Event: “The Founders Speak: Burning Man, Technology, Religion & the Future”

The Burning Man Project is proud to join Columbia University’s Department of Religion and Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life to present a forum on Burning Man, technology, religion and the future, featuring panelists Larry Harvey (founder of Burning Man), John Perry Barlow (founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) and Peter Hirshberg (disruptive cultures and technology expert).

Dr. David Kittay of Columbia’s Department of Religion will moderate a lively conversation about Burning Man as a philosophical movement, its history, and its predicted global applications.

This event is free and open to the public. Reserve your seat here.

The Founders Speak
Tuesday Nov. 19th
7-9pm
Altschul Auditorium (directions)
Columbia University
New York, NY

Much of our use of tech these days is disembodied, and some of it is alienating. Both tech and Burning Man have deeply religious aspects involving sacred spaces (virtual and playa), and his his class, Dr. Kittay looks at whether the 10 Principles could have a corrective effect on the disembodied and alienating tendencies of technology. Additionally, many of the leaders of the tech movement are Burners, so there’s a sociological as well as theoretical and practical aspect to the intersection of Burning Man and technology.

Larry Harvey is the Founder and Executive Director of the Burning Man Project and Chairman of the Board of the Black Rock Arts Foundation. He co-chairs Burning Man’s Art Department, scripts and co-curates the annual art theme, and collaborates with artists in creating aspects of the art theme and the design of Black Rock City. Larry is also a political planner. He supervises the organization’s lobbying efforts and regularly attends meetings with state, county and federal agencies. As a spokesperson for Burning Man, Larry is frequently interviewed and has lectured at Harvard, the Commonwealth Club of California, the Walker Art Center, and the Oxford Union.

John Perry Barlow is a former Wyoming rancher and Grateful Dead lyricist. He graduated in 1969 with High Honors in comparative religion from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. More recently, he co-founded and still co-chairs the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He was the first to apply the term Cyberspace to the “place” it presently describes. He has written for a diversity of publications, including Communications of the ACM, Mondo 2000, The New York Times, and Time. He has been on the masthead of Wired Magazine since it was founded. His piece on the future of copyright, “The Economy of Ideas” is taught in many law schools and his “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” is posted on thousands of web sites. In 1997, he was a Fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and has been, since 1998, as a Berkman Fellow at the Harvard Law School. He works actively with several consulting groups, including Diamond Technology Partners, Vanguard, and Global Business Network. In June 1999, FutureBanker Magazine named him “One of the 25 Most Influential People in Financial Services”. He writes, speaks, and consults on a broad variety of subjects, particularly digital economy.

Peter Hirshberg is a marketing specialist at the epicenter of emerging technology, who has spent a quarter of a century charting the reverberations of all things high tech in culture and in business. Hirshberg first helped bring Apple into the online services arena, then acted as strategic adviser to Microsoft, AOL and NBC. Along the way, he was CEO of Gloss.com and Elemental Software. He’s built a deep understanding of the fundamentals of content production and consumption — and how they’ve changed, both online and off. Hirshberg is a trustee of the Computer History Museum and a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute. He serves on the advisory board of Technorati and keeps up a lively blog on disruptive culture.