Remember those stories about the downtown scene in the ’80s? The myth of Manhattan as a dangerous, seamy place where artists paid $150 a month for a place to live and work? Where you had to fake both schizophrenia and a limp so the ex-cons at the halfway house down the street wouldn’t mug you? A place where that homeless guy wearing only trash bags at the 6th Avenue F stop wouldn’t be out of place? It still exists, only it’s moved two hours south. And there’s going to be a big, sweaty art party right in the heart of the area you really, really shouldn’t be walking in after dark.

Friday, July 10th, at the Philadelphia Institute for Advanced Study (PIFAS) 30 or so ragtag artists turn their studios (in an old sheet-metal fabrication factory) into a series of kiosks, stores and municipal outfits in the manner of a dystopian town that constitutes PIFAS Place.

PIFAS is an intrepid group of young artists who cringe at the word artist, possess the airs of homeless folk both literally and metaphorically, and compete among themselves with bookshelves of actually-read obscure philosophy and literature works. How this makes them different from generations of other artists is beyond me, but they seem to grasp something young New Yorker (Brooklyn) artists have not: the power of collectivity. Bring your pepper spray.—K-Fai Steele