Planet Earth
Turns out there really isn’t anything illegal going on at the renegade art event called Lost Horizon Night Market, an ongoing participatory project with an elegantly simple idea: “Proprietors” rent a truck and do something creative in it, with public interactivity a central element.
There are no admission fees. Participants mainly provide enthusiasm (or homemade jam, or lap dances, or ukulele serenades), and get to soak in a hot tub or share a smoke in the Jesus Christ Hookah Bar. The proprietors exchange their time, money and artistic energy for the distinctive euphoria of seeing people interact with an environment of their own creation.
“For one night, we make an autonomous neighborhood,” said Lost Horizon Night Market co-founder Mark Krawczuk, who enjoys spurring people to act on their creative desires. “I get a kick out of seeing people do stuff. I’ve got 40 people into the game … got people who’ve never done installation art before to do it.”
Part 21st-century street carnival, part Burning Man-style artgasm, the Night Market is an empirical example of the participatory culture movement. To potential proprietors, the scale of a project in a 10-foot by 14-foot or 24-foot space is liberating in its constraints. It’s small enough to visualize a project, big enough to do something with impact, and open-ended in a way that seems to immediately spark flurries of ideas from those who hear of it.
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