After a couple of very harrowing years, BYTE is ready to roll back to playa, literally! 

That’s right, this year we’ll be rolling out to Burning Man in our very first art car, “Petabyte”!

Consisting of over a million fiber optics and contributions from some of our brilliantly talented friends, Petabyte will be our most collaborative, challenging and extraordinary expression of light, sound and tactility yet! 

The work will be immense and the budget expensive but we’re hoping that, with a little help from our friends, family and community, we’ll be able to hit, at the very least, our base target budget to bring you our most ambitious and whimsical project yet! 

Please, help us build the next iteration of BYTE and our loving community by grabbin’ some of the sweet swag we put all our hearts into creating for you!

Now let’s take a look at what we’re going to need to create this furry lovable beast!

Every house needs a solid foundation, just like every mutant vehicle needs a fun unique vehicle to build on so take a look at that beaut below! The good news is, we’ve already purchased her for a cool $11k in the great garden state of New Jersey!

However, since our super talented metal artists are all the way cross country in Oakland CA, we had to take two weeks to drive her all the way there from the East Coast! Although we had an absolute blast, witnessed the beauty of middle America and met some of the most wonderful people along the way, the trip didn’t come without its challenges and costs.

Through scary tire blow outs, starter and engine failures and angry alien hieroglyphic instrument gauges yelling at us, we dropped another $5k.

All told, our foundation has already cost us a total of $16k.

From tons of hulking steel box tube to carefully CNC’d aluminum, this is one of the most expensive facets of creating our entire vision. There are 5 major aspects to this phase of construction.

1. Circuit Board Railings  Start: 3/1   Finish: 5/15

We don’t believe in utility without aesthetics which is why we spent a good amount of time and energy creating these intricate circuit board designed railings that will also light up to the deep house beats in the dusty playa nights! 

2. Top Deck  Start: 6/6   Finish: 7/1

While the bus is super cool, it only has one level and what’s an art car if the DJ’s not on top, rockin’ out to their dancing fans below? 

This requires some major structural welding with a lot of costly materials. We will be constructing as much as possible in Aluminum to save on weight, while the rest of the framing and structure will be built in steel box tubing. 

3. Chip DJ Booth  Start: 7/1  Finish: 8/18

An art car wouldn’t be complete without a DJ booth and BYTE wouldn’t be complete without Chip. Our iconic Chip will double as a DJ booth and dance platform for those brave enough to move their feet 16ft in the air! 

Chip will consist of a laser cut circuit board pattern on its sides under lit by colorful dancing lights, laser beam eyeballs and an organic circuit pattern sculpture growing from its top.

Organic Circuit Sculpt  Start 7/1  Finish: 8/18

BYTE’s original concept represented the liberation of truly sentient Ai and we wanted that to be represented in our new furiend. We decided to capture that transition from robot to sentient being  by taking the rigidity of a typical circuit board pattern and morphing it into organic veins in this sculpture that will also serve as support for vibing dancers.

This will be sculpted by our super talented friend, Kevin Byall.

Hex Panel Fiber Optics Grid  Start: 6/15  Finish: 6/22

The stand out feature of Peta, millions of fiber optics to make, what we’ve named, “Furiber Optic Fur”, will be attached via 3 1/2ft wide diffused polycarbonate hex panels hung from a welded grid.

Start: 4/1   Finish: 6/1

If you’ve ever had the chance to cuddle with our furry friends at past events, you know that their giant fur coats are what makes BYTE so damn lovable and cuddly! While the interior of the bus will still be enveloped in bright fluffy fur, the exterior, instead, will be completely covered with fiber optics!

Our patent pending pending Furiber Optics® fur will consist of thousands of bundles of side glow pmma fiber optics plugged into diffused polycarbonate hex panels! These bundles will be created and shipped from our friends in China so we can just plug and play!

Imagine running your psychedelic hands through this vibrant wall of color!

We’ll be taking bundles of side glowing fiber optic strands and plugging them into the wall of diffused polycarbonate hex panels.

Each panel will hold up to 60 of these fiber optic bundles!

Each 3 1/2ft hex panel will have dozens of port holes to plug the thousands of Furiber Optic bundles into.  Powerful LED diodes will emit colorful displays of animation from behind the panels, lighting up each panel and fiber bundle like fireworks! 

We will be attaching these panels, with special clips, to the steel grid that will be fabricated to the sides of the bus. 

It will it be a cosmic show of light, sound and touch never been done before (as far as we know). 

Start: 5/1   Finish: 6/1

BYTE’s iconic bulbous mirror eyes will also be getting a little bit of a makeover.

Designed by our super talented friend, Steve Galle, these will be the biggest and most psychedelic eyeballs we’ve created for BYTE yet!

With infinity mirrored, geodesic domes, these 3 1/2 ft diameter eyes will blast lasers like they’re hodling dozens of Bitcoin!

We initially looked into actually purchasing a custom sound system for this year’s iteration but, unfortunately, it’s going to be far too expensive on top of all the other huge expenses.

This is why we’ve pivoted to renting a sound system from some really reputable Burner companies. This will give us a better chance at having amazing sound in those deep playa nights. 

This will be a Funktion One setup and next year we will be revisiting the idea of permanently installing our own custom system for the next iteration of Petabyte.

Risks & Challenges

Of course, with projects this immense there will always be bumps in the playa. And, while you can’t anticipate all them, we have taken great strides to try and mitigate as many obstacles as we can.

• Money

This is going to take an enormous amount of clams to create and, with inflation, WWlll and Bitcoin volatility, we know we may very well fall short of our much needed budget.  This is why we have broken up the project into 4 phases.

The first phase is a bare bones version of our complete vision. While Phase 1 is still magnificently expensive, it is the most stripped down version we would be able to get away with while still calling this an art car and a phase well within our reach with a little help.

The rest of the phases will depend on how successful our fundraising and investment searches go. The subsequent phases will build off of phase 1:

• Phase 1: Top deck, Circuit Railings, Fiber Optics, Eyeballs
• Phase 2: Phase 1 + Chip DJ booth on top
• Phase 3: Phase 2 + Funktion One Sound system
• Phase 4: Phase 3 + A Magical furry cuddle room inside

• Burning Man Application

Because giant moveable art can be exponentially more dangerous, Mutant Vehicles at Burning Man are treated a bit differently from static art installations. 

This means that Art cars need to be approved by Burning Man to be able to strut its stuff down deep playa safely.

It is possible, though unlikely, that we may not be able to get approved by Burning Man for myriad reasons, which would be tremendously disappointing. However, if, for whatever reason we’re unable to get the Burning Man DMV to approve our vision, we still plan to bring Peta for in camp parties! Though not ideal, we will still be able to rock out at camp every night!

Other Ways You Can Help

We realize this project is massive and that we’re asking a lot of our friends and family but there are so many ways to help that don’t include spending money you may not have. 

Spread the word on social media and don’t forget to tag us – @CampBYTEthis. Let people know all about what we’re doing or just come show us some love at one of the many fests we’ll be attending this spring! Head over to www.thebyteproject.com for more info!

Regardless of your contribution, whether it be bitcoin or online love, we thank you with every fiber optic of our being and appreciate your magic!

Heaps of love and good vibes, 

BYTE