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James Gwertman has always been a “tinker.” He has fond memories of selling AM radio kits with his father. As a child, he dreamed of getting into Visual FX. He was a stage producer and lighting designer in college.
But the Seattle-area tech veteran has also worked on things that aren’t necessarily physical, building a career around video games, investing in his own game studios and gaming space.
Gwertzman co-founded Sprout Games, which was acquired by Popcorn Games in 2005, and co-founded PlayFab, a game infrastructure service that was acquired by Microsoft in 2018. In the year Become a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm focusing on games.
With a new side project, the light is literally shining on Gwertzman, a longtime interest outside of software.
“I’ve spent my entire career at the intersection of art and technology,” he said. “This project was the most fun I’ve had in a long time, getting my hands dirty, designing and building all the hardware.”
The project is “The Prairie of Possibilities,” a light show and immersive storytelling experience with swaying fiber optic “grasses” and more that Guertman and his team dreamed up three years ago and showcased at the recently concluded Burning Man festival.
‘I want to do that’
In dusty Black Rock City, Nev., Goetzman really got his hands dirty. But the inspiration for “Prairie” was sparked years ago.
Gwertzman first attended Burning Man in 1997 and returned in 2015 after a long absence. In 2017, inspired by the light installation called “Tree of Tenere”, a climbing tree with 25,000 LED leaves.
“I remember thinking, I want to do that. I want to come back,’” Gwertzman said.
Another lighting project, “Sensorio,” inspired Gwertzman in 2020, and he hopes to find something for Burning Man that year. He pitched his idea to a group of Microsoft developers at work and held meetings with interested parties. But COVID-19 was taking hold and the festival, like many other events, was eventually cancelled.
But the seed was planted, Gwertzman said, and a core group of art and technology enthusiasts organized, eventually named The Moonlight Collective. They are: Gwertzman as the main visionary; Experience designer and creator Casey Martin as creative director; Engineer, software architect and program manager Paul McDaniel as technical director; and game designer and sound engineer Ed Allard as lead audio experience.
When Burning Man was canceled again in 2021, the band took the opportunity to avoid writing calls for emphasis. Last fall, they set up Prairie on Mercer Island near Seattle to test things out in public. They used a software program called LX Studio to build the lighting controls, and 250 fiber optic “grasses” were manufactured in China.
Over three November days at Mercedale Park, Gwertzman’s vision of a “prairie” that came to life as a field of nearly 1,500 glistening grasses matched Allard’s musical soundscape. (See video above.)
After testing the installation on a scale and receiving positive feedback from visitors, the team is ready to plan for Burning Man in 2022.
“Casey gets a lot of credit for pushing us to think more like a Disney ideal, to create more interaction for the viewer than realistic lighting,” says Gwertzman.
Those interactions include several “portals,” as well as their own light and sound displays, that visitors can walk through as a sort of entrance and exit between the real world and an alternate universe. Telephone booths were also employed to collect transcripts of visitor stories. People can call a phone number – still active at 844-428-0110 – to be directed to share personal stories related to four emotions: fear, sadness, happiness, anger.
“Hello, Starborn Human,” said a voice on the other end of the line, identifying himself as The Lawman. “You must have questions about who and what I am… I exist to collect stories that involve the human condition and are immortal.
The size of the experience has been doubled to 420 light bases and it is planned to place it in the desert based on a precise mathematical algorithm – this time it was inspired by patterns in nature, explained in a YouTube video about the head of a sunflower.
To pre-design and model the installation, Gwertzman and his team turned to Unity, the most popular software package for game design.
“All of us, me and Ed and everyone else involved in the games, know the unity inside and out,” Goetzman said. We were able to use it to simulate the entire installation and walk around in virtual reality to determine what we were looking for.
‘Our project was very reflective.’
To set up the event in the desert, Gwertzman and a team arrived a week before Burns and began planting flags on the playa, or dry lake bed, where the festival would take place. They deliberately chose a place away from other bright lights and the music of Burnt Man.
They dug holes to bury the miles of cable and wire needed to connect everything in the 250-foot-wide space — AC power to the portal, Ethernet for networking, speaker wire, and wires for controlling the lights themselves.
“What I’ve learned about this project is that it’s 90% logistics, 10% art,” Gwertzman said. “When it comes to bringing all the materials to the desert and assembling the team and doing the construction, 90% of it is just logistics and planning. The actual art is in some ways a minority,” he said.
From the first night to the end of the event, it was a success for those who flipped the switch and built the “Opportunity Prairie Offibility” and roamed the glittering lawns, portals, phone booths and containers. To resemble a research facility for scientists studying otherworldly phenomena.
When they returned in the morning to shut down the power plant, Gwertzman’s team often found several people lying on pillows in the middle of the installation listening to music and the voices of hundreds of recorded storytellers.
“One of the reasons we got so much praise for this project is that combustion can be a very powerful form of technology,” Gwertzman said. “And our project was very contemplative, ambient music. People tell us they come back night after night because it’s so refreshing and so beautiful.”
After tearing down the installation, packing up the playa and putting it back together (Burning Man, of course), Guertman is left to wonder what’s next for “Prairie.”
He is considering taking it on the road to provide power at various locations. For example, he likes to see what everything looks like in the snow. But if a professional collector comes along and wants to find the property somewhere, Gwertzman said he’ll definitely take the call.
Guerzman, who describes his passion project as the perfect fusion of art and technology, says he’s grateful for the experience.
“It was honestly one of the most creative things I’ve ever done.”
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