Chief: Ok We’re sitting in a room with a life-sized hummer in it and that’s a little bit weird, but this is your latest project that’s a collaboration between you two, right?

Lauren Was: That’s right.

C: Why don’t you guys just tell me about it?  I mean it’s covered in lottery tickets—talk about why you made this.  What is it?

Adam Eckstrom: Well about a year ago I was walking in Chelsea and I found a lottery ticket on the ground, and took it home. Lauren and I just started talking about what we could make from a lottery ticket.

LW: We saw a lot of potential in the color and the vibrancy of the tickets. Then we started noticing them on the street all the time.

AE: So for the past year we’ve been collecting them.  Every time we would walk the dog we would pick up tickets.  We would go into bodegas and ask them for the tickets from their trash; we kept collecting and talking about what we could make out of them.  Then we started doing a lot of research about what people buy when they do win the lottery. 

LW: So as we were doing research we found that, no matter what the prize is, if it’s huge or if it’s only a couple thousand dollars, the first thing people buy is a new car.  And so we started thinking about

AE: What we could build in relation to a car.

LW: Yeah, and what these tickets could represent, if it was “the prize of all prizes.”

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Wait, so your interest in lottery is sort of from the peripheral.  You just see these things.  You’re not actually buying the tickets yourself, you’re not regular lottery participants?

AE: We’re not regular lottery participants, but an important part of the project is that we’re no better.  I’ve bought scratch out tickets.  There is the “fun”, excitement, and adrenaline you get out of buying a lottery ticket.

LW: They are something that is in our daily lives, whether we buy them or not.  They are in our zone or something. [Laughs].  I get at least fifteen a day just walking to work, or walking the dog, even now I can’t stop myself from picking them up.

So what you guys came to was to build this hummer, and as people will see in the photos, it is covered COMPLETELY in lottery tickets.  I mean, how many lottery tickets?

LW: Well, we don’t know the number of tickets, but we counted them by adding up the purchase price. And the total value of the tickets adds up to $35,000, the medium price of a Hummer H3.

AE: It’s the price of a Hummer with Chrome mirrors and such, but not all the options like a sunroof and leather seats.. 

LW: [Laughs]

That’s insane.

AE: A H-3 ranges from about 30.9 to about 40 thousand.  So we built it with 35,000 dollars with these specific options because of that.  This being the ticket price of the car, and the value of the tickets we used to build it, we also have priced the “Ghost” at $35,000.  Just to, you know, keep it as part of the idea behind the whole piece.

So, this probably goes without saying but the tickets, they’re all losers?

LW: They’re all trash and they have all been discarded.  We’ collected them all from numerous different locations.

How many places did you have to go, what did you have to do to get this many lottery tickets?

AE: We collected them from all around the country, actually.  We had a few friends send us some; we had students collect some.  And we went into a lot of dumpsters and took them out of trashcans.

LW: We started stealing the trash from places like Bets and Buts or [laughing] there’s this place called Vista Doughnuts on the Rhode Island/ Massachusetts border that sells scratchers, coffee and doughnuts. We grabbed bags of trash from their dumpsters and brought it back to the studio.  We putt on rubber gloves and went through all of it to get tickets. 

AE: It actually started because we would go to these places and ask them, at first they were cool with it and then we got kicked out.  But it worked out to be a great thing because by getting kicked out to their dumpsters, it became a more productive process! We would get a couple thousand dollars worth of tickets from one bag.

LW: We traveled with hand sanitizer in the glove compartment of our car.  We’d drive around Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New York going through trash and then sanitizing our hands.

So, why were these people kicking you out?  What do you think was going on?

LW: Oh I think we just looked— I mean, they told us that the customers were getting concerned.

AE: We were digging through the trash while they were buying things.  [Everyone laughs].  And another thing is that it’s a federal offense— well, I’m not sure it’s a federal offense but— it’s a form of tax evasion— you know, you write gambling off if you win or lose, if you collect 20,000 dollars worth of tickets, you can say you bought them. Then you can write that off on your taxes.  So I think that a lot of places don’t want that happening, and they assumed we would do that.

Interesting.

LW: What was kind of fun about it, too, was we got to talk about the project with people that we might never have met.  We’d go into a store, and tell the clerk “We have this great idea.  We’re building this Hummer out of scratch off tickets. Is it all right if we look through your trash?” And they would either be really excited about it or not care in the least.  But whatever they said it was really interesting to introduce a project to such a wide range of people.

AE: Once we built the Hummer everyone was really into it.  Whenever someone walked by the window and saw it, whether they were interested in art or just delivering a pizza, everyone would get really excited.  They would come in and say: “How’d you get a Hummer through that door!”  And “Why’d you cover it.”