“Underwear!” screamed 6-year-old Sheldon Kilpack, and he shrieked with laughter when his voice turned into images on a screen at the city dump’s latest art show.

At a reception last Friday and Saturday, two artists presented their work after a four-month residency with SF Recycling and Disposal, Inc. The artists donned safety goggles, gloves and boots to dig through the public disposal area on Tunnel Avenue on the southeast corner of San Francisco, where small businesses drop off truckloads of junk. They presented their findings, which they turned to art, just down the street.

Sudhu Tewari, 30, is a Berkeley musician who has built more than 100 musical instruments from scrap parts. He focused his exhibition largely on assembled stereo equipment, television monitors and contact microphones, which pick up vibrations from solid objects and convert them into sound.

Attendees participated in creating the art by touching the sculptures' various springs and wires and talking into the microphones, which sent signals that became light on the television screens.

“There are small sounds all around us that most people don’t hear,” Tewari said. “I want to give them the chance to get hands-on with my art and explore new ways of thinking about sound by amplifying it or giving it a visual element.”

The show's other featured artist, Nome Edonna, 33, is a San Francisco painter and sculptor. He pointed to a sculpture titled "Great American Babysitter" as the centerpiece of his show. A series of emptied-out television cases were assembled into a large shrine, with small toy cars and dollar signs contrasted against Virgin Mary statuettes in the center, all painted gold.

“I address the mass media’s emphasis on consumer culture in a lot of my art, but when I got out here and started going through all the stuff I saw people were throwing away, even I was shocked,” said Edonna. “At least 70 percent of what we found still works. I took home three iMacs that work fine. I’ll be building myself one great computer from those.”

Tewari echoed that most of what he had found was in working condition, but qualified that while older electronics were in decent shape, the newer machines were often completely unusable.

“It’s planned obsolescence," Tewari said. "A lot of modern tech companies, they put one component in their new electronics that is designed to break down after a year or two. And the component is so expensive to replace or repair that it’s easier for people to just buy something new."

Paul Fresina, 46, is the program’s director and a part-time teacher in SF State's department of instructional technologies.

“California has a ban on putting electronic waste in our landfills, so we sort everything out and keep it in a separate facility," Fresina said. "When you see it all piled up together, it’s amazing.”

Deborah Munk, assistant director of the program, said this had been the program's best-attended show yet.

“There must have been 700 people here Friday night. They were wall to wall,” said Munk, who received her master's degree in instructional technologies from SF State in 2000.

The Artist In Residence Program has been running since 1990, and has featured more than 60 artists. The goal, according to SF Recycling's Web site, is to use "art to inspire people to recycle more and conserve natural resources." A small portion of the income from city residents' garbage bills is used to pay the artists' stipends, and the program holds three shows per year, one every four months.

The program will hold its next opening the last week of May, and applications for 2008 residencies will be available this summer at www.sunsetscavenger.com/AIR/.