Wikipedia defines a Simoom as a strong, dry, dust-laden wind that blows in the Sahara, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Syria, and the deserts of Arabian Peninsula. The storm moves in cyclone (circular) form, carrying clouds of dust and sand, and produces on humans and animals a suffocating effect. The name means "poison wind" and is given because the sudden onset of simoom may cause heat stroke.
As Burners can attest, we have experience with similar poison winds in our fair Black Rock City. Not only do we manage to survive these harsh winds, but through our creativity and inspiration from the Ten Principals, we thrive in them creating our own storms of light and sound in the form of fantastic works of art and magical experiences only to see them disappear back into the dust at the end of the event. One thing has been missing from this intersection of creativity, dust, and wind that Simoom hopes to provide. That thing is born from a simple question: What if you could turn the storms of dust and sound and light that traverse Burning Man into interactive art, not at the scale of a particular art piece or point in the city but at the scale of the entirety of Black Rock City itself?
Simoom then hopes to explore the answer to this question by creating the infrastructure to sense and map, in real time, both the natural and human storms of Burning Man across the entire footprint of Black Rock City and to transform that information into a platform for digital interactive art. Simoom will consist of a network of sensors that measure natural (dust, temperature, wind, etc.) and human (ambient sound, ambient light, etc.) phenomena and wirelessly transmit that data back to a central art installation, known as The Eye of the Storm. Infrastructure in The Eye will translate that data into a real time picture of conditions across the city and not only allow participants to view the data but to play with it by turning it into interactive audio and visual art.
The basic unit of the Simoom project is the sensor node. A nodes purpose is simply to sense one or more natural conditions (temperature, dust, sound, light, etc.), convert that reading to digital data, and transmit that data back to The Eye. Each node will consist of several sub-units including the sensors themselves; a solar/battery power unit; a low-power processing unit; and a point-to-point wireless mesh network interface.
The network is the entire collection of Sensor Nodes. The network created will be a point-to-point wireless mesh network where each node only has to transmit its data to its neighbors and not all the way back to The Eye. Each Node then constantly receives data from neighbors and repeats that data itself so all data eventually traverses multiple paths back to The Eye allowing for redundancy and fault tolerance if one or more nodes malfunctions. It is unknown how many Nodes will be in the network but the intent is to provide readings from many points within the footprint of Burning Man, meaning everything within the Trash Fence and possibly along the Trash Fence itself. The design of the network should be scalable but at full build out it could consist of dozens of nodes. Nodes could be placed on existing infrastructure such as street intersection poles, art pieces, The Man, Center Camp, on scaffolding and structures of various camps throughout the city, etc. or installation poles would be created for installation of nodes on the open Playa. As each node is placed at the beginning of the event, its GPS coordinates will have to be recorded and reported back to The Eye where software will allow accurate mapping of node data.
The Eye of the Storm will be the home of the Simoom project and the central point of artistic interaction with the projects infrastructure. It is envisioned that The Eye will be a large covered structure placed somewhere on the inner playa. As participants enter the structure, they are greeted with an introduction to the Simoom project. There would be a number of screen displays scattered around the edge of The Eye that offer various visual representations of the Simoom storm data. These could range from basic “weather radar” type representations to more complex and artistic representations. Each screen would have an interface that allows participants to alter the visual representation on that screen. A large master visualization would be projected on the ceiling of The Eye which would also be changeable by participants. Around the edge of the structure there would be placed a number of speakers. These would form the basis of the audio art portion of the Simoom project. They would create a multichannel auditory space with which to create sound representations of the storms of natural and human activity traveling through Black Rock City. A visual interface would also be present that allows participants to define one or more audio clips for various sectors of the City so that as natural conditions change through that sector, the clips defined there get played in different ways. The multichannel speaker arrangement would allow directionality to be preserved, i.e. if a dust storm is traveling in from the Northwest, sound clips defined for Northwest sectors of the City would be heard first and strongest coming from the speakers placed in the Northwest areas of the structure and sound would wash over the participants as the storm traversed the City with new clips played coming from new directions as the dust entered new sectors. Alternatively, in place of fixed interface units, the participant interface to the Simoom project could be implemented as a local wireless network and deployed smart-phone applications allowing participants to use their own phones to alter the audio and visual art within The Eye of the Storm. Visual and audio artists from around Black Rock City would also be invited to create and perform “sets” at The Eye using the Simoom infrastructure.
The Eye would have a further data infrastructure consisting of a database server. The data coming in to The Eye for the Simoom project would be recorded in this server for the duration of the Burning Man event allowing playback of and interaction with collected data at a later date. This data could also become useful as information to the Burning Man event staff either for ongoing operations or for research into future infrastructure decisions. It is envisioned that sensor data collected from Simoom will be freely available under public license and that the platform itself will be open-sourced to allow for exploration and modification by the community at large.
Human civilization is rapidly witnessing the rise of the “Smart City” and the “Internet of Things” where a ubiquity of sensors are being placed in the public environment and machine-to-machine communication and processing of that sensor data increasingly happens without human involvement. Simoom is intended not only to serve as an art piece for Burning Man but to also serve as a platform for exploring the implications of the Smart City and how this new age can and will affect human existence and specifically the creation of and interaction with art. It effectively turns Black Rock City into an experiment in how the Smart City infrastructure can be used as a platform for art. It is designed to explore the unintended consequences of sensor infrastructure and how the unintended can affect human existence and human creativity both positively and negatively. The participants of Burning Man can then explore the consequences of the Smart City and the Internet of Things in the highly experimental and relatively safe environment of Black Rock City before similar infrastructure becomes common in the default world. Furthermore, Simoom could also serve as a platform for the exploration of uses of sensors in disaster relief, large-scale refugee camps and other situations where sensor data may lead to improved outcomes for displaced and distressed populations around the world. It is hoped that Simoom will not just allow the creation of compelling art, but lead to a better understanding of how sensor networks and the data they collect can better serve humanity.
Cyrus Virdeh
cyrus@simoomproject.org