Some say the Box Shop is 15% of the Burning Man experience. Located in a remote part of San Francisco near the edge of Hunters Point, this workshop teems with dedicated, hard-core men and women making art for the playa. To finish a project—a 160-foot-long serpent, partly arching across the Box Shop—none of the 50 Flaming Lotus Girls can afford to be bored.

"Serpent Mother," their biggest and most complicated project yet, requires hours of electrical work, welding, installing hydraulic systems and fire effects. Then there is the egg, an integral part of the enormous sculpture. Protected by the serpent, the 10-foot egg shoots out 50-foot flames. "Three or four years ago the egg would have been a project in and of itself," explains Brent Coons, one of the project's creators.

A policy of radical inclusion encouraged Stefano Corazza, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, to make his own art project. Originally from Italy, he had never before made art installations nor until two years ago even heard of Burning Man. After going last year, he decided to make something of his own. Inspired by a robotics exhibition he attended, Corazza came up with "A Field of Sunflower Robots," an installation of 45 metallic sunflowers energized daily by following the sun. At night, it lights up and interacts with viewers.

Burning Man art, dismissed by the larger art community as casual and unimportant, often gets burned in finale and few get exhibited anywhere else, which doesn't help dispel that dismissal. Despite the transiency or maybe because of it, Charles Gadeken, a co-owner of the Box Shop, wants to keep this fire alive at Burning Man.

—Sasha Vasilyuk