.
  8. No micromanagement. The rules are very loose. None of the extreme vetting required to participate in something like Burning Man or one of their regionals.

Renegade Burn Recap

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Following the cancellation of the Burning Man Event due to Covid 19 concerns for the second year in a row, an alternative event was held at the same time and nearly the same place in Nevada’s  Black Rock Desert.

The gathering was known to former Burners as Plan B, and to non-Burners as the Renegade Burn.  This was a spontaneous gathering of people determined to have a Burning Man-like experience without Burning Man controlling it. Primary motivations for attendance varied and overlapped. Some camps and projects were determined to assemble their members somewhere to carry out the premise of the event through their interactivity. Some imagined a simpler mode of radical self-expression freed from the yoke of oppression they experienced from Burning Man’s tedious and maddening vetting process.

Well over half of the attendees (recently estimated by BLM to be in the range of 17,000) were people who always wanted to go to Burning Man, but couldn’t get tickets, people who hadn’t been attending because tickets were too expensive, or those who didn’t want a full week commitment and only sought a Labor Day weekend experience, commuting mostly from the Reno area.

Pretend for a moment you’re the Burning Man organization.