In six-inch platform stiletto boots, corset and Elizabethan collar, a tall and thin figure towered over the crowd like an alien monarch.

The music began — Röyksopp and Robyn’s dark synth ballad “Monument” — and the figure began to move long sleeves of pink fabric, folded into teardrop-shaped cavities, as if puppeteered, her gestures alternating between robotic and languid. As she raised her head, her face revealed pure black eyes, twice the size of a normal human’s, that extended down her cheeks and pointed toward a buglike mouth.

It was 2 a.m. in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn. The beat dropped — “Make a cast of my body, pull back out so that I can see” — and she pulled away the mask that was her face. Beneath the mask? Identically inhuman features. Some gasped, others cheered.