THIS BOX IS FOR SALE is a project inspired by the Žaliakalnis neighborhood in Kaunas. There has been constant pipe construction happening on our street where we are currently staying for the past 2 months. The street and sidewalk has been torn apart and there are mounds of rubble. On each block, we see minature columns of the soon to be placed brick. We wondered around the neighborhood, and find discarded parts from construction sites. We found what seemed to be an abandoned building project, with an exposed no roof, that overlooks a large street, close to a river.

It is a neighborhood deconstructed in transition. Across the street there is a brand new high rise condo that finished construction last month. Tenants started moving in. They have well maintained parking spots, whereas the other side of the street is dirt.

The water is now undrinkable and causes rashes after showering. Building officials come to warn our building and neighbors each week that the water would be turned off for repair between the times of 0800-1700. Chunks of debris, soot, and metal particles settle on the bottom of the cup after a day of no water. The water is beige.

“How can we bring attention to this very localized problem?”

And how can we together as artists and developers bring not just outside observations but also attempt to create a technical bridge to go beyond ourselves? How can we potentially bring funding for other projects and organizations?

Maybe we make it into an NFT? Maybe we make several?

We started collecting pieces to build a sculpture to sell. First it was one brick, then we found a bucket of bricks. The bricks stayed outside for weeks. We decided to take more. We thought to get plexiglass and to create an acrylic enclosure around each brick to mint each physical piece as NFTs – as a way to verify each piece with a unique signature, and to assign some value through it’s signature.

So, we went to the construction store to buy the plexiglass, but then there was the electric transformer. It was antithetical to the sterilized, abrupt, abstracted pieces as commodity that we had originally imagined. The rewired lines networked new configurations of interaction for us in the street, with the rusted box that was more than just garbage. It was the Box.

The city itself revealed the pieces for us to document as map-objects and artifacts of this city construction. The TV tube, brick, rebar, transformer were all found and marked on our Map. We brought them to SODAS 2123 for the Regeneration [and it’s discontents] booklaunch.

Inspired by Hybrid Space Lab’s concept of hybridities and their City Kit,
we wanted to document this transitional cityscape, and to share an accessible tool kit for people to be able to use our resources. Everything we have used is basically open source or free. It is a playful experiment in the spirit of collaboration, participatory design, and hybrid spaces where we hope that many others will join in THIS BOX IS FOR SALE. We hope for this to be a potential catalyst or node map-archival project of 360 renderings for transient spaces that wouldn’t necessarily be preserved on Google Maps.

In our resources page, we have information on where and how to use the different pieces of technology and if anyone is interested, they can email us at symbi0s@protonmail[dot]]com with their contributions to the map and VR renderings.