Burning Man 2024: Curiouser & Curiouser

The 2024 Burning Man theme celebrates puzzles without answers, embraces the irrational and the absurd, and invites the unknown over for tea. Because it’s in those timeless moments of not knowing, when we’re consumed entirely by curiosity, that we experience our most profound learning, growth, and creativity. All great journeys of discovery begin with a question; without that spark of curiosity no movement is possible. Staring into the void of unreason, we experience the wonderfulness of wonder, and the staggering awesomeness of awe. Which leads inexorably to the asking of better questions. Which is, after all, what makes us better than the robots. 

The magic of wonder is its power to startle us out of sleep-mode and back into the immediacy of being. Studies say that the average human on an average day is running on autopilot about half the time while they think about something else (possibly cat videos). Even on our best days it’s easy to just believe what we think we believe and stay inside the painted lines. The education system fills us up with all the answers to all the questions on the standardized exams, and we steadily lose the ability to imagine anything that’s not on the test. Sometimes we need to fall down a rabbit hole or step through a drawing-room mirror to encounter the freakiness that was right there all along, just a tornado-ride away in Oz or three wishes over in Faerie. Just past the torii gate on the spirit side, or a short rocket ride over to Antichthon, the Counter-Earth on the far side of the sun where everything is its opposite and nothing is impossible.

We take our title, of course, from Lewis Carroll’s Alice, who keeps her wits about her with remarkable aplomb as she explores a topsy-turvy world immune to the laws of common sense. Not just another folkloric fantasy realm of magicians and dragons, or a video game with the magic of extra lives, but something profoundly weird, a place where time comes unhinged and causality spins around in circles until it gets dizzy and falls giggling to the ground. A place, one might argue, more like our own Black Rock City than any fairy tale.