Ithaca Generator and Beyond
By: Laurence Clarkberg
Tags: Makers, Art, Burning Man

Doug takes note of my welding ability and in the winter of 2018 he and his friend Karl Gesslein approach me with a strange drawing on a paper napkin. Their drawing is a rectangle with four circles, one in each corner of the rectangle. On top of the rectangle is what appears to be a human figure suspended from a pole, an image similar to the end result of the children’s game “hangman”. Doug and Karl explain to me that this drawing represents an electric vehicle that they would like my help building. They further explain that the man figure in their drawing represents a 30-foot-tall bamboo puppet that they would like to construct and bring to the Nevada desert next summer. They say that they had built a similar such puppet last year, and had carried it around the desert using a backpack, but the high winds prevalent in that area had made it very difficult to transport the large puppet comfortably. So they had conceived of a four-wheeled electric vehicle with a wide platform to carry the puppet instead, and they were asking for my help to build it. I winced. The whole idea seemed beyond crazy. My initial urge was to decline, and to respond with the word “Why?” But something deep inside me made me respond instead with the word “Okay!” I didn’t know it at the time, but that response marked a turning point in my life.

That winter and spring Doug and I met regularly at the Generator to work on the “Man Alive” puppet. Doug had been an acquaintance of mine for many years. When I first met him a decade ago, he was a sad-eyed engineer undergoing a painful divorce. But the Doug who approached me in 2018 was a different person. He seemed to have become more alive in some way, and he had a contagious mischievous glimmer in his eyes. He said that the puppet we were constructing was for an art festival in the desert called Burning Man. At every opportunity he encouraged me to consider attending the next Burning Man event with him. He regaled me with Burning Man stories. He told me of the line to get in, cars lined up for miles on a thin ribbon of highway in the blistering heat of the desert, painfully crawling forward toward the entrance, but the people stuck in those cars were not beaten down, instead they were in a cheerful mood, and they emerged from their vehicles in outrageous costumes, and embraced one another with authenticity and humor and grace. He told me of the Rhythm Wave dance camp he belonged to, where he had developed his love for ecstatic dance. He told me stories of risqué fun constructions, such as the large plexiglas room where he joined a group of naked campmates to be sprayed with foamy soap to wash from their bodies the caked-on alkaline dust that permeates that hostile environment. And he told me of the towering Burning Man effigy, namesake of the event, that is burnt to the ground at the end of the week amid primal howls of delight from the crowd of 80,000 inebriated attendees. It sounded like fun.

And it turns out that there is a lot of overlap between the world of the Makers and the world of the Burners. Both groups are full of creative people bursting at the seams eager to do questionable things. I feel a bit cautious. But Doug impresses upon me that Burning Man is not just a big party in the desert, but that it is a magical week-long ceremony and workshop with the goal of personal transformation. Perhaps this explains that mystical glimmer in his eyes? I understood. I myself had in the fall of 2016 been thrust involuntarily onto a spiritual journey. Burning Man seemed an obvious next step in my journey. And so with Doug’s guidance I make plans to attend Burning Man. We complete our Man Alive puppet platform, what you might call a dual tandem electric fat bike, with a mast upon which we dangled a 30-foot tall illuminated bamboo puppet, and we had everything shipped by freight to Nevada.

The Man Alive puppet was a big hit and Burning Man was an incredible experience, which I have described elsewhere. Suffice it to say, when we returned to Ithaca, Doug, Karl and I immediately made plans to construct our next art bike for Burning Man 2019. We decide that the vehicle should take the form of a unicorn. We want to make the unicorn as large as possible. We know that we are limited by the 13-foot height of overhead wires on the Ithaca Festival Parade route, and we are limited by the width of a standard automobile trailer, so we plan to make the unicorn about 12 feet tall and three feet wide. Doug purchases a four-wheeled pedal-powered cart from eBay, and during the winter and spring of 2019 we construct a steel frame in the shape of a large horse that fits on top of that cart. We add an old motorcycle seat so that two people can ride on top of the whole contraption. We add articulated legs and a giant counterweighted bobble head so that riders can give the unicorn realistic movements. Doug adds a powerful sound system, strings of thousands of LEDs, and a small generator to power it all. Karl helps us equip the cart with an electric motor, we cover the whole thing with sparkly fabric, and Sparky the Giant Rideable Unicorn is born. He is an immediate success, and since his creation he has appeared in over a dozen parades and festivals all over the country.