Tuesday, November 4, 2008

TNS#59: BurningMan08 Travelogue

TNS#59 was taped 10/22, the 4th annual TNS Burning Man show, using the now traditional MST3K format which shows our heads in profile from behind as we watch clips and slides from the laptop. Gigi Bisson and Diana Maxwell joined me for the show and presented their slides and clips about their work helping create the Entheon Village Pantheogenesis Temple complex at Burning Man this year -- a collection of 5 temple domes that was quite amazing. We copied Diana's iMovie video clips to my macbook and previewed them, but unfortunately when I tried to launch the project during the taping, iMovie noticed that there was now a sync adapter connected and wouldn't play without going into the video settings and changing them... which I wasn't about to try while the show was in progress. Shockingly bad UI 'feature' for the program, that it couldn't just somehow play in lower res! Similarly Gigi's slideshow in iPhoto wouldn't play, because the new iPhoto 08 apparently launches into some kind of edit mode and won't play until you click a little "Done" button in the lower right corner. My iPhoto 06 has worked ok for me on many shows and didn't work that way so I was unable to get it going either... fortunately former Apple engineer Fred Bockmann was helping crew the show and came onto the set to rescue us and remind us about the 'done' button... Surprisingly bad UI decisions coming from Apple!
Anyway Diana and Gigi talked at length about helping create the Sound Healing Divine Feminine Yurt and we saw some amazing photos of the crystals that were assembled and the hundreds of small geodes that were free for the taking apparently. And I think we previewed Diana's clip of Alex with his light sabre talking about the "new technology that is waiting for us in another dimension" and how we need to use these crystals to open a portal to receive it. Hope that new technology includes something about keeping elections tamper-proof! ;-)
Also mucho thankso to Juli 'Peaceblossom' and Ralph 'Cucoman' Kline for contributing copies of their BurningMan 04-06 and 08 videos which I showed clips of. It was nice to see the footage of the Temples from previous years.