Making The Sardine Dream 2.0 come true
Donation protected
Friends, family, and curious lurkers,
Last May, an intrepid crew of friends in the Bay Area put mind and might together to build a contraption unlike any other. We deemed our glorious machine The Tin, and we deemed ourselves The Sardine Dream .
We were competing in the 2024 The Kinetic Grand Championship, a three-day, 50-mile human-powered sculpture race, sometimes called as "The Triathlon of the Art World."
Kinetic sculptures come in many shapes and sizes. They must be extravagant but also meticulously engineered. The course includes numerous obstacles: rutted-out dirt roads, massive sand dunes, and even water crossings. That’s right: kinetic sculptures float!
Last year, The Tin – while put together in a hasty three months – performed swimmingly. We paddled, pulled, and pedaled the dreamy, fishy contraption through the entire race – and even scored a feature on the local PBS!
This year, The Tin returns with a larger group of seafarers and an even dreamier mission for the 2025 Kinetic Grand Championship!
This year, we're rebuilding The Tin from the ground up, and we're asking for your help to make the following improvements to the contraption:
- Wheels: Replace the Surrey’s small tires with 26 x 4 “fat bike” tires, i.e. monster-truck it.
- Flotation: Swap out our four rain barrels for inflatable pontoons.
- Drivetrain: Upgrade our manual two-gear system with a 2 x 10 drivetrain.
- Breaks: Add four brand-new disc brakes to each tire.
- Propulsion: Rather than paddling, why not build a pedal-powered propeller instead?
- 2nd Deck: What’s better than a floating Surrey bike? A two-story floating surrey bike.
- Sculpture: a bigger and better fish sculpture! Involving metal framing, paper mache, foam boards, and lots of paint
- Costumes: we must be a helmeted, shiny, scaly, school of fish which will also require paints and fabric
Thank you for keeping our tinned fish dream alive! We promise not to let you down.
Sincerely,
The Sardine Dream Team
Eli Cohen
Katie Carlson
Lucy Bennett
Tikko Sperling-Freilich
Harper Wood
Hayley Greenough
Raphael de Chasey
Jesse Yurrow
Gaby Berbey
Brent Schroeter
Asa Conover
Anna Horton
Eli Demosthenes
Natalie Rudin
David Zetley
Cody Lambrecht
Laney Robbins
Matt Smith
P.S. - If you'd like to know a little bit more of the backstory to Kinetic Sculpture Racing, please enjoy this delightful video.
Organizer
Gabrielle Berbey
Organizer
Oakland, CA