Artists, Burning Man and innovation. Exploring the links.

By Grant Hall

I’ve been researching the links between Burning Man and innovation for the past two years. My research aim is to characterise innovation processes that incorporate Burning Man experiences, and over the past couple of months, I’ve interviewed 10 burners working in innovative roles or industries to learn from their experiences. It’s been inspiring to chat with the interviewees, and the experiences they have recounted have been absurdly funny, profound and eye-opening. Furthermore, they have helped me to develop a deeper understanding of how Burning Man experiences can contribute to innovation processes (you can click here to read a little about some of the themes that are emerging from the interviews).

So far, almost all of the people I have interviewed work primarily in the business sector. In the interviews, they have discussed how artistic and other creative experiences at Burning Man have contributed to their innovation processes. Interviewees have discussed, sometimes in great detail, how they have learned from, been inspired (or even transformed) by encounters they had with artists and artworks at Burning Man. Yet despite the centrality of art to Burning Man, and that through the creative process artists are continually innovating, I’m yet to interview an artist/burner about the links between their Burning Man experience and innovation within their creative practice.

As such, I’m inviting full-time artists of all genres (for example, musicians, visual artists, poets, dancers), who have been to Burning Man at least once, to be interviewed about their Burning Man experience and how it links to their professional creative practice. If this is you, and you are interested in being interviewed about your experiences, please help me out by either, dropping me an email (click here), or by taking the festivals and innovation survey to get the process in motion (click here). With your help, I hope to be able to trace the ripple effects of Burning Man within the default world, and subsequently across the planet!

To learn more about the research project, click here.