You’ll now be able to ride these unicorns at Burning Man

Burning Man-bound unicorns Loquacious and Lovely (which we previously covered here) are real and funded and getting ready to hop a train to Nevada.
“It was pretty awesome,” Sophi Kravitz said in an interview over the weekend. “It was funded by 87 people, which, for an art project is a really nice show of support. There were some people who supported it by throwing in a dollar, which is awesome because it’s like, ‘I don’t have any money but I want to support you guys anyway.'”

The rideable unicorns (basically adult-sized versions of these playground classics) are the work of a team of eight friends led by Kravitz and Adelle Lin, whose Kickstarter campaign reached full funding over the weekend. The Kickstarter fund was to help pay for the monumental shipping cost of transporting the unicorns along with some extra LED and fiber-optic lighting to further trick out Loquacious and Lovely.
A new development that’s been added in the last week is to include an afternoon of storytelling during Burning Man. In order to make the project more immersive, Kravitz and Lin equipped the ‘corns with speakers and a Bluetooth connection, so that when people are riding them, others will be able to curate a soundtrack to the night.
“A bunch of our friends were like, ‘I’m a DJ, can I DJ through the unicorns?’ And we’re like, ‘Sure.’ Then we started thinking of storytelling, like The Moth or TMI. Some other creative people were like, ‘Can I do a poetry reading through the unicorns and we were like, ‘Wait, yes, absolutely.'” So now there will also be an afternoon set aside explicitly for storytelling.
The project is being constructed in a workshop upstate in Kingston, N.Y., but both women have deep ties to Brooklyn and met through mutual friends in NYC Resistor, a Brooklyn hacker collective. The building costs are being paid for from a Burning Man Honorarium grant, and the duo plans to have the pieces shipped in early August.

Funded! Thanks everyone <3 #unicorns pic.twitter.com/CdEob1Kgo5

— sophi kravitz (@SophiKravitz) July 25, 2015

“They look pretty good so far,” Kravits said. “It’s not that sexy looking yet. They still need painting.”
All 1,000 pounds of Loquacious and Lovely will ship via freight rail on Aug. 16 to Reno, Nev., and will be trucked from Reno to Burning Man. The festival runs from Aug. 30 to Sept. 7 in the Black Rock Desert.