Lumerian Tribe Precompression Party
Layton, Utah
August 8th, 2004
by Richard Thomson
The groups that attend the Burning Man festival are called "Tribes", and the Lumerian tribe is a local Utah group of burners. The Lumerians recently had a "precompression" party, serving as a kick off event for the attending of Burning Man 2004.
The party was a simple affair held in a private home with a small number of guests. Since I upgraded my demoshow gear to a laptop and a portable projector, I'm now able to quickly setup a demoshow in about 15 minutes. With the scripting that I've done, I can build a setlist before going to an event and have the whole setup running in a short period of time. After I arrived at the host's house, I told them I had brought all the gear for a projection show and that I could setup somewhere inside or outside their house. They had setup some tiki torches outside on their back patio and I setup my projection screen out on their patio with my projector and laptop on their picnic table.
I have been building setlists of demos based on musical style for "disco", "jazz" and "rock" musical styles. The precompression party was my first chance to show off the disco setlist. I always include some demos related to Pilgrimage in any demoshow that I put together to help boost the party.
One small stumbling block in my setlist scripting was with the sexadelic and pornographic demos, both of which don't terminate by themselves but must be manually terminated. My script system incorporates the ability to terminate the setlist or skip to the next demo in the setlist, but I didn't yet have a mechanism for terminating a demo after a certain amount of time. So while my script system automated most of the setlist, I still had to manually intervene for a few demos.
As is always the case when I show demos, people were quite interested. Although I have shown demos at various Burning Man related events over the past two years, there are a considerable number of people in the Utah Burning Man community that have not yet had a chance to see demos in action. Once they see them, they always like them!
After going through the scripted setlist there was still an interest in seeing more demos, so I ran a few demos by hand:
This was a nice little event for me and the first time I had tried to do an "impromptu" demoshow setup using my new portable gear. It worked out well! Its nice to know that with a few items packed into my car I can do a demoshow at anyone's party.