Burning Man art car with $250,000 sound system spotted in Oakland

It’s not a turtle. It’s not a bug. But it’s not a standard car, either.

On Oct. 12, a user of X, formerly known as Twitter, stopped his bike ride to post a photo of a truck-sized green van with bug wings and a jet engine. 

To figure out the story behind the strange sighting, SFGATE tracked down the mysterious sculpture and spoke with one of its creators.

The vehicle is an art car called “Project: Empire.” It was built over the span of eight years, costing an estimated $600,000 from start to finish, excluding labor costs and overhead. The 25-person construction team included two full-time metal fabricators, sound designers, an automotive painter, electrical engineers, a user interface designer and a revolving cast of high schoolers. 

Spearheading the project was the husband-wife team of Jon Sarriugarte and Kyrsten Mate, longtime Burners and seasoned art car designers. The duo had previously built two massive driveable serpents and a giant snail car. Sarriugarte and Mate also run a business selling popular shade kits for Burning Man, which they use to fund their art projects.

Nowadays, their 17-year-old daughter also helps out with construction. Over the summer, her friends would pop into the studio to lend a hand.

The 35-foot vehicle has two light-up spikes on top. A jet engine on the back, which takes up about a third of its length, contains a fog machine. The car is also equipped with 13 high-end Meyer speakers, which broadcast stereoscopic sound collages of rocket noises and archival NASA sound bites designed by Mate, who works at the sound design division of Lucasfilm. Sarriugarte told SFGATE that the locally built Meyer speaker system was nearly half of the construction costs alone, pricing the system at somewhere between $250,000 and $300,000.

The sculpture comes with a whole website’s worth of lore. According to the backstory, the vehicle is a spacecraft that was sent on a secret manned mission to Mars in 1965. (Empire is an acronym for “Early Manned Planetary-Interplanetary Roundtrip Expeditions.”) After the ship was lost in a wormhole, the crew drifted through spacetime for 10 generations, before finally rebuilding its engines and jetting back to the Playa.

“We were amazed to see that the desert that had nothing in it when we left had blossomed into a whole culture,” Sarriugarte told SFGATE, musing from the perspective of a time-traveling Empire crew member. “At first, we thought that was the new norm on Earth …” 

Sarriugarte and Mate drove the art car to Lake Merritt for Oakland’s annual Autumn Lights Festival. The three-night festival populates the area with pop-up art installations and uses ticket sales to raise funds for the Gardens at Lake Merritt. The event was Project: Empire’s Bay Area debut after it made its first public appearance at this year’s exceptionally muddy Burning Man.