Leo Villareal. Nights in the Desert

On his first trip to Burning Man in 1994, Leo Villareal found himself profoundly lost in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert—a disorienting landscape without roads or landmarks. In 1997, he went back to that desert prepared with an idea to help him get back to camp. For what would become his first light sculpture—a purely utilitarian device—the artist programmed a grid structure of sixteen strobe lights with a microcontroller to pulse off and on. In the desert, the lights could be seen from miles away.¹ Across this span of space, Villareal had the sense that the lights were “trying to communicate, to say something.”² Their pulsating sequence transmitted an abstract message and, like many of the artist’s awe-inspiring light works, effected a kind of “psychedelic perceptual experience.”³