Burning Man - 2009
Evolution
" It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection... There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers... and that, while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been and are being evolved."
– Charles Darwin, – The Origin of Species
Nature never made a plan, nor does it seem to copy very well. No living thing is ever quite the same as others of its kind. Charles Darwin called this Natural Variation. There is a kind of subtle chaos, a supple element of chance and change, residing at the core of living things. We've learned that DNA, the code that programs life, is subject to continual mutation. This enables generations to evolve within a changing world. This year's art theme contemplates the power and the meaning of the process we call evolution.
City Map - PolyParadise location marked