Curiosity Index is an installation, a provocation, and one of our favorite dumb jokes.
We created it in 2013 or 2014 inside a derelict factory that once produced vodka for the Russian tsars. The place was pure industrial archaeology: ruins, shattered machinery, ancient tanks, piles of gears, cables, collapsed equipment — a whole mechanical graveyard.
We wandered through the workshops and scavenged a treasure pile of relics: counters, giant bearings, mysterious metal organs whose purpose no one could guess — fossils of the old liquor industry.
We dragged all this loot outside to call a truck… left it unattended for two hours… and came back to find everything stolen. Someone had beaten us to our own heist.
The only object we managed to re-scavenge was an old industrial counter — a gray plastic box with tired green digits. It had probably once hung above a station, counting parts, shifts, or the minutes left until freedom.
We took it to the studio and started thinking.
The reason we were at the factory in the first place was an upcoming art festival — artists were invited to explore the ruins, gather inspiration, maybe find materials.
So we decided to turn the counter into something appropriately idiotic: a device that counts how many people get “electrocuted” while poking their fingers into places they shouldn’t.
That idea evolved into a full installation.
We found an old Soviet wall socket, burnt it with a blowtorch, widened the holes, embedded a tiny flash LED and a mini speaker that produced a sharp electric crack. We mounted it on the wall, surrounded it with warning signs about high voltage and mortal danger.
And then we let human nature do the job.
People are too curious not to try.
You stick your fingers in the socket —
a flash!
a crack!
a tiny simulated short circuit!
You yank your hand back in panic…
and the counter ticks up by one.
That’s the whole piece:
a machine that tracks the number of curious idiots willing to electrocute themselves for art.
A perfect little trap for human curiosity — and it worked every time.