Burning Man 2017 Live Stream: Videos, Photos Of Nevada Desert Arts Festival

Tens of thousands of people will visit Black Rock Desert, Nevada, to attend the Burning Man Festival between Aug. 27 and Sept. 4.

The first Burning Man took place in 1986 on a San Francisco beach, and since then every year the event draws nearly 70,000 people.

"Larry Harvey and his friend Jerry James knock together an improvised wooden figure and drag it down to Baker beach on the Summer Solstice," the festival is described on its site. "They light it up, and a curious crowd gathers to watch it burn. And so it began."

By 1990, the festival became so popular that it had to move out from San Francisco, with some 350 people heading out to the desert as the fire ceremony grew and exploded into an art and free-expression festival.

The tradition is still followed, with the festival culminating in the burning of a massive effigy.

The 10 main principles written by co-founder Harvey in 2004 are radical inclusion, self-reliance, self-expression, community cooperation, civic responsibility, gifting, decommodification, participation, immediacy and leaving no trace.

The 2017 art theme for the festival will be Radical Ritual.

"In 2017, we will invite participants to create interactive rites, ritual processions, elaborate images, shrines, icons, temples, and visions. Our theme will occupy the ambiguous ground that lies between reverence and ridicule, faith and belief, the absurd and the stunningly sublime," the description of the theme reads. "The human urge to make events, objects, actions, and personalities sacred is protean. It can fix on and inhabit anyone or anything. This year our art theme will release this spirit in the Black Rock Desert."

The website adds: "This year’s theme is an attempt to reinvent ritual in our post post-modern world. For this purpose, we will disregard assertions of belief and concentrate instead on the immediate experience of play. Beliefs contain, define, and limit meaning. They can reduce truth to a rational commodity. But play can free us to envision truths of which we have no proof or warrant. Such play, as we conceive it, breaks down the distinction that divides belief from make-believe. Whole-hearted and creative play induces self-surrender to experience that is beyond the scope of reasoned thought."

Click here to know about ticket availability and prices.

For those who cannot make it to Burning Man this year, you can watch the live broadcast of the festival on YouTube. Check out the live stream below.

Below is a video of the Burning Man Festival that took place in 1989. Watch to know how the countercultural festival has changed since its inception.

Below are some photos from previous editions of the festival.