I’ve acknowledged Lorenzo Hagerty for starting this series called Palenque Norte with maps two years ago and making this all happen. Palenque Norte is Palenque, Mexico, El Norte here in Burning Man and it kind of is carrying on that tradition that was established over many years in Palenque. And we’ve been lucky enough to have gracious hosts every year to bring you all together and continue this. And there’s so many new fresh faces and bigger crowds, it’s wonderful. And so I want to acknowledge Lorenzo Hagerty, he’s not here this year, he’s probably going to come back next year. But just want to acknowledge him for doing that and for all the people who helped set up this stage and for Snuff Lake Village. And do you have any announcements? No. No announcements to make. So without further ado, because we have to keep moving, I want to introduce Erik Davis and I was saying before he read his books and his articles and his thinking, it really is a mirror on you, I think. So it’s a really good mirror and it’s sort of a mind-opening mirror on everybody here and what you’re doing and what you’re seeking to do. So without further ado, Erik, here’s the comms. And he’s going to start up this so we’re going to make sure it gets well recorded because all of this will be on the site Palenque Norte.org. And if you just Google Palenque Norte and that’s the QUE.org or Palenque Norte, you’ll find all these talks probably within a couple weeks. And there’s a mailing list and there’s a tribe and everything just to keep you in touch with this community that we’re continuing to grow. Without any more ado, here’s Erik. All right, thanks Bruce and the MAF spokes for setting this up and a distant Lorenzo for masterminding the Palenque Norte lectures. I mean, in some ways, certainly in terms of Daniel, I can say, and Bruce too, I know, and many of the other people who spoke in some ways were kind of fragments or vectors of parents, people who are inspired by Terence McKenna in different ways and have taken those inspirations and gone in different directions that still share something of his unique, inspiring, charming, amusing, tricksterish spirit and that these whole series of talks in a way comes out of that legacy. And the aspect of his work or his inspiration that I’m going to be talking about today has to do with the imagination and with the cultural expression of the imagination. And I kind of picked this idea because I wanted to tie together a number of different themes going on right now. One is the theme of this Burning Man, the psyche, and I’ll talk about the relationship of the psyche to the imagination in a bit. Another is the role and importance of visionary art in this culture, something that’s just been increasingly important to me, something I’ve gotten more obsessed with over the last few years as I’ve met contemporary visionary artists and learned more about the tradition and want to kind of create a, try to understand more about why art is so important in this particular culture or this particular set of overlapping cultural zones with its emphasis on visionary experience, on play, on bohemianism, on hedonism, on ecstatic wonder, on profound cosmic amusement. There’s something in there about art that’s extremely important that I want to get to. And then finally I kind of want to address in a way a perspective on the problem that Daniel raised at the very end when he really kind of took off. We all sort of felt it about how to do something now. What does it mean to do something? How do we stay true to our crazy, wild, inspired, poetic, artistic selves and deal with the reality on the ground? It’s a very frightening, confusing situation. And I want to kind of shift or talk about a shift from an emphasis on visionary art to what I’m calling visionary design. But before we get there, I want to talk a little bit about the imagination because the imagination is an excellent portal into many of the major themes that certainly dominate this particular burning man, but also dominate a lot of the questions about how we proceed and how do we deal with, let’s say, visionary information. Let’s say we’re mostly more or less kind of skeptical, secular types. We don’t believe that it accounts for everything we’ve had, peculiar experiences. We’re starting to get intuitions, synchronicities, things happen. But what are we supposed to do with them? Do we become true believers? Do we create some system that we hold onto? Or do we try to keep an open process of letting these inspirations come in and yet also honoring, in some sense, our own real tradition, which is the skeptical secular West. And one of the things I want to suggest is that going deeper into the imagination and understanding more about what the imagination means in a fuller sense is one of the ways to kind of approach this problem. So to begin, I want to read something short from my great big book of tales of portions of a poem by William Blake, who is of course one of the West’s great visionary artists. And you’ll no doubt be familiar with the opening. To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. That’s usually where people stop, but I’ll go on a bit. A robin red breast in a cage puts all heaven in a rage. A dove house filled with doves and pigeons shudders hell through all its regions. A dog starved at his master’s gate predicts the ruin of the state. A horse misused upon the road calls to heaven for human blood. And he goes on this way, talking about incidents in ordinary life, incidents of joy and incidents of suffering, of cruelty. And he draws these very mundane examples, a dove and a cage. What’s the big deal? A horse getting slapped by its master and connects them with this larger visionary reality, the world of heaven, of gods, of the large soul. And he goes on and on in this way, and then it ends in just a very marvelous, poetic, memorable fashion. Every night and every morning, some to misery are born. Every morning and every night, some are born to sweet delight. Some are born to sweet delight. Some are born to endless nights. We are led to believe a lie when we see not through the eye, which was born in a night to perish in a night when the soul slept in beams of light. God appears and God is light to those poor souls who dwell in night, but does a human form display to those who dwell in realms of day. And I’ll just talk about that last little bit, because the connection between these ordinary events, the dove and a cage, the horse getting beaten, the dog crying, and these larger issues of our society, the ruin of the state, heaven and hell, the connection, the connecting tissue there is the imagination. The imagination is the faculty, meaning like eyesight or sense, the sense that we have, and it is also the place that links the ordinary, material, physical, imagistic reality that we are submerged in every day with a larger, fuller, possibly more real realm of meanings, impressions, stories, archetypes, God forms. It’s the sort of connection between our world and the dream world and the world even farther beyond that, a world of abstract ideas and forms that are very difficult for us to wrap our heads around because they’re so transcendental, they’re so otherworldly, they’re so mystical. And so the imagination is a kind of vessel that connects these two very different realms. And at the end he’s talking about for those poor souls who dwell in night, God appears as endless light, it’s a kind of compensation, it’s the mystical vision. But for people who dwell in day, God appears in the human form. Now why would he say this? In a way it’s like, oh it’s more of that humanistic obsession stuff, that Christianity kind of over did with the emphasis on the human being rather than the natural world. But Blake’s up to something else here, which is to acknowledge the incredible soulful power that comes through actual physical bodies, other people, other personalities, all of you today, incredibly individual. I look out here, it’s remarkable. I could focus in on each one of you in a kind of story emerges or a sense, a temperament, a flavor that’s unlike anything else. But that very sense in this embodied state and in this room today is connected on these various levels in this kind of mystical cosmology with much deeper archetypal forces. We all carry different archetypes. Everything has its soul, everything has its kind of essence, every individual thing in this kind of vision is what I’m sort of setting up, what I really want to explore as a way to go into this question of the imagination, what it means, and how it tells us something about visionary art and finally at the end, visionary design. The term imagination means many different things to many different people. By asking all of us to talk right now, what does it mean? And so I want to talk a little bit about different ways that it’s been described. On one level, the kind of simple one is we just think of fantasy. It’s sort of making something up. It’s kind of a reverie. It might be a productive reverie where you’re composing a poem, you want to describe something in a story and so you imagine what the room looks like and then you describe it. Or it might be just sort of the machinery of the mind going off where you, oh, I imagine that this thing was happening and I knew it wasn’t true, but it kind of takes you over with a sort of vision, a kind of a fabulation, perhaps a fiction. But there’s deeper senses to the imagination as well, even within the Western world that’s turning away from that kind of mystical vision that Blake described. Because in many ways that’s what the modern world does, is it reduces the authority of those mystical inspirations or that deep intuition, that deep poetic intuition that we’ll talk more about in a little wise. But still the imagination has this very important role. The philosopher Emmanuel Kant’s thought is kind of a synthetic function that allowed us to take different aspects of our perceptions, the way we see reality, the way we organize time, the way we perceive space. And it’s what kind of draws it all together into the ongoing flow of one reality that we perceive, more or less, most of the time. So it’s kind of behind the scenes sticking things together. And in a way it’s an interesting vision because it gives us a deeper sense already that when we talk about the imagination we shouldn’t just be talking about mere fantasy or just making things up, that there’s something more profound going on in this realm of the psyche, in this realm of the images and stories that come up. Just as an aside, I mean one way of looking at Burning Man or describing Burning Man is not just sort of an art festival, but it’s a celebration of the imagination in all of its realms, from its kind of hokey, carnival-esque, cheesy midway show side to its sort of most ecstatic visions of archetypes and angels to future scenarios. And all these different worlds are here, all these different portals into different pockets of space time, different historical moments incarnated in art cars, in clothes. It’s this like festival of the human imagination of the whole store house and then drawing these things together and making new connections, mixing them up in new ways, synthesizing them in new ways. So it’s a very apt theme this year, the psyche, because the psyche has these deep connections to the imagination, to the imaginal realm. When we first hear the word psyche, when you just pick up on it, you know, we’re like, what exactly does that mean? We think of psychology, which is kind of like the signs of mind and trying to heal our fucked up neurotic personalities and it’s like, it doesn’t have that deep resonance, but psyche is the Greek word for soul. And that soul has a much richer role to play than simply like our neuroses and our kind of complexes that modern psychology, or at least some modern psychology treats. And one way to get into this issue of the psyche and the soul is to tell a very abbreviated version of the Greek myth of psyche and eros or psyche and cupid, because it’s a very strange, very interesting story and I’ll again, I’ll do a pretty quick form of it. But basically, psyche is the youngest daughter of a king and queen. And her oldest sisters are kind of shrews and they’re married off to other kings to keep all the political situation okay, but psyche is extraordinarily beautiful, extraordinarily beautiful and so beautiful that suitors try to come and win her and they just can’t deal with it. They just, it’s too much, they just quail at it. So she remains in this very strange position and people begin to kind of fear her and think there’s something sort of wrong about her and not coincidentally, some oracle, one of the oracles they listen to at the time says that it’s time for her to be sacrificed to the beast. So they drag her to the top of a hill and tire there and leave her for the night and everyone imagines that that’s it. She’s sacrificed to the great serpent monster and we’re done with her. Well what happens to psyche, she wakes up and she’s been miraculously untied from this post. So she wanders down into the other side of the valley. She finds this beautiful valley incredibly gorgeous. Oh the butterflies and the lights coming through the dappled trees and the streams there and it’s this enchanted valley and there’s this remarkable house, this palace of gold and jewels, the most extraordinary building she’s ever seen and she goes in and it’s full of all the pleasure she could ever have. Marvelous wines and fruits and there’s these sort of mysterious kind of spirit robots who come out to sort of help her in all of her wishes and she’s like kind of a little blown away by what’s going on here and she’s told that the master of the house will be coming that night and meeting up with her as sort of basically her his new bride and this is all sort of her, this is her new life. So she waits the night and then the the the fellow comes but in darkness, in darkness, she does not see him and she loses her maiden head as they once said in the day but rather enjoys it and looks forward to the repetition of this every night when her lover husband benefactor comes in the dark and they whisper and they and they and they follow the ways of love but her days are a little bit more aggressive because she’s not really sure what’s going on with this guy and she begins to hear the call of her of her sisters. They’re weeping, they’re upset, her parents are upset, they know that she wasn’t killed, they don’t know what happened to her and she’s feeling the human tug of family even though these people are kind of a drag. So she’s you know doesn’t really know what to do so she starts talking about it with with with the guy and he’s like look if we go down this road it’s going to be a disaster. We should just we got to stay away from your sisters, we have to stay away from the whole scene and and just not don’t listen to them, don’t talk to them but she keeps pleading with them, keeps pleading with them and he says okay okay go ahead tell them tell them you’re alive but just don’t believe them, don’t do anything they say. Well of course once she starts talking to her sisters they’re very happy to see her sort of and eventually they weedle her enough so that they go to to visit her new her new spread and they walk in and they’re like completely overcome with envy like oh my god how does she get all the stuff we’re married to these miserable petty ass kings and we’re not getting this kind of stuff so they start to like nag her more and more well who is this guy who how do you know you don’t see him he maybe he’s the beast he’s an evil serpent so he she they freak her out so she starts to think oh my god it’s this guy who’s coming on sleeping with every night is this horrible serpent uh and so they they they hatched this plan that she’s going to like pull up a light and see him and pull out a knife and kill him so she gets ready she’s freaking out she’s got to see this guy so she’s in the middle of the night they make love they’re sleeping she wakes up pulls out an oil lamp and it’s the most beautiful being she’s ever seen by far and it’s the god cupid which is kind of a dumb name eros is a much richer and more appropriate name for this being and she falls just even more in love with this god this god suddenly before her in all of his beauty and she’s sitting there just like staring at him holding this lamp and she goes into kiss him and then a drop of oil falls from the lamp and lands on his shoulder and awakens him and he wakes up is in love totally in love and is that that’s it though now you’ve seen me it’s over it’s over sorry it’s over and so he he flees and then this story goes on there’s a she’s she she seeks him aphrodite hates her because she’s so beautiful produces a lot of trials that she has to pass and the various uh beasts of the kingdom help her overcome this and it actually ends unlike many greek myths on a happy note with sort of reuniting of of eros and psyche but the real key part here and it’s not i’m not there’s no answer there’s no like oh here’s what it means it’s that it sets up a couple of really profound things about the relationship of eros of desire of the imagination of desire because of course desire infuses the imagination it’s one of the most it’s the fuel of the imagination uh the relationship of desire and the soul the soul that understands itself that finds itself through the imagination through eros through uh this sort of rich world of the imagination and one is is that you are immersed in mystery that there’s always a darkness to the side of it there’s always an unknown and the very human desire to reconnect and see and weave into a human community whether it’s to connect with the sisters and parents at home or whether to find out who this what this guy looks like that that is always an opposition to the further deepening of this relationship which is incredibly exquisite on one level but also elusive also runs out there’s an ambiguity and ambivalence that you can’t get away from and the more you try to get away from it by fixing it by grabbing a hold of it it’s kind of a metaphor for relationships as well the more likely you are to actually lose it and actually lose the juice and be left with with uh an idea or an image but not the living force and another aspect of this relationship is the is the beast is the beast that to enter into the world of the imagination into the world of the imaginative the visionary realm you have to sort of be willing to go where the beasts are where the serpents might be and to kind of dance with that and recognize that’s part of the world i mean even though the beast has sort of a negative connotation in the story if you imagine it more from her side of things she’s having to confront this fear at confront this imagination confront the possibility that this rich life and all the hedonism that feeds the psyche all the the joys and and pleasures that feed the imagination are somehow bound up with a beast with a serpent kind of figure so all of these sort of themes are brought together in this in this marvelous myth and what the myth for me it sort of calls to deepen the engagement with the psyche and to really see it in my mind in terms of the imagination and in terms of the desire that infuses the imagination the other way of thinking about the imagination that goes beyond poetic fancy intuition inspiration even art is to think about it as an actual place that just as there is a sort of physical world that we’re engaging with these senses our senses five that there is an additional realm a realm of the imaginal realm of the imagination and this is really the sort of you know pre-modern way of understanding it that when when moses is before the burning bush the burning bush is burning it doesn’t mean there’s actually a physical bush that has this miraculous thing happening to it the voice coming out of it like some kind of cheesy movie it means that on some level on some level of experience or perception there’s this kind of fire this kind of visionary fire and it’s overlapped it’s super imposed on the physical world so it it it’s a really important distinction because it allows you to recognize the reality the reality of experiences on the level of the imagination without making what i think of and and for many reasons is a mistake which is to literalize it and to believe or to claim that it’s something that actually happened in the material realm we share so instead of saying wow i had this visionary perception that must be the way things really are it’s like no i was granted a glimpse of the of the imagination of the imaginal world which relates to this world which uses its images again all of us here the the robin the bird the dog from the poem are sort of mirrored in this realm of realized or true imagination and this in many ways is like the way people saw and experienced visionary realities outside of the modern world and what happens in the modern world is that we demythologize that disenchanted drag it down into the way that we generally think of imagination now just like making stuff up maybe at the best it helps you write a poem or something but that you can see now even though the imagination is very inspiring on that level it’s a very degraded concept compared to the richness and fullness of that potential and that potential that potential of the imagination as a visionary experience is what we see or see through visionary art that’s how i’m linking into this sort of topic of visionary art now there’s a lot of different ways to define and talk about about visionary art if you go to like a mainstream kind of art form kind of person and you say the term visionary art they think it means something like outsider art which means pretty wacky stuff done by people who have no training and are often ignorant or naive you know so they’ll say you know watch towers in los angeles is an example of of you know visionary art and that’s it of course it is it is visionary but in really in a lot of ways it’s a very denigrating way of looking at it because it denies the fact that the visionary artist the tradition of visionary art is deeply embedded inside of western art history and then deeper than that in terms of world art history now if this was like a lecture hall i started showing you lots of pictures and talking about details but i’m not going to do that i’m not going to bring up a bunch of artists that you may or may not have heard of when i can’t show you uh what they’re on about so what i want to do is paint in really broad strokes a story a myth if you will about western art and the role that visionary art plays in it now and again it helps understand why i think visionary art is so important because it keeps alive this deeper sense of the imagination or the imaginal so what happens with western art well probably the most pivotal thing that happens uh or there’s probably two two really pivotal things that happen is the entrance into three-dimensional representation where you start to paint paintings that look like their windows out onto a real world that looks the way that our eyes construct the real world in our through our biology so you start to developing perspective and here’s renaissance perspective now paintings no longer look like medieval icons where they’re flat and kind of out of you know they’re in different proportions instead they look like you’re looking through a window it’s like you can see the perspective is what we recognize in our normal life what’s really happening there is the whole realm of art the whole realm of imagination is beginning to move in and colonize physical world the material world and it very much is the most appropriate reflection of what’s happening in in in western culture in general as we thought we move into science we move away from mysticism we move away from the dominant you know teachings of the church we move into a world that that affirms material reality as the sole reality so it’s reflected of course in the images and the vision in the imagination of its artists who are suddenly painting more and more realistic pictures of the world but this tradition does not last and it begins to dissolve there’s visionary artists scattered through it but i’ll leave that i’ll leave that aside but at the end of the 19th century this begins to dissolve literally impressionism which i’m sure all of you’ve seen monay and all and and and they gone lots of impressions people are very familiar with one way of describing what’s happening is that that material window that looked like it was looking out onto an actual space begins to dissolve into dots it begins to become fuzzy it begins to sort of play with the actual process of perception well what happens if i suggest colors this way what if i dissolve the sort of sense of perspective into these different kinds of spaces so suddenly the whole history of representation with this emphasis on the material world begins to dissolve and the ultimate expression of this disillusion is uh and and believe me the art history lecture will not last for the whole time the ultimate expression of it is the turn towards abstract art what’s abstract art where you turn away from the representational world you’re not painting in apple you’re not painting a nude you’re painting some set of images of colors of shapes And I think, and I probably share this, is that I think a lot of us think of abstract art as probably a little cold, little to 20th century, little too flat, interesting, can be inspiring, but a little, you know, why look at that when you can look at whatever, Alex Gray or William Blake or something with a little more juice to it. But what’s fascinating is that the artists, the individual artists who first made the turn, first started doing abstract art were all totally immersed in visionary and mystical world views, in Theosophy, in Steiner, in this kind of world view that Daniel Pinschbeck was talking about. So the turn away from representation, turn away from the Western idea that material reality is the primary reality, is inspired by this whole culture of mysticism, of bohemianism, of hedonism. And here, wait, things are starting to sound a little familiar. I mean, we all have an image in our heads of what the late 19th century avant-garde artists was like. They lived in a little garret and they’re poor and they’re suffering for their art and they’re drinking absent and they’re having wild affairs and they’re running off to Tahiti and hanging out with the native girls and stuffing the native girls. And you know, it’s this whole bohemian kind of mythos. But in many ways it was very true because it was the way to re-plug into these streams that feed the deep imagination. And these streams are altered states, whether through drugs or alcohol or other extreme means, dropping out, not being part of the state, the mainstream society, hedonism, exploring the realms of desire and being willing to plunge into it in all its agony and excess and ecstasy. It’s a whole way of being that becomes the kind of, that feeds this deeper visionary impulse that starts to express itself more and more throughout 20th century art. Part of the reason, I think, that visionary art is important and part of the reason people respond to it so much and respond particularly, let’s say, to a figure like Alex Gray, who I’m sure all of you are familiar with. And I’ll talk a little bit more about his second because this is one artist that I know that most of you at least have seen some of his images. And I wish I could show them because even the people who don’t think they’ve seen them probably have seen them. But one of the reasons that these figures are so important to us is it’s almost, it’s one of the only places in modern western culture where we retain something of that old shamanic mystical truth seeking possibility. But there’s a possibility of that because however much, whatever we believe, maybe we believe in scientific materialism or a little skeptical, we don’t know, but somewhere out there there’s an artist who’s like going as far as they can into their own peculiar individual experience and as a visionary artist into visionary experience having inspiring visions and then bringing them back in a way that says, this is what I saw or something like what I saw or something that I want to communicate inspired by what I saw. And you can engage it not as a religion, not as a new myth that you either believe or don’t believe or a new story that forces you to revise your entire world view. It’s more of an inspiration of a kind of visionary glimpse in a way it’s allowing you to partake of some of that visionary experience. So there’s a heroic quality to the visionary artists. And to the artists in general, we see them as sort of figures who kind of go through these deeper experience that maybe we have sometimes, maybe we don’t have other times. And Alex Gray again is a really, really good example of this because his artwork really expresses in many ways the multiple layers of visionary art and what it means to be making visionary art in our world today. It shows these different layers of the imagination because it’s rooted for one thing in his own visionary experience and then out of that experience he begins to layer these multiple layers of symbols from different cosmic systems, astrological glyphs, things from the Kabbalah. He’s drawing in that synthetic work of the imagination. He’s drawing these different symbol systems together and providing an opportunity, a kind of glimpse that you have into this sort of more real than real world. And one of the great things I like about Alex’s paintings is when there’s a new one that I haven’t seen, it’s like I know that first glimpse is going to be amazing because they’re so overly realistic, photorealistic, hyper realistic that they just jump down your optic canal and shake you often, or at least in my experience. So it’s this incredibly intense communication of a deeper experience of the imagination, of visionary experience, of where visionary experience happens than we normally have in our day to day, even in our normal dreams. So it becomes a place to engage this imaginative matrix because I really think that it’s in that kind of process, in vision questing, in engaging with those deeper realms that we draw forth the inspirations that lead us on. It’s like one of the things that the imagination does is it imagines the future. It says, oh, well this could happen this way, this could happen that way. We’re overly dominated by dark imaginings, it’s harder to manifest. We’re over dominated by uninteresting images. It often drives us into a cul-de-sac. So the imagination is part of the way we manifest. But where do we get our imaginations from? Where do we get our images? Well, unfortunately, most people get them from just the mainstream meme mess. The world of programming that comes from your parents who weren’t really given much of a chance to find themselves in a lot of ways and you’re trying to make that up as you go through media and advertising and different political views. It’s a mess out there. So how am I supposed to find vision for my own life, for the life of the planet, for poetic inspirations in the midst of all this? And what the visionary art kind of points to is a process wherein you go through a kind of experience. You engage on a deeper level through dream work, through psychedelics, through trans, through meditation, through just engagement with these stories, with these myths that can take you over and begin to weave themselves into your life through dream and through synchronicity. We feel this kind of stuff on the plies, kind of what draws us here in some ways is to enter into a life in which the imagination is more real and more alive and more tantalizing and suggestive all the time. So that realm of visionary art really mirrors and gives us in a way a model of a way to bring that into our lives, whether we consider our own decisions we make art or not, is kind of beside the point. It’s the same sort of model. But I think there’s also a problem with the hero model of the visionary artist because it still is that struggling individual, that Western individual who’s breaking through and finding their own particular truth and then heroically or magically or bringing it back to the people. And very important models. It’s never going to leave us. But I think something else is happening now. This is really where we get to the last part of the talk and touching on a little bit of the things that Daniel was talking about in terms of where do we go, how do we approach what’s around the bend. And while I think anything that’s inspirational on the level of the visionary, even cheesy television at its best, is useful in the game to stay awake and to stay enthused and to stay desiring of a richer, better future, I think that that hero model has some problems because I think that in a lot of ways where we’re going is towards a world of collaboration, of collectivities, of networks, of people linking together. And so this whole last little drop meme I have about visionary design is to take that basic model we have with visionary art, where the visionary artist is able to go back and touch into a deeper realm of the imagination that has more reality to it than we allow, that is full of information as well as full of force and inspiration. And to bring that back into the world, what I want to see is some of that same inspiration, some of that same imagination coming into the realm of design. Now what do I mean by design as opposed to art? And I’m going to contrast the two. Design is, you know, as a fuzzier kind of connotation, but I like the fuzziness. So let’s talk about a couple of ways that design is really crucial, ways to characterize it. You know, one of the ways of saying is that design tends to be functional on some level, but not strictly functional. So you’re designing a system because you want something to work or you’re designing, you know, an egg beater and you want the egg beater to work in a certain way. So on some level, unlike art, the concept of design has a functional practical dimension to it, but it’s not just functional and practical because the design is also very much about how you bring art and aesthetics and creativity and style and trendiness to the functionality. So if I’m making my egg beater, I don’t just want it to achieve certain effects, I want it to look kind of cool. So by being cool, you know, it’s going to maybe sell better, but it’ll also, you know, fit in with people’s lives because you want to bring a little, that’s one of the ways we bring art into people’s lives is through design. All of us here, as consumers, which all of us are, consume partly based on design, which isn’t just the design of products, but the design of a whole ethos, a whole mean space. It’s really the way you develop style. So a graphic designer, what are they doing? They’re taking images, they’re taking the material of art, images, shapes, forms, recognizable symbols, archetypes, et cetera, et cetera, but they’re putting them into a slightly different use. They want to communicate a message. They want to create a set of associations between products and ideas. And none of this is a bad process because it’s part of our practical world. It is the world we live in. And if these ideas that we have here that were inspired here are going to get out, even though in a way there’s always the devil’s bargain problem, they’re going to be coming through design in many ways. And so the question then is how to bring that design process onto, in a way, a kind of visionary on a visionary level. And I forgot to mention one other important part about design is the design is almost always collaborative, like in any kind of industrial sense and any kind of even graphic designers, whatever. It’s really something that comes out of the way the groups function. And a way of thinking about one way of defining design is how do you set up a system that’s going to enable a group to function better or to achieve what they want or to put out an expression because you need to have a different way of engaging. You can’t just go off and be the solitary tortured artist. It has to change everything at the last minute to seek their absolute ideal image. People like that are a real pain in the ass to work with. And they don’t tend to last long in the kind of realms that I’m talking about. But the kind of realms I’m talking about are crucial because that’s where the infrastructure for what’s coming next in both the good and bad ways happening and that the kinds of remarkable or quick or sort of mimetic transformations that some people see around the bend that Daniel also talked about a little bit. I believe in many ways are coming through the design process. So the question is then how do you bring that visionary element, that deeper imaginative element into design? So you’re not just basing your design on the trends of the moment or on a merely functional purpose or on some very low level idea of what people want. Like so many products are insults to what the potential of human beings and human collectivities have. And they’re already there. They’re embedded in the product, in the branding, in the way it’s designed, in the way it’s manufactured, in the way we learn about it, in the way we can’t learn about it. We can’t find out where it comes from. All of these things are functions of a design process that are bringing these things to market. So how do we bring this kind of visionary element into that? There’s so many different ways of talking about it, specifics in terms of energy systems and et cetera, et cetera. I’m not going to go into that. What I want to do is come back to Burning Man a little bit and think about that whole idea again that we come out here because of, at least in one respect, because of the art. That’s often how it’s described. It’s described as an art festival. It’s a creative art festival. We also know it’s a party and a mystical riot and all these other kinds of things. But that’s one of its main claims to fame, is it’s a place for art and a very particular, very visionary kind of art. Visionary not just in the sense that it’s made often by people who are not officially trained as artists, which is part of what’s remarkable about it, but visionary in the sense that it has very much to do with this visionary tradition and with this sort of deeper realm of the imagination. And even further, that it has to do with the actual process of vision, of perception. That when you go out, when you navigate the playa at night, you’re navigating this very peculiar realm of light technology. And many of the artworks out there play tricks with your perceptual system, particularly an enhanced perceptual system, but that’s not necessary. And they take advantage of the way that the human perception system creates, in some ways, imagines its reality. What am I perceiving out there? How far away is that? Is that a cube? Is it a portal? Is it a Snoopy? I can’t tell. And it’s playing with that sense of ambiguity on a very technical level. It’s one of the marvels of most of my favorite playa art, is very simple arrangements of electricity and lights, some rebar, PVC, and they stick it out there, and it does marvels to your mind. Oh, it reminds you of this. It looks like that. It calls you in. It seduces you. We move through the playa scape as we’re sort of seduced by these things. So there’s a very rich sense of visionary art here at the playa, and it’s part of what draws people back here. But this site is also a site of visionary design. And we don’t always pay as much attention to the design on that level. And of course, we have to deal with it because when we come here, you can’t just show up. You’ve got to get a system going. And that system almost always involves other people. And most of the system is functional, practical. But if you just do it on a functional, practical level, it’s kind of boring. Go for yourself and for the other people that you want to provide something to. So there’s a little bit of aesthetic there. There’s a style. There’s a twist. There’s a spin. There’s something going. You go out there. You grab memes. You grab, oh, the furry thing, or oh, the playa thing, or oh, the alien thing. And you recombine them and recrystallize them to design your environment, to design your camp, to design your artwork, to design how you’re going to deal with your gray water, to design all this stuff. And some of us, we do better at than others. Some of us more fun than others. But we’re all deeply involved personally on a design process in precisely the sense that I mean. And that it does have a visionary dimension. That that’s that William Blake vision where beating the dog reflects the whole political situation, reflects the nature of heaven is like what you do with your gray water. Even if you end up going, oh, I don’t really deal with it. Dawson is part of that visionary experience. And to draw to that place where the visionary infuses all this absurdity in this, and the things we actually have to deal with on a functional level in a way that’s the kind of gesture. That’s a way that I see things evolving. So that’s how the visionary design works like on a level that all of us here participate in. But also Burning Man itself is designed. It’s engineered. It’s a conscious environment. One of the the group, the best myth about Burning Man is it’s just about like free expression. You know, like it’s about everybody come out here just having free expression. Well, no, I mean, it’s constrained. You can’t go over here. You can’t do this. You can’t put your thing there. There’s a lot of organization here. This organization, the decisions, zoning questions, where things happen, what’s allowed, what’s not allowed, all of these things were developed necessarily in most respects in order to keep the system functioning as it got larger and as more of the state forces paid attention to it. So it’s making design decisions all the time. And in any ways, we’re in a designed environment, but we’re in a particular kind of designed environment that wants to keep the undesigned, the mysterious, the chaotic, the turbulent as accessible as possible. And that’s where it differs from most kinds of design environments where things are like over design, where they try to make everything happen. They want to constrain your experience from the get-go like Disneyland. Disneyland is incredibly well designed environment, but it’s designed to channel your imagination in very specific ways. And it does it in, you know, sometimes creative and playful, but in a lot of ways sort of an insidious manner. Well, the play is designed to like avoid that. Like you could, it’s still a theme park, but it’s this crazy, multi-dimensional, madcap, you know, festival of theme parks, you know, where each theme park goes in a different direction and it’s made by hand and it’s made by, you know, folks you know. So it too is a designed environment and the kinds of questions that come up about, well, are we going to do this or do that? Are we going to zone this or zone that? How are we going to deal with the art? How are we going to deal with the board too? All of these kind of mechanical questions about the event are also visionary questions. There are also ways of thinking about how to maximize visionary experience and that to sort of incarnate that whole visionary realm. One just a simple example from this year is the decision to move some of the theme camps back from the Esplanade into the middle sort of, you know, circles of the camp as a way to break up the kind of suburb city thing that was developing. So that’s a design decision. Like, well, let’s set up an experiment and do this, you know, do it this way and see what happens and we’re the guinea pigs. We’re the Petri dish, this open evolving Petri dish that has all of the elements of engineering in it. What we do with all of our functional problems with our shit and water and electricity and all these things in an environment devoted to the visionary. So in that respect, I see it as a very inspirational in terms of how do we begin to introduce that visionary element into the practical design questions or technologies or systems that we’re involved with in our normal lives or even involved with in our careers. And where I hope Burning Man is evolving and I see signs of it kind of both ways is to an increasing embrace of some of the more chaudry, not necessarily that inspiring elements of what it means to be out here, particularly in terms of energy consumption and to bringing a sort of how do we recognize that environmental problems and environmental constraints are excellent opportunities to practice the deeply imagined desired visionary potential that we all have. That it’s a great problem. It’s a totally inspiring. It’s not just a problem that if we don’t fix in some practical way, it’s going to kill us. So we can go off and do our art and parties over here. It’s that that energy has to go over here and bring those things together, bring the practical problems that we’re facing on so many levels in our society with that visionary inspiration, which is an inspiration both about information, about knowledge of how to do things and about the mystery that lights off. You don’t know who you’re sleeping with, but it’s marvelous. Thank you. Hello. Thanks for your talk. Also, Mike, you haven’t, haven’t expanded very much on the old fashioned sense of the word visionary as like when you talk about when people talk sometimes about visionary architecture, it carries this kind of positivist kind of will kind of carry a model for future generations or a project for a society or the kind of descriptions of how things could be in the future. And well, I guess the answer is easy because I see a bit burning man as a kind of experience of how we could as well develop our society in the future a bit more. But I don’t know if you have something to say on that. Yeah, that’s a good question. He was just raising the point of another way the term visionary has been used, an important sense of it, which I think just feeds into most of what I was saying, which is particularly if you talk about visionary architecture. Visionary architects are really, they’re creating models for the future for how society can evolve can be. And it’s not just that they’re like inspired by fairy tales or something. It’s that they’re really trying to design in many ways a whole system for how people can live and can transform, can move away from unhealthy patterns. It’s actually kind of both sad and marvelous when you start to get more and more into visionary architecture, which I’ve been doing more recently, because in some ways it’s the best example for the kind of design process I’m talking about because you have to design everything and you’re designing the place where everything else happens. And there’s so much remarkable stuff out there. And you just look at the way, like I said, the United States has been developed with these sprawl cities and are these sprawl suburbs and what could have happened if it, well, let’s just take one state and try to build wisely compressed urban environments that have public space and so many marvelous answers. And these things are happening on the fringes and they’re very much an important part of the ideas and inspirations that come into this, the whole topic of visionary design. So I’m really glad you brought that up because it’s really key. And that’s part of what Burning Man is about again, is it’s the way it’s set up, the way it’s designed is an architecture of space and that architecture of space lets certain things happen. Even the decision to let the man start spinning around has a great reverberation in the architecture of space because like the way you orient yourself at night is no longer quite so solid. So suddenly the space is a little bit more topsy-turvy. It’s probably my favorite element of the design this year because it introduces that degree of turbulence. But architecture is a really rich model for understanding and approaching this question of visionary design. I was wondering how you think about how contemporary and modern art fits within visionary art. Yeah, it’s a really interesting question because it seems to me that one thing that’s happening now is that, and I’m no total expert on contemporary art, but I try to keep up, is that in reactions to the erid conceptual ways that people are plunging into more and more intense material. So you have paintings with shit on them, dead pigs, paintings about drugs, and there’s more and more of a willingness to draw from the deeper zones of popular culture. And that’s one element I didn’t talk about is that one way of talking about contemporary visionary art is that in addition to drawing off of traditional visionary symbol systems and drawing off of people’s individual experience, they very much have to do with popular culture partly because of this history of the 60s and how that influenced popular culture. And now more and more contemporary artists are turning to it and you’re starting to see signs of this kind of overlap. So there’s like a big show at the mocha this fall in LA called Exocies. And it’s like 40 established contemporary artists mostly young who work more or less overlap some of the issues of visionary artists. And at the same time, there’s like a show of opening of like strict psychedelic underground visionary artists and there’s some overlap between those. So I do think there’s actually more and more conversation between these two realms partly because the mainstream one is running out of ideas and there’s so much richness in this tradition that’s been kind of disavowed. So I think that there’s going to be more conversation between the mainstream kind of world and the sort of underground that more we see reflected here. Hi. You spoke a little bit about Disney and I just walked in and I’d like you to speak a little for preparing what the, as far as the design, how you would, what the differences and the similarities are between say Black Rock City and Disney World. That’s a great question. It’s a funny one too. And you more and more you think about it the richer it becomes. One of the ways is to say that it is an architecture of the imagination in the sense that it’s both places are sort of are drawing you into a liminal and otherworldly space. But they have very different qualities in Disneyland for the most part. The other world that you’re being drawn into is kind of cutesy and acceptable and ultimately supports family values and it’s kind of a friendly place. Whereas here it’s a little bit more for grabs what the implication is of any of the myriad worlds that you might be drawn into. That’s one difference. Another is that Disneyland even though it has all these, I mean what similarities, if there’s all these different places that you go, well do I want to get on that ride or get on this ride? Do I want to go into the haunted house world? Do I want to go into the Tom Saw world? And that’s how we navigate the planet. We’re like, well do I want to go to that world? Do I actually want to go through that door, that spinning wheel? No, I won’t do that one. I’ll go over here. So this is kind of choosing of entering into these different kind of imaginative portals. But here it emphasizes the differences between them, the brokenness, the fragmentation, the multiplicity of them and it’s kind of this sense that everyone can create a portal and everyone can kind of go into it. Whereas there’s this subtle, it’s too strong a word really, but there’s this subtle fascism to Disneyland where it’s very much in control of the range of your responses. And even to the way the place is designed, so one thing that’s interesting if you go to theme parks is to try to get somewhere that you wouldn’t normally go and look around. If you go to the back of the concession stand and there’s this one place where the garbage is and you can kind of go over it and then you look back at the realm and suddenly the fantasy collapses because you can see all the girders and you can see how they’re feeding the system. So in a classic theme park you have this very well-defined little pocket of imaginative play supported by this whole elaborate machinery that’s unexposed. But at Burning Man we not only have to expose the underlying framework, it’s a great pleasure. That’s one of the lights of Plyart as you see this marvel in the distance and you come up to and you’re like, oh my god it’s doing this thing to my brain and I’m reminded of this and so other world then it’s just a bunch of oh my god what a great idea what a great thing to do with PVC I never thought of that. And then that takes that that idea goes and the next year they build something out of that. So it’s open source as opposed to like you know my little playground where I have the thing. But I don’t want to say to you all negative things about Disneyland because the Pirates of the Caribbean is an excellent experience. What’s that? Anna Monamansion, absolutely. Hello, I would just like to say thank you very much and thank you for bringing into the sustainability issue because that’s been really something that I’ve had to reconcile within myself and just a comment. You talked about light and sound experiments if you haven’t been to the haunted garden. Go to the haunted garden. Deflia, deflia, deflia. There’s no address. Just go. Find it. Thank you. I like that. Okay, I guess. Should we do that? I guess I wanted to give an opportunity for the wonderful beautiful person below me to describe Mavs to talk about Mavs. Yes. Hi, I’m Valerie. I am a student for psychedelic studies and you’re right now in the Mavs theme camp. We’re going to be having psychedelic lectures here every day in the afternoons. Well, tomorrow is our last day. So if you really want to hear a lot more about Mavs, please come tomorrow afternoon and the President Rick Doblin will be speaking at four and will tell you all about all the research that we’re doing and the vision and all that things about Mavs. And also please pick up a Mavs brochure up here in the front. There’s more by the door and look through it and visit our website and ask how to work.