Enormous Art Installation ‘Loop’ Is Headed to Burning Man

Picture, if you will, a giant hamster wheel. (For humans, not giant hamsters.) Then add the magic of a mechanical music box, the kind with the spinning ballerina. Give it a lit-up but timeless, Stargate sort of vibe. Then put it in the middle of a desert. Behold “Loop.”

The interactive kinetic sonic sculpture, which will make noise when someone walks in it, is the brainchild of Stowe artists Dan Rabinovitch and Claire de Luxe. They are currently busy engineering, welding and assembling the project with volunteers in the parking lot of CHC Vans in South Burlington. Once it’s finished and tested, they’ll take it apart, carefully pack it into a 24-foot box truck and bring it on the road to Burning Man 2025, a mass gathering of creatives that takes place in August in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.

Rabinovitch, a graphic designer with a background in audio engineering, attended Burning Man for six or seven years starting in 1999 and helped other artists build a few sculptures. “Back then,” he said, “I told myself, If I go back, I want to build something cool and crazy and big.“

Soon after moving to Vermont from New York in 2020, Rabinovitch fractured his leg. That, combined with the pandemic, gave him downtime to design the project and apply for partial funding through Burning Man Arts. Out of 500 applications, “Loop” was one of about 70 proposals that received the 2020 grant, but that year’s event was canceled. Five years and a successful Kickstarter campaign later, “Loop” is finally up and running. Well, almost.

The 30-by-20-by-22-foot structure, which Rabinovitch designed using open-source software, includes the steel wheel, about 10.5 feet in diameter, which will roll on a series of upside-down casters mounted to steel frames. There are also four towers and two large archways to stabilize things, a circular plinth of stairs, an archway of two curving ladders, and a suspended conveyor belt with plugs that will trigger custom musical instruments, which can be swapped out on occasion. The whole sculpture will be covered in solar-powered LEDs.

Building the thing has meant a lot of creative problem solving on the fly, Rabinovitch said, “because there’s no gravity in the computer.”

Luckily, the creators have had help that is very much in line with Burning Man’s values of generosity and communal activity. Around 15 volunteers have pitched in with construction. Mike Pezzulo, the project’s lighting designer, works for CHC Vans and secured the parking lot as a workspace. Rabinovitch made many of the parts using equipment at Generator Makerspace in Burlington, where he’s a member. “They’ve been hugely supportive and really want to see it succeed,” he said.

The artists won’t know exactly how the machine is used until they see it in action at Burning Man, where they anticipate some of the festival’s 80,000 attendees will not only walk on the wheel to make music but run, climb the outside or invent impromptu performances. Because they created a sturdy enough structure to withstand those activities and the desert’s harsh conditions, the sculpture will be suitable for most any environment afterward. The artists hope to bring “Loop” to events in Vermont, though they haven’t yet made specific plans.

It’s a hefty undertaking, necessarily so for the vast Nevada desert. “To make something feel big out there, it has to be absolutely enormous,” de Luxe said. “It enables you to think about art and scale, and what’s possible, in a totally different way.”

This article appears in Jul 30 – Aug 5, 2025.

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