I experienced my first ever Burn in 2017, and it blew me (and almost everything else there) away. Brian Doherty’s book on the birth, development and future of this extraordinary arts event is an excellent complement to the experience. I was particularly drawn to this paragraph, which references the first time Burners from San Francisco encountered the Black Rock desert:
***The notion of the “Cacophony Zone Trip” was derived from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a beloved art-school film that features a mysterious Zone that looks like the rest of the world but in which bizarre, inexplicable things occur … They all got out of their cars. Michael Michael drew a line in the playa surface, and the Cacophonists walked over it. They were in a different place now. Reality had mutated because they willed it thus. They had crossed into the Zone.***