One Card Short of a Pack

At one time, Pokemon cards were the most sought-after items in the world. Today I found one lying in a gutter.

Pokemon Card


One of my long-term crazy art projects is collecting lost playing cards. I used to see discarded cards blowing around in the streets in Los Angeles and San Francisco, I thought this was a really strange omen, so I decided to pick them up whenever I found them. I figured that given enough time, I could eventually collect a pack of cards with every single card from a different deck. The task is easy at first, any single card you happen to encounter is likely to be something you haven’t collected yet. But as you get towards the end of the deck, the task increases in difficulty expotentially. When you only need to find a few last cards, the chances of any random card you find in a gutter is likely to be something you’ve already collected increases dramatically. I thought it would be a Sisyphean task, but then one day I was walking along and I found almost a whole deck of cards blowing up the street near my house. I decided I should just take the first card I found, it would destroy the whole integrity of the project to pick a card I needed and alter the randomness of the collection process.

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