Greetings, internet explorers! Tune in to today's episode as head back to Burning Man.
Your host, Kris Krüg takes you on a journey through two mind-bending art projects that have defined the essence of the festival.
🎨 Uncle Charlie's Red Hot Cock: From inception to execution, discover how a ragtag band of merry misfits crafted a fire-breathing spectacle that rocked the playa.
🎹 Tyson Ayer's Shrine of Sympathetic Resonance: Dive into the creation process of an architectural marvel, the Shrine, built with piano harps and grand pianos. Listen to the melodies and stories that resonate within its walls.🎧
Don't miss out on future episodes as we continue to explore creativity, community, and connection. Subscribe, share with friends, and join our digital tribe. Let's hit the road together! Your support goes a long way! For more insights and behind-the-scenes peeks, find me here:
🎧 Podcast: Spotify | Apple | Google
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Check one two. Space cadet to mothership. Space cadet to mothership coming over.
(00:07):
Hey what's up good people of the internet it's your old buddy KK.
Thanks for following along on all these video blogs and podcasts I've been putting out lately.
I've been just trying to put all the infrastructure in place to
layer a bunch of interesting shit that's coming next on top of it so
I appreciate it and you know if you're a friend or a colleague
(00:32):
help me out send this podcast to other people get them to subscribe to my YouTube and stuff
help me build this audience and yeah grow from there.
So anyway I am headed from my cabin on Hornby Island this morning
off to my studio at the Hornby Spark Makerspace
and I've really come to enjoy these little talks and drives to do
(00:57):
story time. Today's story time is going to be about
Burning Man. It's that time of year again and all the peeps are
packing on up and washing the dust off last year's gear and heading down to
Black Rock City Nevada for the world's biggest
(01:18):
fucking do it yourself art experience. I'm not going this year
always a bit of a bummer but it's a big effort
with me trying to move to Vancouver and get some of these companies off the ground
and stuff it's just not the right time for me to head down that way but I'm sending my love and support to all the
crews that are going down there and I can't wait to see what you get up to.
(01:43):
I've been posting some photo albums and essays from the last few days
or in the last few days I've been publishing a bunch of photo essays from previous years
and that's the kind of stuff I want to talk to you about today so
I've been really lucky with my Burning Man experience. I heard about it first in 1998
when I was running Spark Online magazine back in the day and it intrigued me
(02:08):
and we were able to cover the event for the magazine but I was not able to go
flash forward to 2005 me and Kim Cathers decided
Burning Man was in our future and we bought tickets and planned to go
and one thing led to another and we weren't on the same page once
Burning Man rolled around. That didn't happen but
(02:33):
a few years later, maybe like 10 to be exact, I was down at the Okachobe
music festival with Tyler Hansen and his whole crew
the Culture House crew and we were building all the Tea Lounge and
Freaky Art experiential stuff for what is otherwise a bigger music festival
and I met this strange cap
(02:58):
Uncle Charlie is a Burning Man OG. He's been building
large steel monuments and sculptures out there at Burning Man since the beginning of time
I think like 20 years or more and he is well known
in the art world and in the Burning Man world and he and I connected really hard
at Okachobe. He had brought out this exhibit called the Fleeble
(03:23):
Flaubler. It was a huge eight seated
steel flaming teeter totter
that eight people could ride at a time and get it all rocking and rolling and
I got out to control the flame effects and just hang with this crew. It was really awesome
It was so awesome that the next year at Okachobe I
(03:48):
decided to switch camps and move from the
Culture House art support camp into camp with Uncle Charlie there
and his ragtag band of Mary Scallywags
and that formed a friendship and Charlie invited me to join his Burning Man crew
He runs a camp called Ask Camp which is perfect for me
(04:13):
art support services and he asked me to be the documentarian of their build
They were building a huge 50 foot tall metal sculpture
It was also a teeter totter but instead of eight seats on it there was like two platforms on each side
You get like 30 of your friends to stand on one or the two
sides of the platform and get the thing rocking
(04:38):
I took a lot of work and it was pretty fucking dangerous but a good time
was had by all. The cock you could fill it full of two cords
of firewood and we burned it three or four times during the Burning Man week
So the whole team of us like 40 after this thing was constructed would
load up the truck with wood and drive the wood out to the sculpture, crawl inside the sculpture
(05:03):
load it all up with the wood and start the fire at the beginning of the night
Also we would accept donation of meats and sausages which we would put in the cocks ass
and after a night of shenanigans and riding the red hot ride
we'd flip the old poop chute open and out would fall hundreds of
freshly done meat sticks ready to feed the people as the sun rose
(05:28):
Totally incredible experience
I got to go three weeks early with Charlie when Black Rock City
hadn't even been built yet, none of the streets are up and none of the street signs are up
and you get to build and watch being built, the city and all the art projects around you
In fact by the time Burning Man rolls around it feels like you've done and seen it all
(05:53):
and I shifted into down gear once Burning Man rolled around
and pretty much just hung out at camp and held court, let people wander on through
took them out to the sculpture, had a really unique and awesome Burning Man experience
Uncle Charlie and I have stayed connected over the years
We've been some support to each other on a sobriety journey that we're on
(06:18):
and he's a good man who I love a lot
has the most awesome community of collaborators and other artists
that would just bend over backwards to help him achieve any
creative dream so Charlie I love you man and I can't wait
so we can work together on something big and awesome
(06:43):
Oh another thing, it's always nice to have a role and being the photographer was awesome
but it wasn't quite enough to make me feel like I was contributing so
Charlie saw that I was responsible, organized and a leader and he asked me to become
the director of the whole project and so what the quartermaster does
and the military they're the guys that like make sure all the supplies and tools are on hand
(07:08):
safe and sharp and gassed up and ready to go
Charlie flipped me the keys to two semi trucks and I became the guy who was in charge of making sure that everything was
where it was supposed to be, when it was supposed to be there and that
someone couldn't find something I would probably know where it was and it was an awesome role
for a guy who's great at observation and likes knowing everything that's going on out there
(07:33):
and I was super grateful to flex my muscles in that way
Also at Okeechobee I met another guy called Tyson Ayres and his
partner, let's call her Leah Desjardins even though I'm not sure
that's how you say her last name. This is the sweetest couple, they're musicians
and educators and Tyson's got a really cool concept for building
(07:58):
sound caves. These are like immersive rooms made out of
the harps extracted from grand pianos
where you can perform or listen to music, Leah does tea ceremonies
and they're really quite incredible. The five walls of the pentagram sound
cave are built with these piano harps and then the roof is built of piano harps
(08:23):
and the resonance in there is insipidly incredible
I think the experimenting with those sound caves led Tyson to dream big
and so he conceived of a large scale project
that combined five sound caves together with a huge pagoda
into a sculpture called the Shrine of Sympathetic Resonance
(08:48):
Sympathetic Resonance is a really cool musical concept where
the sound vibrations for one thing resonate or make vibrations in another thing
and so one thing I think of is like when I'm driving down the road in my truck and there's a load tied down
and the strings are tight, the ropes are tight, as you drive down the road those
strings will start to vibrate like a low frequency guitar string
(09:13):
and in fact if you were to put one twist in that rope
the sound that string makes would be up an octave
two twists up two octaves, three twists up three octaves
as you shorten the length of the rope the wavelength changes and that's pretty cool
anyway the Stalinghaven
(09:38):
tuned to the resonant frequency of the earth, the low drum that's given off
and so over the course of a year we collected 55 grand pianos
from around Oakland and San Francisco, we essentially turned half of our crew into
moving through, off picking up people's busted
instruments and bringing them back to our warehouse and taking them apart
(10:03):
with a team of 50 or 60 collaborators we were able to
essentially construct a 50 foot tall
sympathetic sound resonant pagoda and then transport that to
Burning Man and build it, again we got to show up super early, be with a crew
of exceptional do it yourself badasses and makers
(10:28):
and a real community was formed around the building of that project
the sculpture in the end was incredible
so many different things happened there, concerts happened there, weddings happened there
found people making love, sleeping out, photo shoots
it was just a beautiful space and unlike
(10:53):
Charlie's red hot cock, because the shrine of sympathetic resonance was made of wood
in Burning Man tradition we got to burn it to the
motherfucking ground, so our buddy Ian Tuma landed
a big burn crew, we disassembled all the paints and electronics and toxic things from it
and the night before the man burned down we had thousands of
(11:18):
people assembled in a perimeter around the shrine to watch it burn
I'll try to drop some photos of these projects into this
video here, as those of you who know me know I'm not that good at editing stuff
I like to do one take wonders where I do my best
if I mess up I stop and say I'm sorry and keep going and
(11:43):
try not to edit it just so that I can keep the info flowing
and come across as authentic as possible
anyway I'm sure there's lots of other Burning Man stories trapped inside those two things but that's the stuff I wanted to share
with you for now, put it all down on a permanent record
I'd love to hear what you guys want me to talk about, I got all sorts
(12:08):
of things on my brain, a mix of future stuff I'm working on
and past stories of projects and companies that have never seen the light of day
so I've been having a real fun time doing this and getting back in touch
with everybody, seriously from the bottom of my heart
thanks for following along and tuning in for supporting me
(12:33):
and yeah, if you got cool stuff that you're up to
get in touch, I love doing my weekly community shout outs
where I spread some love around, let everyone know what peeps are up to
yeah, so I'd love to hear from you, I'd love for you to share this far and wide
and yeah, check out that Dent the future post I just put up
(12:58):
it's a conference happening in Santa Fe in one month and I would love it
if all the friends of crew descended upon the Dent the future
festival and we all got to hang out together so if you got the time
you got the money, let's figure out how to make it happen, I can try to get some discount codes
going for peeps, I think it's about $2900 or something so
(13:23):
anyway, worth it
from Hornby Island, over and out for now internet
Check one two. Space cadet to mothership. Space cadet to mothership coming over.
(00:07):
Hey what's up good people of the internet it's your old buddy KK.
Thanks for following along on all these video blogs and podcasts I've been putting out lately.
I've been just trying to put all the infrastructure in place to
layer a bunch of interesting shit that's coming next on top of it so
I appreciate it and you know if you're a friend or a colleague
(00:32):
help me out send this podcast to other people get them to subscribe to my YouTube and stuff
help me build this audience and yeah grow from there.
So anyway I am headed from my cabin on Hornby Island this morning
off to my studio at the Hornby Spark Makerspace
and I've really come to enjoy these little talks and drives to do
(00:57):
story time. Today's story time is going to be about
Burning Man. It's that time of year again and all the peeps are
packing on up and washing the dust off last year's gear and heading down to
Black Rock City Nevada for the world's biggest
(01:18):
fucking do it yourself art experience. I'm not going this year
always a bit of a bummer but it's a big effort
with me trying to move to Vancouver and get some of these companies off the ground
and stuff it's just not the right time for me to head down that way but I'm sending my love and support to all the
crews that are going down there and I can't wait to see what you get up to.
(01:43):
I've been posting some photo albums and essays from the last few days
or in the last few days I've been publishing a bunch of photo essays from previous years
and that's the kind of stuff I want to talk to you about today so
I've been really lucky with my Burning Man experience. I heard about it first in 1998
when I was running Spark Online magazine back in the day and it intrigued me
(02:08):
and we were able to cover the event for the magazine but I was not able to go
flash forward to 2005 me and Kim Cathers decided
Burning Man was in our future and we bought tickets and planned to go
and one thing led to another and we weren't on the same page once
Burning Man rolled around. That didn't happen but
(02:33):
a few years later, maybe like 10 to be exact, I was down at the Okachobe
music festival with Tyler Hansen and his whole crew
the Culture House crew and we were building all the Tea Lounge and
Freaky Art experiential stuff for what is otherwise a bigger music festival
and I met this strange cap
(02:58):
Uncle Charlie is a Burning Man OG. He's been building
large steel monuments and sculptures out there at Burning Man since the beginning of time
I think like 20 years or more and he is well known
in the art world and in the Burning Man world and he and I connected really hard
at Okachobe. He had brought out this exhibit called the Fleeble
(03:23):
Flaubler. It was a huge eight seated
steel flaming teeter totter
that eight people could ride at a time and get it all rocking and rolling and
I got out to control the flame effects and just hang with this crew. It was really awesome
It was so awesome that the next year at Okachobe I
(03:48):
decided to switch camps and move from the
Culture House art support camp into camp with Uncle Charlie there
and his ragtag band of Mary Scallywags
and that formed a friendship and Charlie invited me to join his Burning Man crew
He runs a camp called Ask Camp which is perfect for me
(04:13):
art support services and he asked me to be the documentarian of their build
They were building a huge 50 foot tall metal sculpture
It was also a teeter totter but instead of eight seats on it there was like two platforms on each side
You get like 30 of your friends to stand on one or the two
sides of the platform and get the thing rocking
(04:38):
I took a lot of work and it was pretty fucking dangerous but a good time
was had by all. The cock you could fill it full of two cords
of firewood and we burned it three or four times during the Burning Man week
So the whole team of us like 40 after this thing was constructed would
load up the truck with wood and drive the wood out to the sculpture, crawl inside the sculpture
(05:03):
load it all up with the wood and start the fire at the beginning of the night
Also we would accept donation of meats and sausages which we would put in the cocks ass
and after a night of shenanigans and riding the red hot ride
we'd flip the old poop chute open and out would fall hundreds of
freshly done meat sticks ready to feed the people as the sun rose
(05:28):
Totally incredible experience
I got to go three weeks early with Charlie when Black Rock City
hadn't even been built yet, none of the streets are up and none of the street signs are up
and you get to build and watch being built, the city and all the art projects around you
In fact by the time Burning Man rolls around it feels like you've done and seen it all
(05:53):
and I shifted into down gear once Burning Man rolled around
and pretty much just hung out at camp and held court, let people wander on through
took them out to the sculpture, had a really unique and awesome Burning Man experience
Uncle Charlie and I have stayed connected over the years
We've been some support to each other on a sobriety journey that we're on
(06:18):
and he's a good man who I love a lot
has the most awesome community of collaborators and other artists
that would just bend over backwards to help him achieve any
creative dream so Charlie I love you man and I can't wait
so we can work together on something big and awesome
(06:43):
Oh another thing, it's always nice to have a role and being the photographer was awesome
but it wasn't quite enough to make me feel like I was contributing so
Charlie saw that I was responsible, organized and a leader and he asked me to become
the director of the whole project and so what the quartermaster does
and the military they're the guys that like make sure all the supplies and tools are on hand
(07:08):
safe and sharp and gassed up and ready to go
Charlie flipped me the keys to two semi trucks and I became the guy who was in charge of making sure that everything was
where it was supposed to be, when it was supposed to be there and that
someone couldn't find something I would probably know where it was and it was an awesome role
for a guy who's great at observation and likes knowing everything that's going on out there
(07:33):
and I was super grateful to flex my muscles in that way
Also at Okeechobee I met another guy called Tyson Ayres and his
partner, let's call her Leah Desjardins even though I'm not sure
that's how you say her last name. This is the sweetest couple, they're musicians
and educators and Tyson's got a really cool concept for building
(07:58):
sound caves. These are like immersive rooms made out of
the harps extracted from grand pianos
where you can perform or listen to music, Leah does tea ceremonies
and they're really quite incredible. The five walls of the pentagram sound
cave are built with these piano harps and then the roof is built of piano harps
(08:23):
and the resonance in there is insipidly incredible
I think the experimenting with those sound caves led Tyson to dream big
and so he conceived of a large scale project
that combined five sound caves together with a huge pagoda
into a sculpture called the Shrine of Sympathetic Resonance
(08:48):
Sympathetic Resonance is a really cool musical concept where
the sound vibrations for one thing resonate or make vibrations in another thing
and so one thing I think of is like when I'm driving down the road in my truck and there's a load tied down
and the strings are tight, the ropes are tight, as you drive down the road those
strings will start to vibrate like a low frequency guitar string
(09:13):
and in fact if you were to put one twist in that rope
the sound that string makes would be up an octave
two twists up two octaves, three twists up three octaves
as you shorten the length of the rope the wavelength changes and that's pretty cool
anyway the Stalinghaven
(09:38):
tuned to the resonant frequency of the earth, the low drum that's given off
and so over the course of a year we collected 55 grand pianos
from around Oakland and San Francisco, we essentially turned half of our crew into
moving through, off picking up people's busted
instruments and bringing them back to our warehouse and taking them apart
(10:03):
with a team of 50 or 60 collaborators we were able to
essentially construct a 50 foot tall
sympathetic sound resonant pagoda and then transport that to
Burning Man and build it, again we got to show up super early, be with a crew
of exceptional do it yourself badasses and makers
(10:28):
and a real community was formed around the building of that project
the sculpture in the end was incredible
so many different things happened there, concerts happened there, weddings happened there
found people making love, sleeping out, photo shoots
it was just a beautiful space and unlike
(10:53):
Charlie's red hot cock, because the shrine of sympathetic resonance was made of wood
in Burning Man tradition we got to burn it to the
motherfucking ground, so our buddy Ian Tuma landed
a big burn crew, we disassembled all the paints and electronics and toxic things from it
and the night before the man burned down we had thousands of
(11:18):
people assembled in a perimeter around the shrine to watch it burn
I'll try to drop some photos of these projects into this
video here, as those of you who know me know I'm not that good at editing stuff
I like to do one take wonders where I do my best
if I mess up I stop and say I'm sorry and keep going and
(11:43):
try not to edit it just so that I can keep the info flowing
and come across as authentic as possible
anyway I'm sure there's lots of other Burning Man stories trapped inside those two things but that's the stuff I wanted to share
with you for now, put it all down on a permanent record
I'd love to hear what you guys want me to talk about, I got all sorts
(12:08):
of things on my brain, a mix of future stuff I'm working on
and past stories of projects and companies that have never seen the light of day
so I've been having a real fun time doing this and getting back in touch
with everybody, seriously from the bottom of my heart
thanks for following along and tuning in for supporting me
(12:33):
and yeah, if you got cool stuff that you're up to
get in touch, I love doing my weekly community shout outs
where I spread some love around, let everyone know what peeps are up to
yeah, so I'd love to hear from you, I'd love for you to share this far and wide
and yeah, check out that Dent the future post I just put up
(12:58):
it's a conference happening in Santa Fe in one month and I would love it
if all the friends of crew descended upon the Dent the future
festival and we all got to hang out together so if you got the time
you got the money, let's figure out how to make it happen, I can try to get some discount codes
going for peeps, I think it's about $2900 or something so
(13:23):
anyway, worth it
from Hornby Island, over and out for now internet
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