Each year, Burning Man transforms Nevada's Black Rock Desert into a temporary city where large-scale installations define both the landscape and the collective experience. Serving as a platform for experimental design, the event brings together artists, architects, and interdisciplinary teams to create works that blur the boundaries between sculpture and architecture. These temporary structures often function as gathering spaces, landmarks, or immersive environments, embodying the festival's guiding principle of impermanence.
The 2025 edition introduced projects that examined themes of ecology, memory, and connectivity while responding to the challenges of building in the desert. Ranging from intimate interactive pieces to monumental landmarks, the installations encouraged reflection, participation, and community engagement before disappearing at the close of the event.
Read on to discover fifteen installations presented at Burning Man 2025.
Related Article
An Interconnected Mushroom Grove and a Shelter from the Desert Sun: 8 Installations at Burning Man 2024Temple of the Deep
Designed by Miguel Arraiz, the 2025 Burning Man Temple, titled Temple of the Deep, draws inspiration from the natural formations of the Black Rock Desert. The Temple combines organic, cave-like forms with a structured geometric framework influenced by Baroque architecture, guiding movement and perspective within the space. Its design, visually represented as a fractured black rock, symbolizes loss and recovery, embracing imperfections in a manner reminiscent of the Japanese art of kintsugi.
The World Fair of Unity
Mark Kidnetick Rivera
The 2025 Man Pavilion, titled The World Fair of Unity and designed by Mark Kidnetick Rivera, combined Gothic Revival aesthetics with contemporary digital design to create a striking centerpiece for Black Rock City. Drawing inspiration from 19th-century world fairs and industrial architecture, the pavilion functions as a hub for collaboration, performance, and artistic exchange. Its soaring arches and dual ramps encircling the base of the effigy aim to encourage movement and interaction, inviting participants to explore, create, and connect.
An Event Horizon
Andrey Sledkov
An Event Horizon installation combines art and technology to explore the interconnectedness of things and the passage of time. Metallic structures rise into a swirling vortex, reminiscent of a collapsing star or event horizon, while embedded lighting creates a sense of movement and depth. Inspired by cosmic forces, the work explores humanity's relationship to the unknown and the future, providing visitors with a contemplative environment to consider transformation, change, and the unseen forces that shape perception and experience.
VERTICA
Clayton Blake
VERTICA is a monumental, inhabitable stainless steel sculpture that examines themes of progress, ambition, and societal risk. Its sharply triangular form, inspired by Brutalist architecture, uses three-point perspective to create the illusion of infinite height. Visitors enter through an integrated door to experience a mirrored interior, where reflections and an internal ladder emphasize verticality and human engagement with space. Ascending windows and programmable lighting enhance the perception of scale, while exterior reflections engage passersby and integrate the environment into the experience.
The Moonlight Library
The Moonlight Collective
The Moonlight Library rises alone in the deep playa as the evocative remains of a cosmic library, partially ruined yet retaining one intact corner. Its towering bookshelves, filled with weathered volumes, suggest the persistence of stories even as the structure itself deteriorates. The installation engages with themes of connection, resilience, and shared knowledge. Positioned within the vastness of the desert, the Moonlight Library aims to reflect on how stories endure beyond physical or social boundaries, emphasizing unity and the enduring significance of human expression.
Ad Astra
Gabriel Sobin
This large-scale installation comprises six monumental sculptures arranged in a circular formation, reminiscent of a modern Stonehenge or sacred gathering space. Each piece combines artificial stone with polished stainless steel, merging textured, prehistoric surfaces with sleek, reflective finishes. The forms juxtapose past and future, symbolizing the intersection of history, present experience, and forward-looking imagination. The circular arrangement aims to encourage interaction and contemplation, offering visitors a space to experience human connection and reflection within a composed architectural and sculptural framework.
The Point of Unity
Mykola Kabluka
The Point of Unity, created by Ukrainian artist and lighting designer Mykola Kabluka, integrates modern technology, artistic vision, and philosophical inquiry to explore themes of presence and wholeness. Visitors engage directly with the work, which uses light, sound, and tactile elements to transform intangible concepts into a shared spatial experience. Following its premiere in the Nevada desert, The Point of Unity is scheduled to travel to Ukraine, where a location is being selected to reflect the installation's meaning. The work will be accessible to the public, offering a continued opportunity for engagement and reflection beyond the festival setting.
Black Cloud
Ukrainians ART Group
Black Cloud is a large-scale installation that materializes the invisible challenges and uncertainties of contemporary life. Its form represents threats, from global crises to personal obstacles, making the unseen tangible within the desert landscape. By giving these perils a physical presence, the work encourages reflection and dialogue on resilience and adaptation. Beyond its cautionary symbolism, the installation also functions as a communal space, where visitors can gather, engage, and consider collective strategies for navigating uncertainty. Positioned in the open playa, Black Cloud combines conceptual depth with spatial experience, inviting participants to confront instability while exploring shared hope and connection.
DROP
Auli Uiboupin
DROP is a 5.2-meter-tall habitable sculpture shaped like an oversized drop of breastmilk, built from a welded metal frame and woven with nearly four kilometers of textile waste. Conceived as a continuation of Microplastic Milk Rivers (2024), the structure explores the interconnections between purity, nourishment, and contamination. Visitors can enter into a mirrored interior that creates an immersive, womb-like space used for small workshops and collective exchanges. Inside, almost 100 meters of LED strips run through the sculpture like illuminated veins, symbolizing the flow of energy and the presence of microplastics in natural systems. The installation reflects environmental concerns through its reuse of discarded textiles, many of which are synthetic, and its commentary on pollution as a collective act. Each textile element was sewn by individuals with disabilities from rural Estonia, offering paid creative work in a context where social benefits are limited.
Apotheneum
Anthony Fieldman
Apotheneum, designed by DIALOG partner Anthony Fieldman in collaboration with a team of engineers and artists led by Mark Slee, is a 30-foot illuminated cylinder housed within a 40-foot cubic frame. The installation combines 26,000 LEDs, a haptic floor powered by 96 servo motors, and an immersive sound system to create a multisensory environment. Composed of two nested chambers made of double-sided LED nets, the structure includes a cubic antechamber surrounding a cylindrical "inner sanctum" open to the sky. Inside, a pressure-sensitive platform allows visitors to experience the piece through light, sound, and tactile feedback. Described as a "slow" space, Apotheneum encourages pause and reflection, functioning as both an architectural instrument and a gathering space that remained active throughout the festival's desert storms.
Staircase to Exordium
Joe Lilley
Staircase to Exordium is a large-scale installation composed of interlocking wooden elements arranged according to three design parameters: the number of arrays around a circle, the percentage of reduction per layer, and the thickness of the material. The resulting spiraling form creates a continuous, open structure that blends geometric precision with organic flow. Designed as a space for dialogue and reflection, the installation invites visitors to move through its ascending layers while remaining receptive to new perspectives. As light shifts throughout the day, the structure casts intricate shadows that emphasize its sense of movement and transformation.
(A)MAZE
Cutler Patierno
A(MAZE) is a large-scale interactive installation designed and built by Brooklyn-based architect Cutler Patierno. Conceived as a monolithic labyrinth rising from the desert floor, it invites visitors to enter a sequence of shimmering, cavernous corridors that obscure any direct view of the surrounding landscape. The spatial configuration is intended to disorient and isolate participants from external stimuli, encouraging introspection and calm. From sunset to sunrise, synchronized light sequences animate the fabric surfaces, transforming the interior into a meditative environment. Through its immersive design, A(MAZE) explores the relationship between orientation, perception, and reflection, offering a space where losing one's bearings becomes a deliberate and contemplative act.
Oneirotica
Kirsten Berg
Oneirotica is an iridescent, mirrored-steel installation shaped as a large-scale orchid with faceted, reflective petals that form a spatial structure reminiscent of an altar. Its geometry combines organic and stellar references, creating an immersive environment that interacts with light and its surroundings through reflection and refraction. The installation explores the convergence of natural and cosmic forms, translating the organic structure of an orchid and the radiating geometry of a star into an architectural framework. Conceived as a space of "cross-pollination," Oneirotica materializes the intersection of two conceptual forces, dream (Oneiros) and creative impulse (Eros), to evoke imagination as a generative and spatial experience.
Ocean of Tears
Lukas Mark and Jettinae VonJaeger
Ocean of Tears is an interactive kinetic installation composed of a mechanical wave system activated by human motion. Participants operate a hand crank that generates continuous oscillations across a sculptural surface, allowing them to observe how their movements create waves that travel back and forth in an endless cycle. The work expands upon the earlier Tear Drop installation presented in 2023, evolving the concept from a single drop generating ripples to a dynamic oceanic field. Through its mechanical and spatial design, Ocean of Tears explores the relationship between individual action and collective consequence, illustrating cause and effect as a perpetual and interconnected process.
Thread
Sam Brocchini
Thread is a 50-foot-long interactive light sculpture designed as an immersive environment exploring human connection through tactile engagement and illumination. The installation responds to touch, activating light patterns that reveal hidden visual and spatial effects, encouraging participants to interact and connect with one another through the artwork. Its elongated, continuous form symbolizes the persistence of human bonds and the dynamic nature of relationships, capturing the tension and fluidity between distance and closeness. Through its sensory and responsive design, Thread translates the abstract idea of emotional connection into a shared architectural and experiential space.
