The Portal of Collective Imagination: What the Desert Said
Updated: 3 days ago
I went to Black Rock City this year with a question.
What can we imagine together?
It was printed on the Portal itself, one of several invitations we offered to anyone willing to walk up to one of two podiums, press a button, and speak into a microphone. I had been living with some version of that question for years, through my work in artificial intelligence, through my writing about creativity and ancestral intelligence, through conversations about whether machines can imagine and whether humans are slowly forgetting how. By the time we arrived at Black Rock City, the question had become physical: a 16-foot circular arch built from aluminum truss and programmable LED panels (16! 65" Samsung TVs), powered by the sun and whatever energy we could coax into batteries before the desert demanded it back.
I thought I knew what we had built. Then people started talking to it.
Over six nights, 2,868 voices passed through the Portal. They came in 17 languages. Some people offered hopes and prayers; others told jokes, made declarations, confessed desires, spoke nonsense, or simply wanted to see what this strange illuminated circle would do if they gave it their voice. The computer running locally on the playa listened, interpreted the contribution, and transformed it into a point of light that entered the cosmos moving across the arch, drifting toward other lights carrying something emotionally similar. Nothing traveled to the cloud. Nothing was sent off-playa. There was no invisible database somewhere accumulating people's hopes for some later use. The exchange happened there, in the dust, between a person, a machine, a piece of art, and everyone who had spoken before them.
About twenty seconds after someone pressed the button, something they had said became light. There is something about that transformation that I am still metabolizing.
I have spent much of the last decade asking what intelligence actually is, especially now that we have become so comfortable attaching the word to machines. We talk about artificial intelligence as prediction, computation, reasoning, scale. But I have become increasingly interested in other forms of intelligence: the intelligence of bodies and rituals, ancestors and ecosystems, improvisation and community. The Portal was another experiment in that question. What happens when technology isn't designed primarily to answer us, sell to us, optimize us, or keep us staring at it? What happens when we build a machine whose primary function is to receive something from us and then place that contribution into relationship with everyone else?
The desert answered in ways I could not have designed.
The single most common thing anyone said to the Portal was “Hello.”
One hundred and forty-six times.
Of all the things I expected people to say to a glowing circle in the middle of Black Rock City, I don't think I expected that. Yet the more I have thought about it, the more perfect it seems. Before the grand declarations, before world peace and cosmic consciousness, before the jokes and the prayers and the requests for the universe to rearrange itself, there was this profoundly ordinary gesture of recognition.
"Hello."
It is what we say when we encounter another presence.
Maybe some people were testing the microphone. Maybe they didn't know what else to say. Maybe there is absolutely no need to turn 146 hellos into a philosophical theory of collective consciousness. But I am me, so of course I have been thinking about it.
What interests me is that when people encountered something they didn't completely understand, many of them didn't begin with a command. They began with a greeting. That distinction feels increasingly important to me in the age of AI.
We have been taught to approach machines through commands: search this, generate that, optimize this, tell me the answer, make me faster. Even the language of prompting carries traces of control. But a greeting establishes a different relationship. A greeting acknowledges an other, even if that other is only an artwork, an interface, or perhaps our own imagination reflected back through silicon and light. A greeting begins a conversation.
And the conversation that followed surprised me.
When we distilled the contributions toward their emotional cores, gratitude appeared most often, in 302 contributions. Community followed with 247, then the body at 170, and play at 118. People imagined world harmony and peace. They hoped for a future free from disease. Someone wished racism would dissipate across the universe. Someone spoke about honoring the land and the ancestors who came before us and protected it. Another imagined “a future that truly serves the magnificent creature that we humans are.”
I keep returning to that collection of words—gratitude, community, body, play—because they are not the words we usually hear when the technology industry talks about the future.
The vocabulary of technological futurism tends to be scale, speed, disruption, productivity, intelligence, growth. I have used all of those words myself. I spent years inside institutions where they were practically incantations. Yet when thousands of people were invited to imagine without being asked to produce a business plan, justify an ROI, or prove that their hope could scale, they spoke about being together. They spoke about their bodies. They played. They expressed gratitude.
Maybe imagination reveals something that prediction cannot.
Prediction asks what is likely to happen based on what has already happened. Imagination gives us permission to step outside that lineage and ask what might exist that has never existed before. One extrapolates from the archive; the other occasionally escapes it. This is one of the reasons I have become so interested in imagination as a form of intelligence rather than as a decorative creative skill. Imagination lets us prototype meaning before we have the language, infrastructure, or evidence to make it real.
Of course, this was still Burning Man, and collective imagination apparently also includes “Orgy dome.”
And “sparkle pony.”
And “purple rain.”
And “the man will burn.”
We had hidden Easter eggs inside the Portal, specific phrases that triggered special effects in the light, and once people figured out they existed, the information spread in that strange organic way information moves across the playa. By the end of the week people were hunting for them deliberately, and 339 of the contributions were Easter eggs.
I love this part almost as much as the prayers.
There is a temptation when we talk about collective consciousness, ancestral intelligence, or technology as ritual to become terribly serious. But play is an intelligence too. Absurdity breaks patterns. Humor releases us from the tyranny of making meaning out of everything too quickly. A cosmos containing prayers for racial healing but no sparkle ponies would, frankly, be an incomplete cosmos.
The Portal had to hold all of it.
That became particularly important when we designed moderation. I did not want to build a technological system that confused safety with conformity, because those are very different things. The rule was intentionally narrow: reject identity-based attacks, violence, sexual non-consent, harassment, and self-harm, while allowing profanity, adult themes, drug references, political anger, consensual sexuality, and the messy range of things human beings say when nobody is asking them to behave like a corporate focus group.
Ninety-four percent of real utterances were accepted. Only 47 were moderated out during the entire run, and when something was rejected, we made another decision that mattered deeply to me: we didn't keep it. No transcript was stored. There was only a counter.
I have spent enough of my career around data to know how unusual restraint has become. We have built an entire technological economy around the assumption that if data can be collected, it should be collected, and if it can be stored, someday someone will find a reason to use it. The Portal offered me a chance to practice another kind of technological relationship, one in which forgetting could be as intentional as remembering.
Our ancestors knew this distinction better than we do. Not every ritual was recorded. Not every story belonged to everyone. Not every utterance was meant to become an archive. Some things were spoken into a circle and allowed to disappear when the circle closed.
Perhaps digital systems need rituals of forgetting too.
The Intelligence of Repair
And then, as always happens when humans attempt to build something beautiful in Black Rock Desert, the desert entered the collaboration.
One night the Portal never turned on at all. The solar batteries simply didn't have enough charge. On two other nights, the batteries died early, cutting us off before dawn. Podium A struggled badly at first, receiving only around 14 contributions a night before the crew replaced a circuit board and re-positioned its antenna.
Afterward, it began receiving closer to 300. By the end of the run, 68 percent of all the voices we received came during the final three nights, after that repair.
There is one moment from those days that I don't think I will ever forget.
We were in the middle of yet another technical failure, standing there in the dust trying to understand what had gone wrong and what combination of tools, parts, patience, and playa magic might get us running again. Then, emerging literally out of the dust, came our hardware savant and technical director, Dave Mathews, riding Melton John.
He pulled up at exactly the moment we needed him and asked, with the kind of casual timing that only makes sense at Burning Man:
“Anyone need a lift driver?”
Of course we did.
There are moments in the desert when coincidence starts to feel like another form of intelligence. You can decide for yourself whether Dave appearing out of a dust cloud at the precise moment of a technical failure qualifies, but by then I had stopped asking too many questions about how the playa delivers what you need.
Dave understood the physical and technical body of the Portal in a way that sometimes seemed closer to intuition than troubleshooting. He could listen to a malfunctioning system the way a musician listens for the instrument that has slipped out of tune, moving between hardware, power, structure, and whatever new problem the desert had invented for us that day.
We started calling the interventions that brought the Portal back to life the ARTery repairs, which became increasingly appropriate. The Portal had a body. It had circulation and nerves and occasionally something that behaved suspiciously like a temperament. Dave and the rest of the technical crew kept learning that body while it was alive, often with thousands of pounds of art, electronics, dust, wind, and human expectation surrounding them.
A WiFi fallback link, built midweek by our interaction designer Josh Baillon because the USB connection kept failing, carried podium B through 76 individual outages without visitors noticing. Josh led interaction on the portal with the most enthusiasm and fervor I've ever seen let alone expected out of someone I met at an Esalen Institute workshop in March earlier this year. That statistic makes me smile because it captures something we rarely celebrate about technology. The best technical intervention is sometimes the one nobody sees. No spectacle, no applause, no indication to the person standing at the podium that anything had gone wrong at all. Just Josh behind the scenes noticing, adapting, and keeping the experience alive.
But the intelligence of repair actually began long before we reached Black Rock City.
Off-playa, John “Parts” Taylor had led our build with a very particular kind of foresight. He designed every piece of the sculpture to be modular and easy to assemble, which sounds like a practical engineering decision until you are standing in the Black Rock Desert trying to construct a 16-foot technological portal while dust gets into places on your body you didn't know existed.
As we assembled the Portal on playa, piece after piece simply snapped into place.
And every time it happened, we praised Parts.
I mean this literally. Another section would align, another connection would work exactly as intended, and somebody would invoke his brilliance again. Parts wasn't standing there giving us instructions. His intelligence had already been embedded into the sculpture. The care he put into the design months earlier was now making itself visible through our bodies: fewer unnecessary decisions, fewer opportunities for confusion, pieces designed to recognize one another.
I have spent years around people who talk about “good design,” usually while pointing at beautiful interfaces or elegant products. But standing in the desert, I was reminded that some of the most beautiful design is almost invisible. It anticipates the exhausted person who will someday have to assemble the thing. It understands that the builder may be hot, underslept, covered in alkaline dust, and surrounded by chaos. It leaves instructions not only on paper but in the object itself.
Parts had designed the Portal so that, in a sense, the sculpture knew how to become itself.
This part of the story matters to me as much as the 2,868 voices do. I have spent a good part of Inspired by Intelligence writing about the intelligence of collapse and repair, perhaps because life has given me so many opportunities to study it. A shade structure collapses in a desert storm and the ritual you planned becomes the ritual of cleaning up glass. A hurricane washes out a road in Baja and philosophy becomes a shovel in your hands. A hillside slides toward your pool and suddenly water is the intelligence you have to learn to listen to. I have slowly stopped believing that intelligence is revealed only when a system performs according to plan. Sometimes intelligence is what emerges when the plan fails.
Sometimes it is the person who appears out of the dust asking if anyone needs a lift driver. Or a person who is willing to start each day of Burn week at the Artery building solutions. And sometimes it was placed there months earlier by someone appropriately named Parts who understood that eventually a tired group of people in the desert would need two pieces of aluminum to simply snap together.
The Portal became another version of that lesson.
It wasn't efficient. It was cared for.
That distinction is closer to what I mean when I talk about beneficial technology. We tend to imagine intelligence residing inside the sophisticated part of a system—the AI model, the computer, the code—but the Portal kept showing me intelligence distributed everywhere. It was in Dave arriving when something broke. It was in Parts designing for people he knew would someday be tired. It was Josh in his incessant need to keep the podiums working throughout the sandstorm. It was in Christopher aka Clue keeping electricity moving. It was in Kaz and Chuck tending the cosmos and show system. It was in Mayumi thinking about what a new point of light should sound like when it was born. It was in my son Carson figuring out how to create boundaries without turning those boundaries into surveillance while hand drawing 75 glyphs to map our stars among the cosmos.
None of those intelligences were interchangeable, and the Portal needed all of them.
That is what collective intelligence looked like before a single visitor ever pressed the button.
By the Final Night, the Portal Was Alive
By the final night, both podiums ran at roughly 100 percent uptime for the entire 10.5-hour window. The last contribution entered at 5:49 Sunday morning, just as dawn was arriving.
I wish I could tell you I was standing there in some perfect cinematic pose, watching the first light appear over the mountains and immediately understanding what the whole experience meant. Meaning rarely arrives that neatly for me. Usually I understand my life in fragments and echoes, sometimes weeks or months later, when one experience unexpectedly touches another.
What I understand now is that the Portal wasn't really the arch.
The arch was beautiful, and getting 16 feet of programmable LEDs, microphones, local computation, solar power, batteries, visualization software, moderation, sound, and connectivity to behave in the Black Rock Desert was no small feat. But the physical structure was only the vessel.
The Portal was the relationship.
It existed between the person pressing the button and the stranger whose light was already floating above them. It existed between the engineers repairing a connection and the artist composing the sound that welcomed a new contribution into the cosmos. It existed between ancient ideas of ritual and very contemporary questions about artificial intelligence. It existed between my own imagination of what this artwork might become and the thousands of people who immediately made it something else.
This is also why the conversation around AI and art on the playa mattered to me.
The Portal had been selected as a 2026 Burning Man Honorarium project, and by the time we arrived, there was already a larger debate unfolding about AI-generated art, AI slop, authorship, originality, and whether artificial intelligence belonged at Burning Man at all. I understand the anxiety underneath those conversations. I share some of it. I don't want a creative future in which we outsource imagination to machines and call the resulting abundance creativity simply because there is more stuff to look at.
But I also think the argument becomes impoverished when the only question we ask is whether AI made the thing.
I am much more interested in asking what kind of relationship the technology makes possible.
Does it isolate us or bring us into communion? Does it extract from us or invite reciprocity? Does it make us passive consumers of machine-generated abundance, or does it provoke us to become more imaginative ourselves? Does it flatten difference into an average, or create conditions where thousands of distinct voices can remain distinct while still becoming part of something larger?
These were the questions I carried into conversations side by side with Josh at Center Camp's Art Speaks with Sherry Wong, Anthony Fieldman of Apothoneum, and James Gwertzman who led the design of this year's Temple of the Moon. Later at PlayAlchemist's AI Day led by Gina Levy. I spoke about the Portal as a threshold and about what it meant for me to build it as a Black woman artist whose relationship with technology has always been entangled with questions of access, history, ancestral intelligence, and who gets to imagine the future in the first place. Even more I stood outside the portos during build and was quoted by Anna Tong of Forbes in her coverage of Burning Man and AI when she needed an answer to whether AI belongs on the Playa in the first place.
For me, ancestral intelligence and artificial intelligence do not sit at opposite ends of some timeline where one is old and sacred and the other is new and synthetic. They are different forms of relationship with knowledge. The interesting work happens in the space between them.
That space is where I seem to keep finding myself.
Collective Was the Method
The Portal was built over months of volunteer days at Shulgin Farm in Lafayette, funded through the Burning Man Honorarium and community crowdfunding, with Five Ton Crane serving as our fiscal sponsor and additional grantor.
There were many more hands than mine, which is part of why calling myself the artist has always felt slightly strange when I think about the Portal. I carried the original question and held the conceptual thread, but the physical object contains other people's intelligence everywhere. Some of it is visible in LEDs and sound and structure. Some of it lives inside a connection that doesn't fail, a component that snaps into place, a moderation decision nobody ever knows was made, or a repair performed quickly enough that the person standing at the podium never realizes there was anything to repair.
This matters because I have become increasingly suspicious of the mythology of the lone creator. We love to put a single name underneath an artwork, a company, an invention, or a theory, as if ideas spring fully formed from isolated minds. My own life has taught me otherwise. Creativity emerges from collisions and conversations, from mothers answering WhatsApp prompts, from engineers swearing at broken connections in the dust, from artists imagining sounds, from friends offering their labor and support, and from strangers walking up to something they don't understand and deciding to participate anyway.
The Portal of Collective Imagination was never mine in that sense.
Collective wasn't simply in the title. It was the method.
I may have carried the original question, but it took an entire community to build something capable of receiving the answer. Perhaps that is what I am carrying home from the desert this time.
I began this project asking, What can we imagine together?
I expected the answers to arrive in language, and some of them did: world peace, healing, a future without disease, an end to racism, reverence for ancestors, gratitude, community, play. But the deeper answer was happening around the words. It was in the act of contributing something without owning the final result. It was in watching your light drift toward someone else's light. It was in Parts designing something months earlier so another person could assemble it intuitively.
It was in Dave appearing out of the dust when the technology failed. It was in the crew repairing a broken system so strangers could continue speaking into it. It was in the fact that a technological artwork could become less about the technology the longer people interacted with it.
Maybe collective imagination isn't a giant shared vision of the future after all. Maybe we don't have to agree on the future before we begin building it. Maybe collective imagination is a practice of making enough space for different hopes to coexist, allowing them to move toward one another without demanding that they become the same thing.
That feels much closer to what I witnessed in the desert.
There were 2,868 voices, speaking in 17 languages, carrying gratitude and grief, sex and silliness, politics and prayer, ancestors and possibility. For six nights they entered a circle of light and became part of a cosmos that none of us could have made alone. And somewhere inside all of that complexity were 146 people who walked up to an unknown thing, pressed a button, and simply said hello.
I keep thinking about them.
Maybe the future doesn't always need another command. Maybe it needs a greeting.
And perhaps the most intelligent thing we can do when we arrive at the edge of something we don't yet understand is not to ask immediately what it can do for us, but to introduce ourselves, listen for what comes back, and begin the much slower, stranger, more beautiful work of learning how to be in relationship.
That is the Portal I thought I was building.
It turns out we were already standing inside it.
Comments