Theme for Burning Nest 2026

True To You!

Bring Yourself

Anything You Want!

Completely Here!

WOW!NOW!

• Metamorphosis - you may emerge a different person (all change, tickets please)

• Apocalypso - chill out, relax, explore and party in a tropical themed environment after the apocalypse

• Beyond wonderland … start or continue your own personal journey in a relaxing and potentially surreal environment.

1. The Age Between - where past, present and future meet, where old stories change their clothes, where myth and reality blurs, and where time ceases to exist.

2. The Passage - Resting between mortal life and eternal paradise lies a plane, where emotion replaces time; where echoes of the real world may be heard, sounding as if built on memories rather than matter. It is the place where souls come to understand who they are before they can move on. It is the realm where endings can be rewritten.

3. The Great Unbinding - the end of all worlds, where all of creation gathers. Where all souls stand revealed, not to be punished, but to be embraced. Where all masks fall, leaving only truth, understanding and unashamed release. Judgement Day has arrived, but it has left the judgement behind.

Nest 2026 will be the last on that site... So, something which nods to that...

> Chapters

> Ch-ch-changes!

> Hello, goodbye.

Pandora’s Paradox

Parallax Prism

Nexus Nebula

Fractal Fragments

Hi lovely,

These are my ideas according to my regional burning man experiences:

Noosphere or Hive mind : coined by Teilhard de Chardin and Vernadsky, meaning the “sphere of human thought,” like a layer of collective consciousness around Earth.

Anima mundi: this is Latin for “soul of the world,” the idea of a universal spirit connecting all living things.

Best wishes,

Jing (pronounced: j-i-ng, like jinglebell)

Not Actual Size - We’ll make tiny things huge and huge things tiny! Sometimes our telescopes and microscopes give us a better understanding of our surroundings. Sometimes we use scale to trick each other. Let’s play with both.

Under Construction - Nothing is ever finished. That’s ok. We’ll take the cones, the signs, the flashing warning lights, and apply them to everything. Our event. Our art projects. Our workshops. Ourselves.

Ancient Technology - Look up the next event on your Antikythera mechanism. Find last year’s must-have phone in an archaeological dig site. Reinvent the wheel, and writing, and weaving. Connect your steampunk contraption to alien technology via the mycelium network. Ditch the radios for some tin cans and string. RSVP by carrier pigeon.

You know what was great? The theme for Microburn this year was 'dinosaurs' - you can dress as a dinosaur, you can draw a dinosaur, you can find songs that are directly and literallyabout dinosaurs in lots of different genres of music, there are films about dinosaurs, there are puns about dinosaurs.

I think if the purpose of themes is to inspire art and artists we overthink them way tooo much and often go fore something so general it means something different to everyone, and honestly means nothing to a lot of people aside from some nice sounding words,the verbal equivalent of an LED pattern that's pretty, but totally abstract! There's already going to be plenty of anstract, pretty LEDs at any burn, regardless of theme, I say we should go for something everyone can agree more or less what it is, something that any child knows what it means and can draw, not dressed up to sound nore vague and fancy, just straight forward.

So -

Space (not cosmic something-or-other, just space)

Pirates

Time travel

Dinosars / prehistory (again [Micro is a small enough event it bears repeating, it was a really good theme])

Dragons (similar but you stick some wings on)

Robots / the future

The 1920s

Under the sea

Halloween

Christmas

Birds

Your favourite book

I know these don't sound as fancy as usual, but i really think a back to basics approach could inspire more art and more engagement and reckon it's worth a go.