Video: Jared Ficklin – Art in Dusty Places

I have known Jared Ficklin for many years. He is one of those people who, whenever we meet, the conversation immediately goes off in five directions at once. From technology and product design, to skateparks, to building absurd things in a garage just because they should exist. As I wrote in his speaker introduction, Jared believes the future should be prototyped, not just imagined. And that is exactly what this talk is about.

For Berlin he suggested to do something a little different. Not a talk about the future of technology, but a talk about what he does on the side. About his hobbies. About what drives him as a maker.

Sure enough, he came back with “Art in Dusty Places” – a talk about almost a decade of bringing large scale art projects to Burning Man.

Art in Dusty Places

Every year a city of 75.000 people is built in the middle of a dry lake bed which is in the middle of the Black Rock Desert which is in the middle of nowhere in Northern Nevada in the USA. Black Rock City exists ephemerally on a substrate of an ancient lake bed that is an unhealthy and caustic mix of alkaline salts and fine minerals laid out perfectly flat for miles in all directions. The smallest movement of air raises the dust, a breeze necessitates eye protection, a wind creates a whiteout so complete you can experience vertigo. The dust coats everything and everyone.

It is an environment naturally devoid of the influences of contour, contrast, color, liquid water, animal or plant life. In this setting humans arrive for a month of building and 10 days of existing. Then in effigy it is all burned to the ground. With no other natural influences the emergent culture is unique and decidedly humanistic. Life can become so amplified that the world outside is referred to as analog. Any day at This Thing in The Desert is a practice between survival and self-actualisation and like no other day lived. And it comes with two constants: Dust and Art.

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What followed was a tour through augmented reality porta-potties, a 100 yard long trailing soul, a solar power library for artists, giant gramophone horns playing eight hours of Stephen Hawking lectures and a whole lot more. Jared took us through every project from idea to prototype to scale, from sketching gears in the garage to bolting things to the playa so they don’t blow away. The whole talk is full of stories about serendipity, about his twin brother “the dude”, his crew, his daughter, and the community that grows around any creative endeavour you take serious enough.

What I love about this talk is that underneath all the dust and burning man stories, it is really a talk about making. About iterating. About trusting your idea enough to commit to it for ten years. About building three iterations until you reach 80% of your vision and knowing when to stop chasing the last 20%. About leaving no trace. And about the fact that, as Jared says, you don’t build on the playa – you set up on the playa.

There is a sentence in there I keep thinking about: “The dust always comes and it settles equally on everyone.” I think that applies to a lot more than Burning Man.

More information about Jared Ficklin on his beyond tellerrand speaker profile page.

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