Practical Necessities

This art structure is currently being hand-built by a handful of people in the SF Bay Area, Seattle, and Los Angeles. Raw materials costs for approximately 3000 pounds of wood and fasteners is nearing $5000 spent to date, all from personal funds. We will still bring the art regardless, but if you want to participate by offsetting some of the cost, you'll help solve the transportation side of the project and earn our eternal thanks. We'll probably be at the art piece many times over the week at Burning Man, so if you donate please stop by and say hello!

Philosophy of the Art

Scintilla enshrines and celebrates a tiny spark of patient life. Triops eggs can wait decades for the right conditions to start their lives, and in so doing extend the survival of their species through adverse conditions that their parents cannot. This act of patience has worked, maintaining their existence for over 400 million years. Participants will be invited to visit the tiniest of worlds and understand that even the smallest spark can matter to the big picture.

Scintilla's exterior is a collection of hexagonal and crystalline elements evoking the microstructures of minerals (kaolin clay etc.) found in the Black Rock Desert. Several glowing amber spheres representing Triops eggs (extremophiles native to the lakebed) surround the structure, indicating that as we've approached the art piece we have stepped into a microscopic world.

One wall of the structure is a large hexagon including a hexagonal portal. This is fastened to the ground at an angle, and prismatic walls extended downward to form a semi-enclosed, peaked roof area. Several smaller hexagonal tiles are distributed around this structure in tasteful chaos.

Inside, benches surround a glowing, sandblasted sphere with a shadowy figure inside. Messages engage participants in philosophical introspection, and also to use provided tools and compounds to slowly polish away the sandblasting, countless hands in the community working to reveal a secret inside the egg over the week.