About the Atlas

The Black Rock Atlas seeks to answer a simple question: How, year after year, does Burning Man create a full-scale city of chaos, and yet consistently engage in cooperative behavior at a scale rarely unseen in society? With its leave no trace ethics, gift economy and free spirit, Burning Man has tapped into the powerful formula for human cooperation.

In 2022, we sent 600 will-o'-wisps across playa to map the networks of serendipity. The Will-O-Wisp Adoption Network (W.O.W.A.N) will help us understand the flows of information and gifts, and how camps are connected. You can read more about the project in The Burning Man Journal or from Axios.

🚨If you have a Will-o'-wisp, please email us at blackrockatlas@mit.edu!🚨 Returning data can be done quickly completely over email. If you have a friend who might have a wisp, please pass along the message. See more on the Burning Man Instagram post. Stay tuned for results!

We also ran a similar experiment in 2018. You can read our article in Nautilus. You can also read about our 2018 results and methods here or on our research paper, and join our mailing list for future projects studing large-scale collaboration, on and off the Playa.

For more information, feel free to reach out to our team.

All photographs are taken by Micah Epstein and are not liscensed for redistribution. Please contact press@burningman.org for redistribution permission.

The Journey

In 2018, we tracked the decentralized journey of 15 "Vessels" through the gift economy of Burning Man using GPS technology, generative photography, and human cooperation. Building on the experimental methods of Stanley Milgrim's Six Degrees of Separation experiment, the Atlas seeks to understand how and why people work together in one of the most unique and cooperative environments on earth: Burning Man. How does this event continue to scale, while mantaining a collaborative and enagaged mentality? How does it balance organization and the chaotic self-determination that it is so well-known for? Through a research and design methodology, we explored these questions by sending the 15 vessels across the Playa. What we learned has valuable insights into the nature of human cooperation, and offers wisdom about how we can build our institutions, our online social networks, and our communities to be more creative, optimistic and cooperative.

In the 2018 iteration of the Atlas, two vessels got to their terminii. The average degrees of seperation was 5, although the limited sample size makes this an noisy estimate.

We were also able to recover the GPS data from two of the vessels, which shows the path they took across Burning Man.

To learn more about our results and methods, read our paper on arXiv.

W.O.W.A.N

In 2022, we sent 600 will-o'-wisps across playa to map the networks of serendipity. The Will-O-Wisp Adoption Network (W.O.W.A.N) will help us understand the flows of information and gifts, and how camps are connected. You can read more about the project in The Burning Man Journal or from Axios.

🚨If you have a Will-o'-wisp, please email us at blackrockatlas@mit.edu!🚨 Returning data can be done quickly completely over email. If you have a friend who might have a wisp, please pass along the message. See more on the Burning Man Instagram post.

Stay tuned for results!

Thank You!

Your participation in the Black Rock Atlas is a key reason of its success. You can find updates on the project here, get in touch with us here, and take a follow-up survey to help us improve here.

If you found a vessel and would like to return it, or have some stories about the experiment you would like to share, please Contact Us!

Team

The Black Rock Atlas Team was created by a team of artists, designers and researchers based out of the MIT Media Lab. We are fascinated with questions about how groups of people come together to solve large-scale, difficult problems - and the role of technology and design in that problem solving.

The team is comprised of Ziv Epstein, Micah Epstein, Eyal Perry, Max Lagenkamp, Irmandy Wicaksono, Cathy Fang, Océane Boulais, Hope Schroeder, Christian Almenar, and Sandy Pentland,

Web design based on Dimension by ajlkn.

Terms

This survey is part of a scientific research project at MIT. Your decision to complete this survey is voluntary. If you give us permission by completing the survey, we plan to discuss/publish the results in an academic forum. In any publication, information will be provided in such a way that you cannot be identified. Only members of the research team will have access to the original data set. Before the data is shared outside the research team, any potentially identifying information will be removed. Once identifying data has been removed, the data may be used by the research team, or shared with other researchers, for both related and unrelated research purposes in the future. Your anonymized data may also be made available in online data repositories such as the Open Science Framework, which allows other researchers and interested parties to use the data for further analysis. Clicking on the arrow at the bottom of this page indicates that you are at least 18 years of age and agree to complete this survey voluntarily.

Contact

or email us at blackrockatlas@mit.edu.

Elements

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