This was the talk of the town this year. Very hard to describe. It's a crazy human-powered Zoetrope sculpture. The top part of the sculpture rotates. As you can see, the monkeys are spaced at regular intervals in slightly varying positions. Surrounding the sculpture, power is supplied by solar panels and about a dozen exercycles connected to generators. Once enough people have ridden the cycles for long enough to recharge the sculpture, the carousel starts spinning. At night there are strobe lights synchronized to the rotation of the carousel, so with each flash of the strobe you see the next monkey, providing stop frame animation.The effect you see is that the monkeys are swinging from vine to vine. While they are swinging, a serpent comes down with an apple in its mouth, which the monkey then eats... and then proceeds to swallow the serpent too. It's very twisted and really creepy to watch.
During the day, there are special "monkey goggles" you can wear which have fast shutter mechanisms in the eyepieces. The masks were intended to provide the same stop frame animation, but I couldn't find a mask that was functional. There were all pretty thrashed by the end of the first day. So this was best seen at night. This and David Best's temple were my two favorite things on the playa this year.
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