You see? Nothing out of the ordinary here. Just a fully-functional Victorian house car on wheels tooling around the Nevada desert.

Be warned: The rest of the images in the gallery link below are light on gadgetry/vehicles and heavy on WTF, sexy Mad Max hippies, fire breathing and even some bondage. [LA Weekly]

Nah, it's one of the many art installations sprinkled over the dusty playa at Burning Man 2009. This year's theme is Evolution: A Tangled Bank. Safe travels if you're a weekend burner headed to the Blackrock Desert, and don't forget the distilled white vinegar to neutralize that alkaline playa dust!

One year later (and having travelled around three continents since), that stuff is still turning up in random places like my hiking shoes. [San Francisco Chronicle]

It's Burning Man 2005!

Giz reader Dean sent in a slew of aerial photos from the event four years ago after reading our post on the retro rocket being erected in Nevada this year.

These pics are cool because, as many of you know, we dig airplanes here at Gizmodo. And Burning Man, it just so happens, has had its own fully functional airport since 1999.

That's a good thing, believe you me, because it gives us some nice bird's eye shots of this immense event:

Called the Raygun Rocket, the art piece is an interactive, 40-foot tall four-story rocket right out of the Marvin Martian/Bugs Bunny/Buck Rogers era. The whole thing, including LED "launch pad," is powered by solar panels.

A "future that never was" say the designers, and who are we to argue. It's just too bad they couldn't figure out a way to make it launch. I'm sure at Burning Man there would have been more than a few people willing to give that ride a try.

A shot of the rocket in fabrication. The designers say it's easily transportable via flat bed truck and low-earth orbit. OK, just the truck. [Raygun Gothic Rocket via CNET]

[Matador Nights]

Once again, the week before Labor day brings offbeat art lovers from around the world to Black Rock City, Nevada, for a seven-day event that immerses the senses in radical artistic self-expression. Actually, its pretty hard to describe Burning Man unless you have actually been to one, but it is certainly a far cry from the stuffy art museum atmosphere most of us are familiar with. Plus, there are enough flaming gadgets to keep any nerd entertained. Hit the jump to see some of the unique projects on display this year.

Other projects to look out for:

• I Heart Lamp by Blue Lake Iron Works by Joel 'Fatboy' Brown, Mark 'F St' Whitman, Spike Foster, Tisha 'Mortisha' Sloan: "I Heart Lamp is a super-size sculpture of grandma's living room floor lamp. More than 30 feet tall, the lamp sits on the playa as a reminder of the cushy living rooms that are the American Dream for the mainstream, but with a twist to fit other dreams. Made from a scavenged Douglas Fir pole and recycled box pipe and lumber, this lamp, besides being surrealistically large, does not contain an electric light bulb. This lamp is lit by a propane fire cannon that turns on the same way the light would… when someone pulls the chain hanging from under the lampshade almost 20 feet in the air." (It may also be an homage to the movie Anchorman. I hated the movie, but anything Steve Carell says is OK in my book.)

• PlaySoundGround by Sasha Leitman and Michael St. Clair: "PlaySoundGround is an adult-sized playground that is also a musical instrument. It consists of three large pieces: a merry-go-round, a slide, and a teeter-totter. These pieces are equipped with sensors that convert the motion of play into music. The installation provides an arena for chaotic improvisations, synesthetic experiences and pointless fun."

• SOL by Alex Nolan and Justin Grant: "SOL is a groundbreaking piece of kinetic art, pushing the limits of sound, vision and motion in art. The sculpture is a nearly 25' tall robot, sensing the location and motion of nearby observers to track them with a highly directional sound system. The work is powered by an array of solar panels, drawing energy the sun to fuel its sensory output."

• Tetrion by Jim Abrams: "The Tetrion is a tremendous representation of the pieces from the original Tetris game."

[Burning Man Image of 2008 Burning Man designed by Rod Garrett and Larry Harvey]

Apparently it was designed to poke fun at the US obsession with firearms, and it's supposed to tie in with Burning Man's fascination with fire and "radical self expression.”

Whatever: launching a jet of luminous flames ten feet to incinerate a target sounds waaaay more fun than firing a BB-gun on your more "normal" fairground show. You agree, guys, don't you?... or am I just a pyromaniac? [Laughing Squid]
Photo credit: Scott Ashkenaz.

So UV-filtering glass was added to block the potentially harmful rays—though evidently this thing is still plenty bright enough to burn skin, as it has Ottow's on at least one occasion. In real world application, the flashlight can illuminate a cloud that's four miles in the air, or scare the neighbors by lighting up their house from the same distance.

One things for sure: when the vampires finally come out of hiding (a few hundred years after the robot apocalypse) we're calling this guy.

And then we're gonna be all like, "I see your Schwartz is as big as mine." (Sorry, we held that joke back until our arms were trembling.) [popsci]

Burning Man: Musical Mac Laptops in Home-Built Bio-Hazard Boxes [Create Digital Music]

Burning Man Interactive Music Preview [ Create Digital Music ]