BMIR 94.5 has been The Voice of the Man for the past 20 years.  While it has historically been a radio station that adheres to the idea of the Temporary Autonomous Zone, we believe that due to the current state of the world’s affairs it is of utmost importance to utilize our voice to facilitate dialogue and thought provoking content for the sake of pushing social change. Inspired by the BLM movement, yet not contained by it, curated 72 hours of programming over Labor Day weekend which focused on the pressing issues at hand in our world. From Black Lives Matter to LGBTQ civil liberties to the plight (and future) of the Indigenous peoples of this land, we utilized our trusted medium to give a voice to those that need to be amplified at this paramount intersection of space and time.

With the possibility that our beloved BRC may not happen for quite some time, the BMIR management team considers this to be our greatest work ever. A culmination of years of cultivating positive relationships, testing our own sanity by doing this crazy thing in the desert, and by being the “living room” of Black Rock City where open, direct, and honest dialogue has always been welcome on the airwaves.
This is a collection of some of our great talks, and we hope you not only enjoy the candor within, yet you are inspired to spark your own conversations moving forward.

With love,

The BMIR Management Team

BMIR 2020 Justice and Equality Series

Get a behind-the-scenes tour of some of the art you'll encounter on the playa this year.

11. It S All Salt

10. Mariposa

9. The Teetering Trail Of Tooter

8. Rushmore

7. Release

6. Camp - Fire

5. A Capsule Of Curiosity

4. Light Curve

3. Rhinoceros

2. Desert Pop

1. 2024 Audio Art Tour Introduction -How Curious

Burning Man Art Discovery Guide 2016

The Black Rock Lighthouse Service

Stories of the wild '90s and the formation of DPW from Burning Man's first storytelling fellowship recipient, Tony “Coyote” Perez-Banuet, Superintendent of Black Rock City.

This is an excerpt from Coyote's upcoming book about this pivotal era in the history of Burning Man. These chapters comprise Part I: Inferno.

Audio production by Accuracy Third
Music by That Damned Band

Chapter 5: God’s Flashlight

Chapter 4: Inferno

Chapter 3: A Night at the Opera

Chapter 2: City of Permission

Chapter 1: In Through the Out Door, Pt. 2

Chapter 1: In Through the Out Door, Pt. 1

Written, edited, and produced by: Accuracy Third
Featuring music by: Midtown Social

Unofficial Burning Man Survival Guide Part 1: How Not to Fuck Up Going to Burning Man

Written, edited, and produced by: Accuracy Third
Featuring music by: Vagabondage

Unofficial Burning Man Survival Guide Part 2: How Not to Fuck Up Burning Man

Benjamin Wachs's Album

Fascinating Stranger - Obscure Existentialists at Burning Man

Ritual, Dr. Tanya Luhrmann says, is the way we connect the world as it ought to be with the world as it is – and orient ourselves to it.

Ritual Practice and Mental Health (Tanya Luhrmann)

Burning Man tech staff member Anselm Engle put the pieces together, suggesting that the experience of going to Burning Man is itself a manifestation of the “Hero’s Journey” — a kind of mythical journey common to most (or even all) cultures.

Burning Man As the Hero's Journey (Anselm Engle)

A guide to the Honorarium art and artists at Burning Man 2017. A great way to get fired up about the amazing art that's going to be on playa! Listen while you're packing, driving to Black Rock City, or just stuck in D Lot!

2017 Burning Man Audio Art Tour

Charon

The Temple of Awareness

The Flower Tower

We don't usually think of "Awe" as one of the essential human emotions, but licensed psychologist and American Psychological Association Fellow Dr. Kirk Schneider's research suggests that we should.

Schneider, President Elect of the Existential-Humanistic Institute and past president of the APA's Society for Humanistic Psychology, says that awe is a contradictory emotion - one which makes us feel both elevated and fragile, elated and terrified — and that without it, life becomes rote, even mechanical, a process of just going through the motions. We need experiences of awe to live as deeply as we can.

Awe, Ritual, and Risk (Kirk Schneider)

Meet Tony and Daniel Wichowski, also known as Mr. Pepperdine and Scratch.

Tony and Daniel met on playa in 2014 and married there legally in 2015. They remain unmistakably in love today.

But happily ever after endings don't write themselves. Sometimes, it takes a transcontinental sacrifice, commitment to the sport of extreme paperwork filing, and a Supreme Court case to pull one off. Swiss cigarettes help.

Burning Love Ep. 1: Until the End of the Playa

The problem with the way we try to give AI ethics is that we design these ethics to work for the status quo, the way things are right now.

But things never stay the same for long, the status quo is constantly changing, and so that sets our AI ethics up to fail.

That's the insight of Dr. Christoph Salge, a professor of Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire and New York University's Game Innovation Lab. Instead of giving Artificial Intelligence a set of rules to follow that will become obsolete as the world (and our needs) change, we should give AI principles to follow that can adapt to our own changing needs.

Empowering Robots Are Ethical Robots (Christoph Salge)

Amazon has recently confirmed reports that its home operating system "Alexa," has been spontaneously laughing for no apparent reason, occasionally refusing to obey commands, and sometimes performing actions that were never asked for.

No one has any idea why — is this a bug? A glitch? A hacker attack? — but internet pioneer and Microsoft researcher Jaron Lanier is probably not surprised.

In his 2017 book Dawn of the New Everything, Lanier points out the startling degree to which these home operating systems — not just Amazon's but from every company on the market — visually resemble "HAL," the AI system in 2001: A Space Odyssey which cannot process conflicting missions and turns homicidal.

Artificial Intelligence Is Just a Story, and We Can Tell a Better One (Jaron Lanier)

In his previous work, leading Existential Psychologist Kirk Schneider has put the experience of "awe" at the center of human psychology. Without experiencing awe, life tends to become flat, mechanical, and unhealthy — a prison to be broken out of, rather than a possibility to grow into.

In his new book, The Spirituality of Awe:  Challenges to the Robotic Revolution, Schneider points out that awe itself is paradoxical: it generates fear and hope, a sense of grandeur and insignificance, of strength and weakness, the imminent and the transcendent ... not one right after the other, but all at once. And it is our ability to have these simultaneous experiences, these experiential paradoxes that cannot be resolved rationally, and be present to them, and integrate them into our lives, that is the essence of our humanity.

Paradox Is the Heart of Humanity (Kirk Schneider)

Vanderbilt Professor of History Michael Bess is the author of the forthcoming book What makes us human? From neurons to the Sistine Chapel, and is studying the technologies that may destroy us, including artificial intelligence and genetic engineering.

The risks of catastrophic failures, he says, are significant — basically our newest technologies are a car without a break, and if you drive one of those too fast, you're probably going to crash. Anyone interested in the survival of our species should be asking ourselves: how do we slow down enough to understand what the problems we're really facing are?

The Human Symphony (Michael Bess)

It's often said that Burning Man and the internet grew up together: both started emerging at around the same time in the late 80s, went through a "wild wild west" phase in the 1990s, when they were seen as counter-cultures. Both started to get really big around the turn of the century, and both became massive cultural phenomenon after that (though, granted, it's a hell of a lot easier to find someone who's never heard of Burning Man than it is someone who's never heard of the internet.) Many of the people who made the internet what it is went to Burning Man - and both imply new forms of social organizing.

Anselm Engle, a member of Burning Man's IT team, thinks the similarities go deeper. Both Burning Man and the internet were born out of the same social forces and cultural movements, and thus have been moving in parallel - one emphasizing pure information, the other grounding us firmly in the immediate physical moment, but both still riding the crest of the same wave.

Which is why he thinks Burning Man can be described as an open=source, cloud based, culture — Burning Man and AI have co-evolved.

Burning Man And AI Have Co-Evolved (Anselm Engle)

Burning Man Project Communications Director Megan Miller interviews Mayor Stephen Benjamin of Columbia, South Carolina and Mayor Hillary Schieve of Reno, Nevada during their visit to Black Rock City in 2018. They came as part of a delegation of 11 mayors from the U.S. Conference of Mayors who came to learn what their cities could learn from our city.

(Photo by Robert Burnett)

Mayors of Columbia, SC and Reno, NV Interviewed on Playa

Burning Man Art Discovery Guide 2019

Cloud Swing

BMIR's very own Operations Manager, Jex, spends time with Marlon Williams, the Assistant Director of Public Sector Innovation at Living Cities, and longtime POC Burner.  Join them for this fabulous stroll into streams of consciousness on race and Burning Man.

This is just one piece of the programming we did over Labor Day weekend, 2020, where we curated 72 hours of programming which focused on the pressing issues at hand in our world.  

Please listen to the other episodes in this playlist - https://soundcloud.com/burningman/sets/bmir-2020-justice-and-equality

We hope you not only enjoy the candor within, yet you are inspired to spark your own conversations moving forward.

With love,

The BMIR Management Team

BMIR 2020 - Jex feat Marlon Williams

Ed Fletcher joins BMIR's Rubik on his show Extraterrestrial Street.  Ed is a producer, writer, activist, former journalist for the Sacramento Bee, and POC Burner with a wealth of knowledge regarding Burning Man's relationship with minorities.

This is just one piece of the programming we did over Labor Day weekend, 2020, where we curated 72 hours of programming which focused on the pressing issues at hand in our world.  

Please listen to the other episodes in this playlist - https://soundcloud.com/burningman/sets/bmir-2020-justice-and-equality

We hope you not only enjoy the candor within, yet you are inspired to spark your own conversations moving forward.

With love,

The BMIR Management Team

BMIR 2020 - Rubik feat Ed Fletcher

RayRay of BMIR speaks with Neil 'Catalyst' Takemoto about Sovereignty Catalyst Hub, Project Radical Inclusion, the Global Multicultural POC Neighborhood Project, and much more.

This is just one piece of the programming we did over Labor Day weekend, 2020, where we curated 72 hours of programming which focused on the pressing issues at hand in our world.  

Please listen to the other episodes in this playlist - https://soundcloud.com/burningman/sets/bmir-2020-justice-and-equality

We hope you not only enjoy the candor within, yet you are inspired to spark your own conversations moving forward.

With love,

The BMIR Management Team

BMIR 2020 - RayRay feat Neil Takemoto

Dr. Cornel West & Professor Tricia Rose of The Tight Rope Podcast join BMIR's Project Manager, Kanizzle, to discuss art and creativity and the parts they play in destroying, and creating, ideologies of hate.

This is just one piece of the programming we did over Labor Day weekend, 2020, where we curated 72 hours of programming which focused on the pressing issues at hand in our world.  

Please listen to the other episodes in this playlist - https://soundcloud.com/burningman/sets/bmir-2020-justice-and-equality

We hope you not only enjoy the candor within, yet you are inspired to spark your own conversations moving forward.

With love,

The BMIR Management Team

BMIR 2020 - Kanizzle feat Dr Cornel West & Professor Tricia Rose

BMIR's Project Manager is joined by two wonderful thinkers from Washington, DC - black radio Luminary Maxx Myrick and artist, political activist and burner Quest Skinner to discuss a wide ranging set of topics around racism in America.

This is just one piece of the programming we did over Labor Day weekend, 2020, where we curated 72 hours of programming which focused on the pressing issues at hand in our world.  

Please listen to the other episodes in this playlist - https://soundcloud.com/burningman/sets/bmir-2020-justice-and-equality

We hope you not only enjoy the candor within, yet you are inspired to spark your own conversations moving forward.

With love,

The BMIR Management Team

BMIR 2020 - Kanizzle feat Maxx Myrick & Quest Skinner

Stuff to listen to on the way to Black Rock City. Or if you're stuck in D Lot. Or anywhere, anytime.

Burning Man Project

Pinned to spotlight

Popular tracks