Art cars, Tinytropolis and spinning till you get sick

Here’s a hodgepodge of images from Tuesday – art so thick you could barely see the playa – Black Rock City’s population was 51,000-plus this year, and it showed.

There were brilliant art cars, and an excellent installation called Tinytropolis, which consisted of internally-lit dioramas that 100 artists had stuffed into otherwise identical, solar-powered cardboard boxes.

This gorgeous globe of woven, welded steel spun just 50 yards away from our site, which made it a) easy to find at night and b) somewhat sickening. Biomass (my son’s playa name as of this year) got physically ill looking at it and had to be led away clutching my arm, while Hitgirl (yes, my daughter’s playa name, and more accurate than you would guess) spun herself happily around it like a glittery, giggling moon.

Extra bonus – here’s a video of my favorite art car at the entire event, the Maria Del Camino. Though I didn’t get to witness it, the car apparently lifts its body up to reveal the image of the False Maria robot from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, rendered in tens of thousands of holes drilled into her body: