Andrea C. Dose of UC Berkeley, Berkeley, California
Devolution - CD Car

Andrea submitted his/her (sorry, ambiguous name) entry with this letter:

"This is our entry into your contest...we call it devolution - a car devolving into a fish.

We have covered the 89 geo metro in aol cd's, cd-r's and dvd-r's cut into quarters and glued on with silicone. The entire car is covered. A quick estimate of the number of aol cd's used is approximately 500,000 hours free.

We made the car before we heard about your contest, so it doesn't conform to all you rules, but we thought you might appreciate it anyway since it does give people ideas of how to use aol cd's. We chose not to show the aol side of the cd because the other side is more visually appealing. The cd's refract the light spectrum, creating a rainbow affect that's always changing.

The car is still in use and becoming well known in Berkeley. The best part about driving the car is the reactions from people around us, everyone waves and photographs us and it's an excellent solution to road rage. The worst thing about driving the car is we can no longer pick our noses sureptitiously! (Editors note: Eww!)

Many small children ask if we are the rainbow fish (http://www.eduplace.com/tview/tviews/hoyler16.html) and for them we have cd scales to give away. Thus we continually use more aol cd's and these are still identifiable as aol cd's. "

Here's the pictures Andrea included:

I gotta tell you, not only is this one of the best uses of a bunch of AOL CDs I've ever seen, but it's also the best use of a Geo Metro I've ever seen. We did almost disqualify this entry because there aren't any visible AOL logos in the pictures, however we eventually all agreed to keep it just because it's so damn cool looking and obviously uses up thousands of otherwise worthless CDs.

I bet there is a hugely annoying amount of sun-glare off that thing. I'm frankly surprised the cops let you drive it. But, it is on the road, so as far as we're concerned it's legit. Nice work...is it a pain to wash?

...on to the Honorable Mention ->