The next time you’re in Washington DC, and you drop a quarter into one of those windup-crank toy-dispensing machines, and you wind up with a little plastic globe-ful of crumpled-up garbage — don’t be alarmed. (Odds are), you’ve stumbled upon Christopher Goodwin’s Trashball art installation.

Goodwin sort of takes the content in FOUND! Magazine and delivers it to his audience in three dimensions. The hands-on, urban-explorer experience for those who don’t actually want to stoop down and pick up the litter themselves, I suppose.

What might you find in a Trashball? Here’s a sampling from someone who’s bought about 50 of the little suckers:

“There’s an element of gambling to it,” said [Tom] Jennings, 42, a data technician. He has cracked open the orbs to find ephemera as varied as a crumpled-up Polaroid snapshot from the 1970s, a Danish coin and a canceled 1981 stamp from the African nation of Djibouti.

I have to say: On first glance of the photo above, I thought that the Trashballs were actually solid plastic or rubber orbs, with the found detritus trapped inside. Not sure why that occurred to me; I guess they seemed more like art pieces that way. I guess, in terms of a participatory artistic experience, it makes more sense the way Goodwin is actually packaging them.

All I know is that I’m making a mental note to scope out one of these dispensers for the next time I visit DC. No visit would be complete without retrieving one of these junky mementos.