New York City’s trendy, so-called NoMad district (North of Madison Square Park) has seen its share of hip art installations, high-technology displays, and exotic food festivals in the 10 years since Shake Shack set up shop there. But none quite compare with Funland, the Museum of Sex’s new carnivalesque mashup of erotica, edibles, and architecture. It’s “a sensual exhibition to pique the most jaded museumgoer’s palate,” say its creators, the London-based conceptual artists Bompas and Parr.

Funland, which opens its midway today, is no tawdry Times Square peep show. And Sam Bompas and Harry Parr are not pornographers. Their eponymous London studio creates distinctive jellies in service of “flavor-based experience design,” culinary research, architectural installations, and, well, good eating. Funland is an idea that’s been percolating in the Bompas and Parr studio’s collective consciousness for some time. “With Funland, we wanted to explore whether architecture could elicit an erotic response,” the duo told me in an email.

Their starting point was what they call the “transgressive” space of a carnival fairground. The itinerant “funfair has always had an air of other-worldliness to it,” says Bompas about British carnie culture. “In its pre-industrial days the fairground was seen as a venue for the pursuit of pleasure—a carnival in which all aspects of society could mingle and participate in a multitude of vices and experiences,” Parr adds.

Courtesy of Bompas & Parr

For Funland, the duo collaborated with Professor Vanessa Toulmin of the National Fairground Archive, which for last 20 years has been documenting the carnival-culture ephemera. She provided many of the oddities exhibited at Funland, including a DIY sex film made by a fairground owner. “After shooting a promotional film for his fairground, he used the rest of the reel for a salacious personal project,” Parr says, adding that this will be the first time the footage has been made public.