NEW YORK – If you were a cop and came across 30 unmarked box trucks gathered in a remote industrial corner of Brooklyn, who would you interrogate first – the folks bent over bowls in a mini ramen noodle house, the mourners in the funeral truck or the screaming masses taking turns shooting paintballs at someone in a chicken outfit?

The Strip Truck features professional pole-dance instructors (and even inspires some spontaneous disrobing).

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.

A heater problem hits the Double Wide Spa Truck. At the January Night Market, the hot tub worked great.

Third Time's a Charm ——————–

Last weekend's Night Market was the third. Prior gatherings have included an erotic pastry truck, a 3-D Twister truck, a sock hop, a tea house, a pinhole-camera studio, a little big-top circus truck and a blindfold robotic gamelan truck. Aboard the Happy Birthday truck, participants entered a psychedelically joyous little world where everybody got a cupcake, a party hat and a rendition of the familiar song that never failed to crack up people waiting outside.

There's been an actual strip club with mirrored walls, brass pole and real-deal strippers taking fake dollars in their G-strings. And the racket never ended in the Smash Truck, where a throng on one side of a thick Plexiglas wall screamed "Smash! Smash! Smash!" as participants on the other smashed the bejeezus out of televisions, Hummels and computer parts with a baseball bat.

Lost Horizon Night Market co-founder Mark Krawczuk serves noodles in the truck that started it all. Photo: Rebecca Letz

The most recent Night Market took place Saturday. By 9:15 p.m., an otherwise desolate street along a freight-rail line in Bushwick was alive with the squeal of screw guns, banging lift-gates and urgent directives. Rental-truck roustabouts in cowboy outfits and wedding gowns pull-started generators, and as the last of the trucks arrived, Krawczuk, 37, finished up his duties as head parking attendant. He took off his orange vest and put on a chef jacket. It was time for him to start cooking noodles.

The Night Market began with one truck Krawczuk used as a prank on the 2008 Burning Man Decompression event in New York. Intrigued, Krawczuk's co-conspirator Kevin Balktick, 26, was drawn in, and together they grew the Night Market to an 11-truck affair in September 2009, and then to more than 20 trucks in last January's event. Neither claims control of the event, calling themselves only "Those Who Choose the Place and Time."

As communications chief, Balktick sets a high bar for proprietors by example, turning informational symposiums for potential proprietors into mystical and adventurous gatherings set in church attics and historical society libraries. For attendees, the bar is set by proxy. In an e-mail to proprietors about soliciting donations he writes, "Please don't turn anyone away for want of funds. Ask them to sing you a song, do a silly dance, make you a picture, help you move next weekend, etc. Create an exchange of some kind."

The ambitious Surveillance Truck project comes off with only minor glitches. Photo: Michael Gwilliam

The Surveillance Truck ———————-

Jason Eppink is a 28-year-old assistant curator of digital media at New York's Museum of the Moving Image, as well as one of the artistic overachievers that comprise Wonderland Collective in Astoria, Queens.

At the Sleep-Eazy Motel, proprietors request you bring your own rubbers and sex toys. Near the end of the night, a couple emerged from one of the rooms and deposited a freshly used condom on the front desk. Photo: Michael Gwilliam

His Night Market project, the Surveillance Truck, involved one truck with a wall of TV monitors, another for use as a film set, 16 security cameras mounted in and on several other proprietors' vehicles, and about 20 cast and crew members.

"The main character doesn't even know what's going on," says Eppink of the storyline he created for his recurring film, built around an unsuspecting attendee. "The narrative is like this river, and the target gets swept up in it, and can maybe choose which side of the river he goes down, but he's going down the river."

The idea of being a proprietor also appeals to nonartists. Entrepreneur and traveler Etan Fraiman studied theater in school, and became a fan of immersive cultural/theatrical experiences like SantaCon and Idiotarod. He finally satisfied his compulsion to do his own version of the Coney Island Shoot the Freak paintball game at last weekend's Night Market.

Volunteers get shot with paintballs in the Shoot the Freak Truck. At one point, they faced a bottle-rocket assault.

Freaks Come Out at Night ————————

The result was two 24-foot trucks parked back-to-back, with shooters in one and freaks in the other, dodging fluorescent paintballs in a janky, blacklit shooting gallery.

"It didn't come out exactly how I wanted it to," says Fraiman, who finally conceded success "when these two people jumped into the suits and utterly committed to being freaks. They threw water balloons at the crowd, leaped into the shooter truck – people were actually freaking out. It was great."

Accomplice and chicken-suited freak Evan Abel adds: "Some people came up and told us it was their favorite truck."

Part of the Night Market, as viewed from the footbridge over train tracks in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. Photo: Michael Gwilliam

High Times on the Down-Low ————————–

It was almost impossible to see every rolling installation at last weekend's event. There was a mock funeral truck, a jazz truck, a Nigerian embassy e-mail scam truck, a screen-print truck, a truck full of rocking chairs, a high-school slumber party truck and a touching tribute to one woman's deceased father, in the form of a photo booth where folks posed with life-size cutouts of '60s rock stars made from photos taken by her father, a former editor of Hit Parader magazine.

"Originally, I was going to help my friends in the Make It Happen Truck," which was devoted to helping people complete personal goals, says Vanessa Paulsen, proprietor of photo-booth truck. "Then I said, 'Fuck that, I'm gonna make my own thing happen."

Dr. Adventure sits in front of his Cabinet of Wonder, which features a fetal pig in a jar, skeeball, a preserved bat and other treasures, presented out of the back of his El Camino. Photo: Michael Gwilliam

A friend of Krawczuk's points out that if one were to spend just 10 minutes in every truck, it would take five hours to see everything. "And the Night Market is four hours long," Krawczuk adds wryly.

The Night Market events are not promoted publicly, and proprietors and their friends are asked not to post anything to lists or social-networking sites. The time and place for each event are announced only through word of mouth, and proprietors are encouraged to limit invitations to those who might do their own truck someday.

"The goal is growth through participation," says Balktick.

One obvious question is whether publicity will ruin this grass-roots operation. But Krawczuk says there are ways to manage the growth, by "splitting it into multiple markets, or not inviting people [beforehand], or doing it in different towns, different formats – the cardboard box market."

Balktick says the sporadic schedule and ever-changing format of the events help keep the Night Market fresh. "If someone reads about the market, goes to the trouble to find out about it months from now and comes on down, they're probably good people and that's alright by me," he says.

What about people copping the idea? "I'd like it if someone did an alternate market," says Krawczuk. "Yeah, I want someone to do one and invite me to their fucking Night Market."

But while creative glory abounds, failure remains a specter. Things rarely go as planned – car batteries die, taking lights and music with them; windstorms wreck props; people flake. And, by the way, the cops did show up at the last Night Market, cruising by to cite people for open containers and, unbelievably, jaywalking.

While proprietors know they bear final responsibility and liability for what happens in their environments, the risk is not so much about a potential injury or arrest record. It's about not completing a vision that seemed so clear at the beginning. Eppink's main worry with his Surveillance Truck was about finding people to participate for a full 15 minutes during an event where things move quickly. The scenario had to run several times for the project to be successful.

"The first guy was very hesitant to commit," he says. "He kind of resisted the whole time, but he finally ended up at the Surveillance Truck, realized everything and said, 'This is the best thing that's happened to me in a long time. I'm so glad I stuck with this.'"

See Also: