Jared Ficklin
Jared is a frog fellow. He believes experience is key to design and has spent more than a decade finding value for the user in innovative technology and bringing solutions to large organizations. Every March in Austin he directs the SXSW Interactive opening party which is a large scale social experiment with a focus on technology in social settings featuring lots large scale interactive installations. He spoke at TED. He is maker. He is the co-director of Austin Public Skatepark Action Committee. He was once a cowboy in 1867.
Talk: 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.
