You’ve Got My Eyes

A structural fusion between Lost Horizon Night Market and Competitive Winter Picnic, You’ve Got My Eyes is a part-social & part-physical installation in the guise of a back alley, grey market, cyberpunk-themed science fair. It’s a peek into the overlap between our emerging future and the imaginary worlds of Gibson and Blade Runner, mediated through the prismatic lens of real research and working tech organized into distributed nooks of autonomous creative space. Each exhibitor provides their own project and interactive installation within the overarching structure of Krawczuk’s spatial and temporal organizational design. This design then implicitly guides each participant through a network of physical and social interactions introduced via a photo wall of pseudo-anonymous conversational cues, reinforced by the exhibits themselves, and undergirded by a waiver everyone has to sign — just in case.

You’ve Got My Eyes gathers an eclectic collection of exhibitors, curated within the space for maximal conceptual and narrative juxtaposition. For example, a facial-recognition-activated sex toy harp plays across the aisle from an artist applying face-erasing make-up, each creative endeavor cancelling the other out like antiphase sound waves. Or vaporized scotch wafting from one exhibit stands in stark contrast to another with brilliant elixirs of non-alcoholic psychoactive beverages, the qualia of intoxication balanced against the pure chemical effect. Whether it’s an ad hoc street market for visceral meats, a dispensary for flavor-swapping miracle berries, chemist beermakers, blacklight tattoos, hand-made spirographs, or a neutrino-catching cloud chamber — each exhibit breaks down the atomic features of a real scientific insight and turns it on its ear, revealing a unique and surprising twist to spur participant inquiry, engagement, and conversation.

A framework of implicit guidelines organizes the social installation space by informing participant engagement and interaction. Marked by yellow bandanas, exhibitors are free to mingle and interact with each other’s work and with participants. The exhibitors are simultaneously included and demarcated, their interactions, lectures, and explanations part and parcel of the relational exchange of information. When participants enter the space, a semi-anonymous photograph is taken and they are asked to provide a topic of conversation they are interested in. This serves as a point of departure for exhibitors and participants to approach one another with a ready-made contextual bridge, sparking new connections between individuals within the social space. These social practices are as essential to the project as the physical exhibits, a logistical mortar that binds the participants’ experience via a relational praxis of organized chaos.  

Organized chaos demands a flexible core of meticulous arrangement and an openness to the shifting reality of live events, which mirrors themes present in the source material: what’s real is always a mystery, always undulating, always up for interpretation. Similarly, the download of knowledge in this social space is mediated via both exhibitors and audience members, their interactions with the physical and social installation network, and Krawczuk’s overarching organizational matrix. With collaborative communication protocol, relational logistical preparation, and a constant balance between the exhibitor’s artistic freedom and the event’s explicit goals, every element mutually reinforces an interactive social/scientific discovery space.

In Krawczuk’s work, process defines and maps intention. The scientific process provides an intentional scaffolding through which discovery can be made, tested, validated, and shared. By the same token, a strict adherence to process articulates Krawczuk’s organizational aesthetic. Each logistical element involved in co-ordinating the event resonates with both the immediate cyberpunk aesthetic and, simultaneously, the overarching values shared across all of Krawczuk’s event-based projects: participant engagement; open access; rhetorical irreverence; a model for ease of distribution; autonomous spaces that provide a venue for free artistic expression; activities that blur the line between audience and artist; and a meaningful dislocation of the ordinary into the hyperreal and surreal.

You’ve Got My Eyes creates a pocket dimension of discovery where the science is real, and the experience is real, even if the world isn’t.

More details at KrawczukIndustries.com