‘He knows that he can not reveal himself to anybody…When he is talking to his soul, he wears a mask…There is a loneliness within his heart, which neither praise nor blame can reach, because he is his own judge with whom there is no appeal.’

-Friedrich Nietzsche, Will To Power

The eyes of the Silver Man, a living statue on Michigan Avenue, are hidden behind sunglasses. People fascinated by him peer closer.

Is he a statue? Is he a robot?

The enigmatic street performer is Preston Dinwiddie. He is 25 years old.

The Chicago Burning Man Community once again steps into the limelight at Looptopia for the second year in a row. Chicago "Burners" took over the Empire Room in the Palmer House Hilton and transformed it into the Chicago Underground Art School. The Art School hosted a wide array of artistic explorations to show Chicagoans how to be a kid again with tables offering mask making for a photo shoot to creating "Zine" pages for a T-shirt to manipulating video with a magic torch. Here is their story...

When Nick Pupillo stands in the middle of the dance floor, he doesn’t just stand there, he grows.

His quiet strength radiates against the roughness of the room, with its exposed brick walls, industrial pipes overhead and a metal door that opens onto a loading dock.

His bare feet are rooted in the black vinyl floor. His sweat pants are rolled up, squeezing the flesh just above his knee. A man with short brown hair, athletic build, crooked smile, and big, friendly eyes, he looks up. He lifts one arm to the sky, letting the other dangle toward the earth.

Last year, I arrived at Looptopia around midnight only to find that the cops had shut down Millennium Park. All that drinking for nothing. After I was nearly arrested for throwing a coffee cup at an unmarked police car, I finished out my night roaming randomly through Wrigleyville before heading back to Evanston.

In short, it wasn't going to take much for this year's Looptopia, an all-night party held in downtown Chicago, to top last year's inaugural effort.