Oliver Poole
The Independent
The Burning Man festival starts this Sunday and this year’s installations are set to be some of the most outrageous ever with a giant jellyfish, a heart that pulsates in time with the viewer’s heartbeat and a life-size recreation of a Boeing 747 airplane among those to be displayed.
The festival, which draws almost 70,000 people each year to the Nevada desert, distributed £1 million in art grants this year to ensure many new participants will get the chance to join established artists with work on display.
Perhaps the most spectacular, and certainly one of the largest, will be the recreated Boeing 747, which has been moved in giant pieces from the Mojave Air and Space Port.
More than 500 volunteers, including engineers from Boeing and Nasa, have worked since 2015 to not only disassemble the plane, but also add staircases, paintings and other details including day-glo lights to its outsides.
“It started off as a joke when I saw a bike made out of airplane parts at Burning Man and I said, 'Wouldn’t it be great if we made an art form out of a plane?'” said Ken Feldman, the project manager who organised the purchase of the decommissioned 1985 Varig 747.
Another art piece at the festival, now in its 31st year, is the Pulsating Heart by established Russian artist Vasily Klyukin.
For his new interactive installation called the Pulsating Heart, the viewer wears a special bracelet that reads the their pulse. The sculpture then synchronises with the bracelet and starts to light up in time with the heartbeat.
If the bracelet is worn by two people, the sculpture will beat faster and more rapidly.
“I am sure that it will become a notable object at the festival,” Mr Klyukin said, adding that after the festival the work will move to the La Collection Air museum in Lucerne, Switzerland.
The 40-foot high, 60-foot long jellyfish that will also be among the hundreds of art works on display has been created by Nevada artist Peter Hazel. Made out of recycled glass, the work will consist of 1,600 small jellyfish joined together to make the giant's statue.
The event ends every year with the symbolic burning of a wooden man sculpture and of many of the art pieces that had been specially created and displayed on the festival.