Chapter 2 · 1 year · I, Robot

2018

Second Landing

Art grants, letters lying on the ground, an army tent and the first Ukrainian art car in Black Rock City.

The year at a glance. Tap a moment to read its part of the story.

4.5 m

AI.TLants, robots holding up the Earth

25 m

Sorry, one word laid on the playa

~200

Ukrainians in Black Rock City that year

Art of the year

AI.TLants

The second year brought art. Ukraine’s Ministry of Information Policy offered small grants for projects at Burning Man, and Kurenivka put forward artist Oleksandra Stepanenko and a group of artists with an idea about artificial intelligence, years before everyone was talking about it: AI.TLants, a set of Atlantes.

The result was a 4.5-metre sculpture: robots holding up a model of the Earth, a perfect fit for that year’s theme, I, Robot. At night the geodesic sphere glowed and shifted through colours, some 12,000 LEDs flickering like neurons firing in a brain.

The plan was to cast the figures in polymer on site. The molds didn’t fit the suitcases, then they did, then the cast wouldn’t release. On the playa the team changed course, and Oleksii Tronchuk welded the Atlantes from metal, almost single-handedly.

AI.TLants →

Art of the year

Sorry

It was the year Burning Man’s founder Larry Harvey died. Artist Oleksiy Sai came with a much bigger project in mind, Time to Say Goodbye, a tunnel of lamps. The crowdfunding raised only part of what it needed, so the team brought another of Sai’s works with a similar idea and a simpler build: Sorry.

The word lay flat on the playa, 25 metres long. Its point was that “sorry” has been said so often it no longer means anything. It took three days to build and two more to buy missing parts; a storm killed two brand-new generators before the launch, and a neighbouring camp lent its spare. Sai co-created the piece with Svitlana Ratoshniuk, Oleksii Novikov curated it from the Ukrainian side, and Nova Ukraine with the Consulate General in San Francisco helped with logistics. For the first time, Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs helped fund contemporary Ukrainian art at Burning Man.

Looking at the letters lying on the ground, Sai decided that next time his letters would stand, and they did.

Sorry →

The camp

A whole village

The camp grew. Zhenya and Valya Zasutskiy gave it a real army tent. Khrystia and her friend Marina brought the first Ukrainian art car to Black Rock City and parked it at Kurenivka, and campers rode it all week. From the air you can see the whole village: yurts, kitchen, bathhouse, tents.

Every evening the camp fed around a hundred burners at its bar and dance floor, ran a workshop casting pewter office soldiers, and threw a costume party called Fake ICO.

Around two hundred Ukrainians came to Black Rock City that year, and there were two Ukrainian camps, Kurenivka and Borshch. Kyiv DJ Masha Yefimenko, a first-timer camping elsewhere, came over to play a set at Kurenivka.

All that infrastructure took its toll, and the build crew finished exhausted. The lounge tent stood empty most of the week; not building it would have given everyone a day off. It was the year Kurenivka learned that more is not always better.

Playa names stuck that year too. Yaro had long been Vozhd, the chief of the tribe, for taking on too much and trying to build a utopia; at his fourth burn he named Ella “Mama-drama”, the camp mum who worries about everyone.

At home

Kyiv, before and after

The burn didn’t stay in the desert. On 26 May 2018, at VDNH in Kyiv, Oleksandr Ovsianko and Yaro co-organised Precompression Kyiv 2018, the first official regional Burning Man event in Ukraine. Nothing was for sale: food and drinks could only be given or received as gifts, and the costumes were half the point.

After the burn, Decompression Kyiv, U augment US, brought the playa’s stories and art back home. Each of these parties drew between 500 and 1,500 people, and they became the city’s favourite burner nights.

Art of 2018

The art pages

In their words

2018, as people told it

Track of the year

Toma Rybka at Kurenivka, Burning Man 2018.

Kyiv, before and after

Precompression and Decompression in Kyiv, 500 to 1,500 people each.

Built by

The 2018 build crew

The people who arrived first and left last.