Sub-Atomic Art Made in a Particle Accelerator for Burning Man 2024
Thrown into a pile of treasures collected by adventurers from around the world - by Jamie Joyce
Get a piece of particle art or world treasure via the Kickstarter.
Burning Man Honorarium 2024
When I asked a woman “does your family have any mottos?” She said - “Yes, live dangerously carefully.”
…and that just hit me like a bolt of lightning.
I thought - “Oh, I’ve got to make a ‘Lichtenberg figure’ map of the world in a particle accelerator and bring this to Burning Man.” So I made the map (V.1. pictured right), applied for a Burning Man honorarium art grant, and got it for the fourth time. So…
A large map of the world created by irradiating acrylic with 2.5 million volts of electricity in a particle accelerator facility (using lead shielding to control which electrons got charged, and hence making the shape of the continents after the electrical discharging)
…what is the piece?
In the night it twinkles and glistens, in the day it blazes and shines! What is it? It's a pile of treasures from around the world! Roughly the shape of a conical pyramid, it's 7ft tall / 6ft in diameter, and is absolutely covered with stuff, like: jewels, love letters, multi-lingual books, ship wheel, trophies, totems, poems, coins, etc. The centerpiece is a "painting" (map of the world) thrown into the pile. The map of the world is a golden-framed 50"x30" cut of clear acrylic which I irradiated using a 2.5MeV particle accelerator beam. When you irradiate acrylic with 2+ million volts, electrons get excited and discharge in lightning-bolt patterns (called Lichtenburg Figures) - but I shielded parts of the acrylic with lead, so the controlled discharge created a map of the world. It will be thrown in a pile of treasures collected from dozens of adventurers….perhaps even you!
Treasures can be anything: wisdom, symbols of friendship and love, work you are proud of, trinkets from travel, and sub-atomic particle art. This piece is going to be a big pile of that.
(This is a terrible mock-up, but whatever)
What comes next:
Step One: Make Lichtenburg Figure Map of the World - done
Step Two: Collect Insane Treasures from Around the World - in progress
Step Three: Get Burning Man Honorarium - done
Step Four: Build the darn thing - in progress
What is this high-voltage art and how did this project come to be?
Discharging the electrical charge built up in the acrylic after the map is pulled from the accelerator beam. See Jamie (later joined by the marvelous Bert Hickman) use the discharging rods along the lead shielding to create the continents.
Well….
A Lichtenberg Figure is the pattern of electrical discharge - it looks like tree branches, lightning bolts, and neurons. You can burn them into wood (or irradiate them in acrylic) using various techniques, such as “fractal burning” on wood, or what’s called “shock fossils” or “captured lightning” when using an electron beam. Jamie didn’t start by making them with 2.5 million volts in a particle accelerator, however, she started with just a few thousand volts from a microwave transformer in her 20s.
Fractal burning (making Lichtenberg figures in wood) with microwave or neon transformers is a highly dangerous form of art which has been known to have killed at least 35 people - of the relatively few number of people who try it.
But….that was the point.
Jamie wanted to make some art for people she loved. The message of the pieces were “I love you so much, I would die for you.” Fortunately, in the process of making these pieces (ahem…living dangerously), she did not die. In part, it was because she had help from an electrical engineering friend (you know, living carefully). However, her machine was housed in a hackerspace, so to prevent other people from digging it out and potentially dying, she laser-engraved on the machine “THIS IS HIGH VOLTAGE. IT WILL SHOCK THE SH*T OUT OF YOU. DON’T DIE, OK? DON’T TOUCH, OK?” (she was in her 20s, remember).
A dear photographer friend (the incredible Jim Hobart from Macbeth Studio), amused, wanted to do a photoshoot with Jamie and her machine (pictured below), and those pictures were posted on the internet. One day, someone left a comment on the photo of the machine that read: “Right up to OSHA spec!” And that person….was Todd Johnson: a physicist who makes Shock Fossils (or Lichtenberg figures) at a particle accelerator using an electron beam with 1000x the voltage that Jamie was using. They met and for years they have been making sub-atomic art together side by side. Todd was present when Jamie made the Lichtenberg Figure map of the world for Live Dangerously Carefully (which actually ended up painfully electrocuting Jamie when she failed to completely discharge the lead shielding - ouch)!
About Jamie Joyce
(Lead Artist of Live Dangerously Carefully)
Jamie has been winning awards for art for well over a decade, and has been paid to make art for almost two. She has been a Burning Man Honoraria three times before and her art has been featured in a museum. In college, Jamie helped pay the bills by entering (and winning) art competitions with a technique she calls “stuff sculpting” or “waste painting,” in which she arranges everyday objects by shape, texture, and color. She is obsessed with complexity in design. Live Dangerously Carefully will be such a “stuff sculpture,” in which objects are arranged for an aesthetic effect as well as optimized for interactivity. The entire piece will be a giant puzzle.
How she found Burning Man: Jamie was in the middle of making a fossilized skull of a Tyrannosaurus Rex artwork when a passerby commented that she should make art for Burning Man (a globally known art festival), but she hadn’t heard of it before. She looked it up and found the deadline for an honorarium was due in two days. She applied, she won, she went - and she’s been continuing to go to Burning Man for what will be 10 years in 2024.
In her everyday life: Jamie is the founding executive director of The Society Library, a nonprofit working to reimagine the future of public digital libraries by building databases that model the arguments, claims, and evidence from different points of view on wickedly complex socio-political issues. Essentially, this work is about compressing the knowledge of tens of thousands of multimedia artifacts (per topic) and saving researchers thousands of research hours. Currently, the Society Library team is automating the methods which Jamie architected with AI. Jamie is dedicated to the sincere inquiry after truth, building educational curricula to help students comprehend complexity, has sat on many nonprofit boards (including one which issues art grants), and has generally served in the nonprofit sector for many years.
Want to Help Collect Treasures? Want to Support the Kickstarter? Let me know! ⚡
Burning Man only pays for a portion of an honorarium art piece, we are counting on you to help bring it to the Playa!
We are looking for:
Books “of wisdom” from around the world (multi-lingual)
Spiritual Totems, Symbols, and Trinkets
Flags, Rugs, Fabrics, Clothes
Cultural Artifacts (items that are representative of a specific culture or place, such as a sword from Japan, a hookah from Morocco, etc.)
Historical Artifacts (a piece of a starship, a sunken ship piece, a bolt from a classic piece of machinery, etc.)
Legally acquired (and transported) soil and water samples
Clocks, gems, pearls, and coins
A sample of work you are proud of (that can be made into an artifact form, like a printed essay)
Symbols of adventure (climbing gear, a plane propeller, a ship helm)
Love letters, cards from friends, and poetry
Join in on the ✨treasure hunt,✨ and thanks for the interest and (potential) support!
(And to the family whose motto it is, I hope to do the sentiment justice. I hope you don’t mind, I was instantly inspired and generally always do what the artistic muses ask of me when they direct so precisely)