So, you may have been following our adventures with Mirror Blaze at Burning Man in 2015. However, there was a significant amount of work put in by many people to make it work.
But before all of that, it started with sparks of inspiration. Or perhaps more precisely, flames of inspiration from S. We had been to the Burn with Site 3 Fire Arts in 2013 (pictures forthcoming[1]), and in late 2014, we had started talking about putting something together for 2015 (August/Sept).
Sometime in December, I was hanging out with some of my friends who do fire spinning, and (in addition to being pretty cool), it helped keep fire art at the top of our minds:
I also thought enough of this picture of the Man to screenshot it, perhaps to remind myself:
The other members of S3FA were also experimenting with various flame effects, such as Carrie’s Sniffly Dragon:
Along the way, after the success of the Charcade in 2013, we decided to put together a ‘Charnival’. Many ideas were thought up. I don’t remember if these were from a brainstorming session with all of S3FA, or just S and I, but I do remember that it was S’s idea to do a flaming mirror maze[0]:
You can see a number of ideas here which made their way into the Charnival (either on their own, or from a brainstorming session such as this one). Specifically, a ring toss game (‘Flaming Hookers’), the hall of mirrors and fire mirror maze were combined into Mirror Blaze, and there was a high striker (‘Hellblazer‘), amongst many others:
One of the other wacky ideas that was discussed was a fire-bumper-car game, working title ‘Crash & Burn’. There was vigorous discussion about the artistic direction of this project, and I ended up facilitating[2] a session where we settled on a combined vision:
Sadly, ‘Crash & Burn’ did not receive enough funding to go forward, but it lives on (in a fiery way) in our hearts.
We did go forward with Mirror Blaze, and this was apparently one of the initial Google searches I did while we were first researching geometries:
Next time, I’ll start in on the Mirror Blaze design and build process. Stay tuned!
[0]My posts are almost by necessity from my perspective. The initial idea, and most of the driving force for Mirror Blaze came from S. (Just ask her about the quartz tube story!)
[1]Don’t ask about the order that I post pictures. I don’t know, either.
[2]This was the first time that I really facilitated a meeting like this, and it really cemented my desire to do more facilitation. If you’re wondering what it looks like when I run/host a meeting, it may look something like:
