[ ENTER ] : SCIENCE // FICTION

November Digest of Think Inside the Box. [ENTER] is our recurring monthly digest published at the end of every month, surfacing what is happening, the systems, learnings, and our Artifact Highlight.

Dec 01, 2025

This month, we have been working on Sights by Artifice: SCIENCE//FICTION, a new production created in collaboration with Sights & Sounds. It marks an expansion in what we are able to build. Instead of designing singular moments, we shaped an entire environment that processes and reorganizes the space; treating the dance floor as a central site of meaning.

SCIENCE // FICTION transforms 53 Scott Ave into a living system; connecting performers and visual artists into a continuous field where signals and sensorial experience merge. The intention is simple. Build an environment that feels structured yet alive. Controlled yet porous. A space where the community is not an audience but a co-author of the atmosphere.

This production is the first time we bring our curatorial language to a full scale nightlife setting. It extends our ongoing interest in systems, bodies, and the infrastructures that shape shared experience.

Saturday
12/06
10P-LATE
53 Scott Ave 5F + 6F
Bushwick

VIEW SCIENCE // FICTION WITH US

Enter the Simulation

For SCIENCE // FICTION, we were invited by Sights & Sounds to lead the spatial and visual architecture across both floors. The artifacts include:

An environmental texture that respond to movement and density within the SCIENCE simulation on FLOOR 6 with //PIXELMOUTH
A projection of “Surface Tension” by Karyn Nakamura on the FICTION simulation on FLOOR 5.
“The Depictions” on 3 CRTs
Plastek Pet
Kit Volta
Dong Deng
Cass Yao
Sylvia Ke
The Artifact Studio
A techno-organic lighting system designed with GUMGUM Studio
Visual staging and spatial curation by Studio Artifice and producer Tyler Felson.
Sounds between TECHNO and HOUSE by Sights&Sounds.

This is the beginning of a longer arc in which Artifice builds hybrid experiences that move between installation, performance, and collective gathering.

[ENTER] Floor 6: SCIENCE

Start with the top floor: A simulation of external growth driven by the pulse of techno and experimental left-field sound. Fractured projections and fog-filled orbs shift with the pressure and intensity of the room.

//

[EXIT] Floor 5: FICTION

Descend into floor 5. A cyber-corporeal city where light organisms and deep grooves animate a hybrid terrain of sculptural and digital forms.

Building SCIENCE//FICTION for Sights and Sounds

For the creative process behind SCIENCE // FICTION, we wanted to think critically about our science fiction curatorial angle within the contextual constraints:

How do you design a nightlife environment that behaves like an experiment rather than a backdrop?

We approached the production as a simulation. Each floor operates as a controlled system with its own logic for light, sound, density, and movement. The architecture does not sit behind the experience; but rather the artifacts behave reactively to the emphasis on the probabilistic.

Our role was not to decorate the venue. Our role was to set the initial conditions for an evolving environment. This required building a visual and spatial language that could hold two parallel realities.

SCIENCE functioned as the framework. FICTION introduced the drift.

Together they shaped a world that felt engineered and imagined at the same time. To design this, we borrowed structural insights from physics, especially from the double slit experiment, which became a conceptual anchor for the production.

src: https://www.are.na/charles-broskoski/double-slit-experiment-images

The Double Slit Experiment: //

A model for perception and parallel realities.

The double slit experiment demonstrated something essential about the nature of observation. When particles are not watched, they behave like waves and move through both slits at once. When observed, they collapse into a single measurable path. Reality changes based on how and when it is perceived.

We treated this behavior as the foundation for the simulation behind SCIENCE // FICTION.

In practical terms, the double slit framework informed two key design choices:

1. Two floors as two possible states

Each floor represents a different configuration of the same environment. One is structured and rhythmic. One is more fluid and unstable. They exist in parallel and only collapse into a single experience as people move between them.

2. Reality as interference pattern

The combination of these techno and house sounds, the visual architecture, and human movement creates a so-called “interference pattern”. No two pass-throughs of the room look the same.

This is how the SCIENCE // FICTION environment behaves. Not as a static installation but as a sequence of probability states shaped by the people inside it. The production is a physics experiment disguised as a Bushwick rave.

This is the beginning of a longer arc in which Artifice builds hybrid experiences that move between installation, performance, and collective gathering.

View SCIENCE // FICTION with us

Secure entry to Sights & Sounds: SCIENCE // FICTION

SIGHTS Lineup

//PIXELMOUTH
Karyn Nakamura
Plastek Pet
Kit Volta
Dong Deng
Cass Yao
Sylvia Ke
The Artifact Studio
Lighting by GUMGUM Studio

SOUNDS Lineup

Floorplan
Anthony Naples
x3BUTTERFLY
Dennis Free
Donis
Amelia Holt
Monolithic
Lee Cash

Artifact Highlight: [ Surface Tension ]

[ Surface Tension ]
Karyn Nakamura
Projected installation for 53 Scott

Surface Tension is a video work that explores how technology shapes what can be seen and what remains hidden. It examines the tension between perception and authority when machines become our intermediaries for vision. The original artifact is composed of video, a slide projector, a drone, security cameras, and lasers featuring a microscopic cinema in which individual neuron cells perform as actors trying to form a “THOUGHT” using the technology of optical tweezers.

A 15-minute loop combining raw microscope footage with computational layering: color inversions, diffusion-model textures, algorithmic reconstructions. The result is a constantly morphing space between biological matter and digital reinterpretation; an interrogation of what we accept as “image,” “meaning,” and “reality.” The work challenges the authority of mediated vision. By literally choreographing the substrate of consciousness; neurons themselves, then re-visualizing them through digital filters, Surface Tension forces a reflection on the tensions between raw biological reality and mediated representation. What does it mean to “see” consciousness, and who gets to decide what that visibility looks like?

Microscope footage, optical manipulation of neurons, custom diffusion pipelines, and live spatial capture. At its center, Surface Tension grounds itself in a real microscopic process. This raw material becomes an absurd kernel of truth that the installation revolves around.

The final environment unfolds across the curtain at 53 Scott Ave, forming a sequence where biological matter and computational imagination merge into a single field.

Think Inside the Box

We are a creative studio based on science-fiction; where art + technology converge to shape + link artifacts through strategy + vision. Artifice uses science-fiction as a framework to guide our curatorial approach and inform our visual language.

Chapters are Artifice’s core program: a two-part showcase that combines a Lab: WHITEBOX and a Stage: BLACKBOX into a single world-building environment. This dual structure is what differentiates Artifice from traditional gallery formats.

Artifacts are crafted documents designed to interact with their surrounding systems. We highlight artifacts over the identity or platform of the artist. This way we focus on the contextual relevance of the artifact, which informs each Chapter to function as an authentic relational and narrative-driven world, differentiating our format from traditional shows.

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