Social anxiety becomes performance art at the 20th annual Burning Man festival, in the Nevada desert, thanks to the Dicky Box.

At Burning Man, where revelers live by an unwritten code of group participation, Christian "Dicky" Davies, a 27-year-old antisocial from San Francisco, has sealed himself within a transparent 10 x 10 Plexiglas box for the entire weeklong event....It's a serious performance piece to express the isolation he has felt in the "forced fun" environment during his past two visits to Burning Man. Dicky doesn't like to dance to electronica. Dicky doesn't like glo-sticks or pink cowboy hats. Dicky doesn't trust touchie-feelie strangers who want to be his best friend.

But he very much likes Burning Man's desert art, so his roommate Logan Mirto decided to turn Dicky's anxieties into an interactive sculpture that would make him more comfortable on the playa: A clear room with clean white Ikea furniture and a mail slot to accept notes, food and gifts from the community. He can mingle, on his own terms.

And as the unrelenting winds ripped cowboy hats off heads and coated everything in a layer of dust Monday, Dicky remained one of the cleanest humans at Burning Man. "It's kinda nice in here, but my windows are getting coated so I can't see out," he said.

Burning Man ends with the burning of a wooden man. Pretty inspiring, especially for anarcho-syndicalists.

But there's one problem: Burners flying out of Reno tend to track lots of fine, white desert sand through the airport.

How about a hose patrol on the departure-level drive-around?

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Posted by Matt Rosenberg at August 30, 2005 11:53 AM