Burning Man selected the Portal of Collective Imagination as an official 2026 Honorarium project. This August, a 16-foot arch of light, voice, and shared wonder rises from the Black Rock Desert — and we need your help to build it.

The Portal of Collective Imagination is a large-scale interactive artwork by Kim Carson: a circular threshold built on prefab truss, clad in wood, and animated by 16 screens integrated into the structure itself. By day, it stands in open playa as a monumental geometric presence. By night, it becomes something else entirely.

Sound and human presence feed a local AI system running entirely on edge hardware — no internet, no cloud, no data leaving the desert. The Portal translates those inputs into imagery and moves across the screens in real time, creating a shared memory field shaped by everyone who passes through it. Sometimes the displays act like fragments. Sometimes they cohere into one image across the whole structure. The result is an artwork that we create in community.

This is a project about what technology can become when it is designed for wonder instead of extraction. It is also a real build, with real material demands. The Portal is being engineered with RBHU as the structural partner and built at Shulgin Farm in the Bay Area before heading to Black Rock City.

The Burning Man Honorarium grant covers $18,000. We secured an additional $17,000 through donations and grants and are raising $22,000 publicly through Crowdfundr to close the remaining gap.

Your contribution helps pay for:

• Prefab truss and structural hardware

• 16 integrated display surfaces

• Edge AI hardware, sensing, and control systems

• Sound, power, and lighting infrastructure

• Build materials and fabrication

• Transport to and from Black Rock City

• Engineering, installation, and paid crew support

The Portal is designed for life beyond Burning Man. Its modular truss structure allows it to be disassembled, transported, and rebuilt for future exhibitions, festivals, and public installations. The people who fund this campaign are helping launch the first chapter of that life.

If you believe immersive public art should exist in the world — and that technology can still be intimate, poetic, and human — we invite you to help build it.