Last night, I learned that Black Rock City isn't going to be built in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I'm grateful the Burning Man organization made that choice. It was the right thing to do in this time.

I had been waiting to announce that my friends and I had gotten a Burning Man Arts Honorarium until I knew what was going to happen. But now that I know the event isn't taking place, I feel much more comfortable showing off our plans!

Based on our previous quantum multiverse projects, we were going to build a working quantum physics apparatus in the middle of the Nevada desert. The idea was to use it to split the Multiverse and sends Burners spiraling along separate parallel realities. After they got the results of the experiment one door would open to a series of chambers that would let them explore what it looks like to crawl inside the internal workings of the Multiverse itself.

We figured our art piece would solve the only bad thing about Burning Man—that there's just too much to do—by splitting the Multiverse so everyone can do all the things they want to do. It sounded like a fun idea, and honestly, there's really no better place in the world to debut a scifi-philosophy-puzzle art installation than at Burning Man. Burners love to play dice with the universe. We made this video to explain what we doing for our grant.

But sadly, like so many things right now, this project will have to wait for a bit. We're hopeful that our Honorarium grant will carry over to 2021, and we can make our project all the more fantastic for next year. And I'd be excited if there'd be some kind of virtual burn that we can participate in this year. I could imagine turning our CAD model into an online game. We'll have to see how this year shapes up.