Long Feng · Black Rock City · 2026
The Stage
Posted: 29/07/2026
Each week, the Long Feng team gathers to share progress, coordinate what's next, and flag where help is needed. Nature works like a stage: everything already happens on it, none of it scripted, none of it forced. What can be built is the stage itself, the structures and the operation that let good things happen.
That's what we're doing, and each meeting is shared publicly, as this article, so anyone can follow the work and join it. This one covers the builds coming to Black Rock City this year: the light forest the camp sleeps under, the master tree at its center, the rebuilt Long Feng stage, and the new generation of mushroom robots. It opened with the principle the whole project runs on.
Let the Beauty Lead
It's one of our main principles, and it works as a check inside every decision: what is leading it, beauty or fear? Choices made from fear force things into place and settle for less. Choices led by beauty draw the right people, build trust between them, and show the next step on their own.
It sounds soft. At the scale of a volunteer-built, self-organizing project, it works like an infrastructure.
Beauty is how a few hundred people who were never assigned anything still end up building the same thing.
The Light Tree Forest
A forest of light.
The structure the camp sleeps under, rebuilt as a forest of light poles. Last year's shelter was challenged by the weather; this year's is properly engineered: built to stand, and built to be looked at. The team is already in Nevada working on it.
Two goals shape it. It should feel rooted, as if it grew out of the desert. And the build itself should be fun, because the camp's theory is that people learn fastest when the work is.
The Master Tree
Nature and structure, one form.
At the center of the forest stands the Master Tree: an organic trunk wrapped in laser-cut panels and lit from inside, so it glows like a lantern under a canopy about fifteen feet across, hung with warm amber lamps.
It reads as a grown tree and a built object at once. That's the entire idea: not nature with technology bolted on, not technology dressed as nature.
The Long Feng Stage
We're also rebuilding the Long Feng Stage this year, and it's changing in almost every way: a new layout, more fire on both sides, a new platform so more dancers and performers fit on it, more light and sound running through the whole structure. The dragon stays at the center. Last year the stage was built around the art car; this year it stands in front of it, and that freed the design to go much further.
What it looks like is a secret until the burn. We want you to meet it the moment you come around the corner at 10 & K.
The Mushroom Robots
Trained for love, not engagement.
The Mushroom Robots return rebuilt: sturdier, longer-lived, and far more capable. Each runs on Pearl, the AI trained for love rather than engagement, and holds a relationship over time: it recognizes you and remembers you, not a series of prompts.
And the long arc: these companions grow up alongside children, the way Una is now, learning the people they live with over years, not evenings.
The stage is set.
10 & K · Black Rock City · 2026
This is a summary of our Long Feng camp meeting.