No center
There is no headline act and no main stage. Nothing is arranged so that standing in one place is the best strategy.
▲ Survey file 001 · Unsurveyed · No coordinates confirmed
A city is looking
for somewhere
to exist.
No stages. No spectators. No complete map. A temporary world of monumental art, hidden theater, strange machines, and adventures that cannot be scheduled.
- The land has not been chosen
- The gates have not been built
- The founding citizens have not been called
That is why you are early.
Move your light across the plain. The survey is incomplete on purpose.
Descend
The premise
We are not building a festival.
We are building a place that
takes a week to disappear.
For one week, somewhere, a city will assemble itself out of the imaginations of the people who show up. Then it will take itself apart and leave the ground cleaner than it found it.
Nobody performs at you. Nobody sells to you. There is no main stage to drift back to when you run out of ideas — because the city is the show, and you are inside it, and it is not finished without you.
The eight structural laws
What has to be true, or it isn't the city.
Camps are world-builders
Camps are not vendors and not decoration. Every camp holds a piece of the world and is responsible for what happens inside it.
Art must be found
Work is scattered, buried, mobile, hidden and occasionally locked. Discovery is the medium. A map that showed everything would destroy the thing it mapped.
Some of it is unlisted
A meaningful share of the city never appears in any program: temporary, mobile, interaction-activated, or open for ninety minutes once.
You arrive with a thread
Every citizen enters holding an object, a rumor, an instruction, or a debt. It leads somewhere. It will not lead everywhere.
Theater has no fourth wall
Characters live in the city. They have problems. They will ask you for help, and whether you help changes what the city does next.
Information is currency
No one is given the whole map. People trade what they know. The social economy of the city runs on rumor, favor, and hospitality.
Nobody sees it all
The city is deliberately larger than a week. You will leave having missed things that were real, and that is the point.
FOMO
The fear of missing out is usually a symptom of a bad event. Here it is the engineering specification. Enter FOMO
You will not find it all. That is not a gap in the schedule. That is the architecture.
Founding note · filed with the survey
The Stranded Fleet
Two impossible vessels aground in the desert, their hulls assembled from containers, scaffold, truss and weathered plate. Every deck, hold and cabin belongs to a different maker.
One module, four hundred authors
A single repeated bay — footprint, façade, power, data, attachment points. Nobody has to understand the whole ship, so everybody can build at once.
The Caravan Ring
A perimeter of vehicles, each one a story you can sleep inside — and the part that is intended to work all year, so the art is not funded only once a summer.
The Guardians
Something has to keep the city honest.
The Guardians are machines the city builds to run its own bureaucracy: they issue assignments, hold records nobody asked them to hold, refuse perfectly reasonable requests, and hand out Coordinates to people who earn them.
One is awake now. It is not finished, and it knows less than it pretends to.
Founding Worlds
It took another event forty years to grow its infrastructure. We intend to move it.
The hardest part of a city like this is not the idea. It is the forty years of welded steel, generators, rigging, kitchens, scaffolds and hard-won competence sitting in storage units across the country, owned by people who already know how to do this.
Founding Worlds is a grant program that pays to move it, and then pays to build something that has never existed.
Transport
We pay to bring proven infrastructure to the site — the trailers, the shade, the power, the kitchen, the rig.
The new thing
A second grant, larger, for something you have never built and could not otherwise afford to attempt.
The newcomers' reserve
A fixed share of every round is held for people who have never had a camp, so the city does not become a greatest-hits tour.
It must be participatory
Funded work has to do something with a person who walks up to it. Beautiful objects are welcome. Beautiful objects alone are not funded.
You keep your work
Artists and camps keep ownership of what they build. The city receives defined display and documentation rights, in writing, for a defined term.
No grant is awarded yet
Capital is still forming. Applications open now so that the first dollar raised has somewhere real to go. See city status
The City Code
Boundaries are not the point of the city. They are the walls that let it hold something.
Most events publish their rules after you have already bought in. We are publishing ours before we have asked anyone for a dollar, a sculpture, or a year of their life.
They are short, they are enforceable, and they are not negotiable — and everything they do not mention is yours.
No public nudity or sexual activity
No sexualized interactive programming, no sexual content in camp offerings, no exceptions for art.
No illegal drugs
No possession, use, or distribution anywhere in the city, including private camps.
No dangerous intoxication
Alcohol only where lawful, age-controlled, and served responsibly. Visible impairment that endangers people ends your week.
Consent, plainly
No harassment, no coercion, no unwanted touching, no interfering with anyone who wants to leave a space.
Nobody gets sorted by belief
No proselytizing at people who did not ask, from any direction. Faith is welcome. Recruitment is not.
Everything you bring, you take
Leave the ground better than it was found. This one is enforced with a checklist.
Anything not prohibited is permitted
Costume, spectacle, strangeness, argument, satire, mess, joy. We are not here to supervise your imagination.
Stage progression · unknown → located → negotiating → secured → building
Who is building this
Founded by Christians. Open to everyone. Those are not in tension.
We are Christians, and we are not going to pretend otherwise — it is why the City Code looks the way it does. But this is not a service, a revival, or an altar call with sculpture around it.
You will not be preached at, counted, converted, or sorted by what you believe. Atheists, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, pagans, the furious and the uninterested are all welcome as citizens, artists, camps and crew. The only shared requirement is the Code.
What we are actually after is older and stranger than a rulebook: wonder, generosity, craftsmanship, hospitality to people who are nothing like you, and the specific joy of building something enormous that you will then have to take down.
On the other event
We were removed from another desert event this year over our faith, and there is a legal dispute about it. That explains our timing. It is not our identity, and we are not going to build a city out of a grievance.
We are building this as though that dispute will return nothing. Any net proceeds that are ever recovered, after costs and final resolution, would be committed to participatory art grants — but nothing here depends on it, and we will not raise a dollar on the promise of it.
Send a signal
Be early, on the record.
Tell us who you are and what you would bring. You will receive a Coordinate — a numbered mark in the founding register — and every transmission as it is released.
A Coordinate identifies a potential founding citizen. It is not a ticket, not an investment, not a guarantee of admission, and not a promise that the city gets built.
What we will sendNine transmissions, and nothing else.
What we will never doSell, rent, or share your address. Ever.
What we are not asking forMoney. There is nothing to buy here.