MIAMI—You wouldn’t exactly call it the world’s warmest welcome: three enormous orange safety cones, at least a story tall and made of cast epoxy, are planted right in front of SCOPE Miami’s big white pavilion. The cones, a 2007 artwork by Dennis Oppenheim, say “stay away-beware-danger,” according to a helpful plaque.

Once inside, you realize that the fair—located in Miami’s Wynwood Art District, with 98 exhibitors all focused on emerging talent—is actually quite friendly, and that the cones are part of a definite trend this year: playful sculptures and installations that mess with your expectations.

SCOPE’s FirstView day for VIPs found artist Jason Hackenwerth in the middle of an aisle, struggling to create what looked like the world’s largest childrens’ party blow-up animal, a mixture of hundreds of blue-and-green balloons—but was actually part of a performance piece called The Madonna Project. The work, involving two male figures and a female one, will take place in front of the fair Saturday at 2 p.m. It touches on “the laws of attraction among mates and rivals,” says Hackenwerth, who actually moves around in one of the balloon creatures as part of the 45-minute performance.

As early-bird collectors hovered, the artist added that his work was typical of SCOPE in that it was “less commercial, less collectible” than the typical Art Basel offering. Then he added quickly, “but that doesn’t mean I [won’t sell] out of the piece.” You, too, can have the performance in your own backyard, or at your private museum, starting at $35,000.

Certainly Studio Visit (2007), a sculpture by Berlin-based Robert Barta, poked fun at the whole notion of pricey purchases in general, with a direct slap to the art-patron relationship. Composed of a tipped-over coat rack holding two deluxe furs, near a nibbled-down pile of wood chips, it imagines what a “pissed-off beaver” would do if he came upon coats made out of his relatives, says Augustin Dufrasne of the eponymous Brussels gallery, who was showing the work for $16,000.

One of the more eye-catching works on display was found at the booth of Space Other from Boston. Peter Schmitt’s 004#03-7 (2007) is a kind of techno-Calder: a large metal “tree” from which three dozen or so light green boxes hang. Each unit is a little machine that prints out white receipt paper. As they get clipped, they fall, creating an autumnal paper pile on the booth floor. (No word on who had to rake them up.) The work sells for $36,000, and on the fair’s first morning at least two collectors were already sniffing around it.

Natalie Kovacs, a Toronto-based curator at large for SCOPE who was involved in selecting the galleries and works, says that Schmitt’s work nicely captures her goal: “With 30 fairs, the work has to be an immediate out-of-body experience, or there’s no point in taking it out of the box.”

Clearly, the adjective “cutting-edge” is again part of SCOPE’s scrappy credo. It could be applied quite literally to the clippety-clip of the receipt machines, but maybe not so much to Hackenwerth’s balloon creature—when latex is your medium, cutting edges can make your market go POP.

Ted Loos is executive editor of Art+Auction. His wine column "In the Cellar" appears on ARTINFO every other Wednesday.

Editor's note: This article originally misstated the price of Robert Barta's Studio Visit as $45,000. It has been updated to list the correct price of $16,000.