She’s a longtime senior leader of the Black Rock Rangers and the principal of the Gerlach K-12 School. Keeper lives year-round in Gerlach, one of the smallest and most remote towns in the US, and the closest community to Black Rock City.

In this storytelling episode, she shares her unique perspective on blending the worlds of Burning Man and rural life.

She tells the tales of keeping the town’s school open after the local mine closed, transforming it into an all-ages institution of families.

She shares about how locals offer a year-round outpost for helping townsfolk and visitors stay safe and thrive.

Keeper’s dual roles—Ranger and Principal—are deeply informed by the principles of Gifting, Civic Responsibility, and Radical Inclusion. Woven in is the philosophy of building supportive environments where everyone feels they “belong here.”

How?

And how does a school that is barely on the map support its kids to be local ambassadors and worldly humans?

Hear how now! And in the words of Ranger Keeper (and Bill & Ted), be excellent to each other!

Black Rock Rangers

gerlach.washoeschools.net

Ranger Takes Gerlach School from Remote Town to National Stage (Burning Man Journal)

Class Trip to Black Rock City (Burning Man Journal)

burningman.org Gerlach Black Rock Station

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Black Rock City has an airport, a hospital, a post office... and yes, an observatory! For a decade, the Black Rock Observatory has served as a portal to the cosmos, bringing deep space to the desert.

Father-and-son Zoom and Robin Newhouse are at the helm of the observatory that houses several telescopes for viewing planets, galaxies, and even our sun. They offer a museum of meteorites that are billions of years old, and they even have custom tarot cards. The Observatory's theme camp serves as an expert nexus: It is home to Space Talks with physicists and professors who are usually only available within academic halls or behind NASA’s walls. And they even have Space Deck tarot cards!

They bring these offerings to Burning Man Regional events, festivals, and eclipses worldwide, but they save the observatory structure itself for Black Rock City.

Hear them share stories of science and spirituality, and how they garner shared humanity from the cosmic perspective that is viewable through this lens.

They explore awe and expand perspective. It’s the hard work of building and running a theme camp made worthwhile in that single moment of cosmic connection.

Listen in and look up!

www.blackrockobservatory.com

youtube.com/@Black-Rock-Observatory

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Recorded in Black Rock City, you can hear the grainy gravitas of their voices...

For decades now, Jon Sarriugarte, Kyrsten Mate, their daughter and their team build mobile art.

From a meter maid cart turned space shuttle, to a custom copper retro fire snail on wheels, their creations make up part of BRC's moving landscape. They built a trilobite to ride, a gilded golden zeppelin car, and a noir submarine buggy.

Then there are the Serpent Twins. Back in 2011, when the playa glowed with now outdated EL wire, these 50-foot long slithering dragons rippled with color from a touch of their LED skin.

What about this green insect rocket?

Project: EMPIRE returned to BRC with more sights, sounds, and stories. It’s a NASA spaceship and a giant bug, a bewildering blend of art, engineering, and a delightfully conspiratorial backstory…

On playa we tracked down Jon and his daughter Zolie who has been Burning her entire life. They shared stories of the absurd early days, and the adventure of navigating the desert in a two-ton masterpiece.

We talked about bringing radical self-reliance to the default world, and the mechanics of a legacy built, piece by painstaking piece, in the name of art.

formandreform.com/empire-of-dirt

www.jonsarriugarte.com

projectempire.org

oilpunk.com

20 Years of Mutant Vehicles (Burning Man Journal)

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Hear the stories of the art and artists. Black Rock City hosts 400 artworks from around the world. This episode features 12 of them, and this year’s Temple.

This is a sonic journey of artist's recordings and chats with Burning Man Project's Director of Art, Katie Hazard.

Desert Arts Preview is your chance to step behind the scenes and listen to the process of creating interactive, collaborative, community-built artworks.

This episode explores:

• The Sphinx Gate - Mareesa Stertz & Tania Abdul
• Sinksphere - Scott (Scottysoltronic) Whitaker
• Afterlife Reincarnate - Adrian (Blitzy) Tay
• Resilience - Whitney Webb
• Moonlight Library - James Gwertzman (Moonlight Collective)
• Desert Air Oasis: BreathCore 7 - Elnara Nasirli (MXNZM)
• One Tin Soldier - Mark Deem (Misfit Toy Crew)
• Black Rock City Chicken Ranch - Rob Brown, Alysha Cypher, & Aviva Kinoko
• Disco Snail - Alyssa Oliveira (Alpine Artists Collective)
• DROP - Auli Uiboupin
• Pillar of Po Tolo - Antwane Lee (Solar Shrine Collective)
• Rose Wonders - Thomas Dambo
• Temple of the Deep - Miguel Arraiz

Desert Arts Preview 2025 (burningman.org)

Desert Arts Preview 2025 FULL LENGTH (YouTube)

Temple of the Deep (Burning Man LIVE podcast)

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REMASTERED FOR 2025: Our most popular episode of all time.

Listen in as longtime Burners talk about the dynamic aspects of thriving in Black Rock City: mental, physical, material, and relational.
Andie, kbot, Molly, Stuart, and Vav explore:

• socks secrets
• FOMO variants
• saying yes and saying no
• giving and accepting help
• No Friends Monday

and much more and other and new!

Featuring cameos from longtime Burners: Anjelika, Chef Juke, Crimson Rose, DA, Dave X, Halcyon, KJ, and Lulu Lurine.

They discuss doing it all, doing it right, and doing it wrong, as access to being real.

Don’t just pack. Prepare. Here’s how to have BRC overwhelm you in a good way.

Black Rock City 2025

Burning Man Journal

John Craigie (YouTube)

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Zander was the executive director of The Long Now Foundation, dedicated to long term thinking. He also helped build their library, a book club for the end of the world, with all the titles we would want to rebuild civilization, if needed.

He is one of the brains behind the 10,000-Year Clock, designed to tick off the years, and chime the centuries. He’s now co-creating the future of the web at Automattic.

He and his team are bringing a library to Black Rock City, to the World’s Fair pavilion under The Man. It’s a refreshing opposite. Like his theme camp inside a refrigerator truck NOT being hot, this library is about NOT being burnt. It’s an ephemeral manual for civilization. We the participants will choose what books to save from burning.

Zander shares stories on the effects of books, websites, and rituals, as well as Burning Man’s past, present, and future.

This episode is on YouTube here.

rosefutures.com

BRC Honoraria Art (Burning Man Journal)

A group for those who want to participate (Facebook)

https://longnow.org

A Pavilion for Tomorrow Today (Burning Man Journal)

wikipedia.org/Clock_of_the_Long_Now

Kevin Kelly: Optimists Create the Future (Burning Man LIVE)

Photo by Brendon Hall

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AI is a context changer, a shaker upper, and a force multiplier to what our human minds can do.

Andie says that AI is a major philosophical shift in humanity, and when this kind of thing happens, the first people she goes to are artists and academics.

Andie and Stuart talked with a few artists and academics about their AI infused art coming to Black Rock City. They share their dreams and nightmares, and how to 'go beyond.'

· Chad Elish — Verse-O-Matic

· Kate Greenberg, Deva Temple, Eric Vicenti — "Out the Other"

· Dr Jukka-Pekka Heikkilä, Kiana Kaiser, Michael Zeltner — Burning Stories & Burner AI

This is transforming personal stories, creating unique dialogues between humans and the machines that reflect us, the good, the bad, and the ugly… and the beautiful… and the surprising.

Here is how artists conjure creativity and empathy using AI at Burning Man, a home for art to push against and learn from.

Burning Man LIVE: Dr Heikkilä and the Science of Participatory Culture

Burning Man Journal: Burning Stories Research Team

LIVE.BURNINGMAN.ORG

Kevin Kelly is a leading thinker of the digital age. The founding editor of Wired Magazine, he helped produce the Whole Earth Catalog, and an early internet pillar called the WELL. He is a journalist, an artist, and a longtime member of the Burning Man community.

He is a radical optimist.

The future is a construct of the collective imagination. We see utopian stories as too pie-in-the-sky. We have a morbid curiosity for dystopian stories. What’s in between? Iterative improvement. Protopia.

Delve into this conversation on cultural narratives, the transformative potential of AI, and the context shift into lifelong-learning.

"It’s not that our problems are smaller than we thought, it’s just that our capacities to solve them are greater than we thought."

wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Kelly_(editor)

kk.org

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