BYTE is an 80-person Burning Man camp, and for the 2024 build I was its Art Director, after contributing in 2023. If Gratitude Grove taught me to build one large installation, BYTE taught me to direct five of them at once, with a small city's worth of people and a budget that had to hold.
The scope
Across the camp we designed and executed five large-scale installations: 15-foot platforms, a 30,000-watt mobile sound stage, a pyramid lounge, and more. Each one is its own engineering and design problem. Together they're a coordination problem. My job was to hold the creative vision across all of it while making sure the pieces actually got built, placed, and powered, in a place with no infrastructure and no forgiveness.
The real work
Art direction at that scale is mostly operations wearing a creative hat. I coordinated budgets, timelines, build crews, and site placement, the deeply unglamorous scaffolding that decides whether a vision survives contact with the desert. Eighty people, five builds, one week, zero do-overs.
Why it's in the portfolio
BYTE is the clearest evidence of something I believe about myself: I can hold a creative vision and the operational reality of delivering it in the same head, at the same time, for a large group of people. That's the exact skill I bring to a business: the taste to know what should exist, and the operational grip to make sure it actually does. The desert is just a more honest client.
By the numbers
- 80-person camp, Art Director (2024)
- 5 large-scale installations
- 30,000-watt mobile sound stage
