history

Hi all! Since this is the first year of Camp Kinetic, its history will be mostly about me, the founder. I have professional experience in film production, finance, management, and martial arts instruction. I’m passionate about fire & flow arts, music, and building community.

I've been to fifteen burns, starting in 2001, and have camped with different theme camps in places all over the city. I’ve also been to a few regional burns, including Burning Seed in Australia. I was the central organizer of a camp called Wrongtown from 2010-2018, where I handled the majority of the communications, finances, projects, creative direction and online content. I was largely responsible for its growth between 2014-2018, when camp gradually transformed from a renegade sound camp of 25 burners to an officially placed sound camp on 2:00 with 135 campmates.

I was so proud of our camp in 2018! We hosted members of five different conclaves and had a full DJ lineup with several big fire jams during the week, as well having Wheelchair Jousting and a place to fill up on coffee and electrolytes.

However, disagreements among camp leadership had been intensifying in recent years as our camp grew further and further away from the primary founder and builder’s original vision of hosting a small family of travelers from abroad (while also running renegade sound). As someone who has a multicultural background and who has done more traveling than most, I wholeheartedly support international burners, but my focus all along has also been to grow from a family into more of a community.

PRINCIPLES

To put it bluntly, I don't believe that Burning Man is about having a camp parent who provides for a bunch of overly dependent Sparkle Ponies or tourists simply looking for a place to be comfortable, nor do I agree with a camp resembling a small army of nameless workers to be fed and controlled. We can do better than this.

I believe in tempering Communal Effort with Radical Self-Reliance. I do my best to acculturate people to the city and to instill a sense of ownership so that every individual in camp is empowered and feels free to do what they love. Radical Self-Expression - especially in the forms of art and music - is also essential to what it means to be a burner. And contributing to the city - clearly, significantly, and in a capacity sanctioned by the BMorg - is why theme camps exist in the first place. These values guided many of my decisions over the years, resulting in the camp developing into something that I feel was a better example of what Burning Man is all about. But maybe that was just me.

Wrongtown will be on the playa again this year. It will be downsizing and rolling itself back a couple of years, eliminating both flow arts and the music lineup in order to become more easily managed. It will also be moving back into the city to a location that will hopefully be more ideal for what it has to offer. This is a solution for camp Wrongtown that the other two leads agreed on. I still care about flow arts and music and want to continue supporting both, so I decided that it was time to move on.

MOVING FORWARD

This will be Camp Kinetic's first burn. I'm excited to take everything I've learned over the years and have a fresh start with a new camp. My vision for this camp is to keep all of the Ten Principles alive, to build a few aesthetically pleasing structures, and to support a community of people who are passionate about movement arts, bass music, and fire! This is what I've done locally, with L.A. Burn Club @laburnclub - It’s a story that's similar to Wrongtown but without any major conflicts or creative differences.

There are people on board who I admire and respect who are helping to make it all happen. Some of them are campmates from 2018 and previous years. Many are seasoned burners. The goal for 2019 is to be about half the size of our mother camp in 2018, to stay cohesive, and to focus on our theme. I'm so grateful that there are people who share the same vision. Together we look forward to creating what will be a metamorphosis from our original camp into a new experience at Black Rock City.

See you on the playa!

Andy

Camp Kinetic

ig @campkinetic