Mel Chin recently came to ASU to promote his new Fundred Dollar Bill Project, and having some knowledge of his past work, it was great to meet the man in person. He is quite a character and excellent presenter, which I did not expect.

The Fundred Dollar Bill Project is his response to New Orleans. And I don’t mean post Katrina New Orleans. While he was brought in as an artist to respond to the devastation left by the hurricane, he realized that a bigger problem was already present in the city, in the soil.

Lead levels in the Ninth Ward dirt peak at 3,000 parts per million. The EPA marks 400 parts per million as detrimental to child development. Most European contries set the bar at 100 parts per million. 30% of children in New Orleans have lead poisoning.

With his research team, Mel Chin calculated that the entire city of New Orleans could be treated with a fish bone solution that locks loose lead and blocks it from entering humans for $300,000,000.00. While he didn’t think he could raise this much money, he did think he could create it with the help of school children all over the country by making Fundred Dollar Bills.

Here’s a video describing the project:

Once all the Fundreds are drawn, they will be picked up from collection centers around the country in a vegetable oil armored truck. The truck will then deliver the bills to Washington DC and ask congress for an equal exchange of one Fundred Bill for one Hundred Bill. The goal is not only to clean up New Orleans, but to demonstrate a working new science for removing lead in other cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Phoenix.

You too can get involved and make your own Fundred using these templates. If you teach, know people, have parties, or a knitting circle, you too can get your group to make some Fundreds. The only restrictions are the Fundreds must be printed in color, and only one Fundred per person. You can follow the project on Facebook, too.

I got my 3D Design class to make some Fundreds with the help of Claire, one of the ASU Museum interns. Here are some photos of my Fundred:

Now get out there and make some money!

For the past two weekends I’ve been chopping, grinding, welding, and drill a broken foundry cart to make a bike trailer! Since I don’t have a car, it is hard for me to get some of the basic art supplies, like plywood and concrete. The bike trailer opens up a whole new world of possibilities, one of which includes bringing Cracker the Cat to my studio.

I got the plans for the trailer from Pedal People. They have a strong emphasis on community building through bike cart design, a rather unique combo. The idea is that few people would be using a trailer every time they used their bike, so why not own one cooperatively? Aaron explains it much better on his site:

the political side of bike carts

i’ve been designing carts that people can build in their communities for a low cost, with only basic fabrication skills and access to common tools. building and using carts can help facilitate a process of local community development. some folks extend that farther by starting community cart programs, in which a lot of people can use a few carts/bikes. the carts are built from metal conduit tubing and are brazed together using an oxy-acetylene torch. they take from 5 hours to 12 hours to make, depending on your familiarity with the fabrication techniques. they cost about $30 to build if you use new parts and salvaged wheels.

car independence: we need to become independent from using our automobiles, for many reasons. cars are a problem because they support global industrial capitalism and the outsourcing of manufacturing to the people who are hurt the worst by industrialism. they also support militarization of oil-rich areas of the world for access to cheap energy. our use of cars releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and burns dirty fuel in inefficient engines where the combustion byproducts poison humans, other organisms, and the land. additionally, the automobile paradigm takes us out of small centralized communities where we could work, live, and play, and spreads us out to the far reaches of sprawling development where we use our cars to go everywhere and isolate ourselves from our neighbors, local small businesses, and family.

why bike carts? too often people complain that they would ride a bike except they can’t carry what they need for work, that they can’t bring their children, that they have to pick up a bag of potting soil that they couldn’t possibly fit on their bike with the groceries…sound familiar? bike carts are a great solution, but most are expensive (for a cart that can haul 200 pounds, $300 to $500 USD). this cart weighs 30 pounds, costs $30 to build, and will carry more weight more securely than many commercial bike carts. it might even be able to carry larger items (like sofas or plywood, for example) than a car can carry. so this is a project about making bike carts, but it’s also about finding a way to gain independence from our cars, build community by fabricating, playing, and biking together. reclaim transportation technology and empower ourselves by taking technology choices and development back into our own hands.

the dominant car-based transport paradigm teaches us that to get around, we need to spend lots of money to buy something which is environmentally damaging. it teaches us that when something breaks, we need to take it into a shop, send away for parts, and pay lots of money, and eventually start all over again with a new car. you can’t build them, fix them very easily, grow fuel for them (for the most part: read on ethanol and biodiesel), or use their parts after you’re done with them in their original form.

if we question cars, we learn that we can lessen our impact by buying a less-bad car (small car, hybrid, grease, biodiesel), and that less-bad is a fine way to be. make that choice for yourself.

one less car

make it two?

So for the community part of my cart I held a not-quite-successful workshop last sunday on bike cart construction, and I’m going to put my email address on the cart so people who see it can ask me about using it for the day. We’ll see how it goes.

In case you’re wondering, The cart cost me about twenty bucks to make. All the metal is from a broken dolly, I got the wheels at Bike Saviours for $10.00, I needed an inner tube that was $5.96, and some metric nuts and washers cost $3.83. I also found the plywood and a friend donated the spray paint. Hooray for recycling.

A note: Pedal People recommend using electric conduit piping to build a cart, I do not. It is flimsy, often galvanized (poisonous to weld), and cylindrical. If you can, get square tubing instead; it is stronger and much easier to work with, think butt and miter joints. My hitch is a little different, too. On the cart arm there’s just a u-bolt, and on my bike there’s a 880lb test carabiner welded to a metal plate. My cart is also a little bigger; the bed size is 24″ x 24″, with the capacity of carrying sheets 24″ x 48″.

Now go make a cart!

Here are some photos of my set up process:

The buckets are modeled on the container buckets designed by the Home and Garden Information Center at the University of Maryland Cooperative Extension. Here’s a pdf of the bucket plans and other information about container gardening. I went with this design because it stores extra water in the bottom of the bucket. In traditional container gardens, the water just drains out the bottom, but since I’m in the AZ desert, the extra water chamber helps keep the soil moist and helps to prevent evaporation.

Here’s the basic design:

1. Get a 5 gallon bucket, some 3/8″ tubing, a 10.25″ circle, and some 3″ pvc pipe
2. drill a 3/8″ hole 2″ up from the bottom of the bucket
3. insert a length of drain tube into the hole and push a nail through the end of it. This keeps the tube from getting pulled out. In my set up, all my buckets drain into a water collection tank, so I can use overflow water to re water the plants. Neat!
4. Cut 3 2.5″lengths of pvc pipe and place them in the bottom of the bucket. These hold the spacer up and create the water storage chamber.
5. Make the 10.25″ circle. I used metal cause I found some scrap lying around. You could cut one out of a bucket lid, or even plywood. Drill a bunch of 1/4″ holes in the circle so that the water can drain out. When you plants are mature enough, their roots will even grow through the holes to tap directly into the water chamber.
6. Put the circle in the bucket above the spacers and add a layer of rocks, about 1″ deep.
7. Fill the rest of the bucket with dirt / compost / vermiculite.
8. Get Planting!

I’m going to start out with lettuce, onions, and garlic, all of which do well in the Arizona winters. I’ve also got some bush beans and peppers, we’ll see how that goes.

In the interest of band wagons and the future of my work I’ve added a sustainability statement to my ABOUT section, and copied it bellow:

• Performance
  My public performances deal directly with sustainability and social responsability by illustrating how an individual’s actions can directly affect the surronding community.
• Materials
  The majority of my materials are scavanged, reused, or directly recycled. My electronic projects all use ROHS compliant parts where available, and if a physical computing work does not sell after a year or two it is stripped down and returned to my parts bin for use in new projects. As producers of 3D objects, artists have a responsibility to their communties that their work be meaningful and necessary, and not simply more pretty clutter and junk.
• Energy
  Currently, 50% of my office and living space energy comes from wind and geothermal power. Many electricity companies now offer a green plan option – check with your utility provider about switching a percentage of your electricy over to renewable sources.

So, I completely forgot I even applied to this show, but here it is!

According to their website:

Engrained is an opportunity for students, faculty, staff and the larger community to engage in sustainable dining through a living-learning restaurant that is committed to locally grown food and environmentally friendly practices. The restaurant is located on the 2nd floor of Arizona State University’s Memorial Union at the Tempe campus.

The Show is up from Tuesday to Thursday with a reception and free local sustainable food on 24 October 2009 from 11:00AM to 2:00PM.

I just found out that The Boston Globe published a link to the old travel blog I wrote with Alison Croney on Sunday, 23 August 2009! They did an article on WWOOFing and included a post regarding our experiences with it. Unfortunately my link didn’t make it into the online globe (odd), just the print version.

Here’s an excerpt from <D:E:C>

I think wwoofing is a great way to get to know local people. The ideal length of time to stay with a host, in my opinion, is two weeks. It takes one week to get to know the people and work you will be doing, and one week to enjoy it. By the third week I was sick of it. Farm work is hard, physically and monotonous at times, so certain muscles would get very sore, but by switching it up and doing different work on different farms I was able to let parts of my body recover. Pick macadamias is hard on your neck and back, while weeding garlic is hard on your knees, for example. For this reason, if you have any trade skills that you enjoy, such as carpentry, painting, networking, or web design, look for hosts who need this kind of work done. Not that there’s anything wrong with farming, just that if you will be wwoofing for a long time it is nice to mix in work you enjoy. Maybe you enjoy farm work.

As promised, a mostly complete google map for Tempe bike lanes and routes.

View Tempe Bike Lane and Route Map in a larger map

Red lines are streets with bike lanes.
Blue lines are streets with a designated bike route.
Green lines are non motorized multi-use paths.
Pink lines are streets with an extra wide outside lane.