May 31
May 31
The Box That Makes the World Go Round
A system of self-propelling factors powers the growth: Globalization drives containerized cargo, and containers fuel globalization. Steel boxes have become the building blocks of the new global economy. Without this ingeniously simple, stackable and standardized receptacle, we would still be waiting for China’s economic miracle, and the American urge to spend, spend, spend would have been stifled in its infancy
…
The ships usually spend four to eight weeks at sea. A global network of shipping lanes now spans the globe, directing traffic. The Artemis, for instance, plies the so-called “A Loop”: from Hamburg to Amsterdam and on to, say, Tokyo, Singapore and Southampton before returning to Germany. Vessels from the “Super-Post-Panamax Class” — which measure 40 meters wide and can’t squeeze through the Panama Canal - take 56 days to complete a single lap.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,386799,00.html
May 31
Shipping containers in Architecture: Quik House : Adam Kalkin
http://www.quik-build.com/quikHouse/QH_main.htm
Continue reading »“You can look at them both as junk or as something special,” Kalkin notes. “To me they are like a treasured antique: they may not be inherently valuable, but the history and the storytelling add value.” Kalkin’s inventive architectural vision grows directly out of his belief in interconnectedness. He argues, “We come from a culture of sampling. I’m just out there in the world picking out things and reusing things—sampling—from my experience and from what other people have already invested a lot of time and energy in. I think there’s a tremendous amount of richness out there.”
His ability to mix unlikely sources and materials with the fairly straightforward domain of domestic architecture sets him apart from other architects, he thinks: “I’m a little bit outside of architecture, in the sense of my lack of allegiance to a specific kind of behavior or orthodoxy. I don’t value architecture culture over other cultures: I draw from writers, music, and the visual arts. Who wants to narrow the world down?” Instead Kalkin hopes he’s “seeing real connections between things and reaching toward a humanitarian core,” revealing that the “distinctions we’ve built up are false ones.” Just as insects make the most of a fallen tree in a forest, utilizing the tree for both shelter and food, Kalkin sees the sense in “repurposing” objects for architectural ends. Or, as he says, “Any kind of junk can be turned into stuff.”
May 31
RE: Minimalism
As a sculptural object, the shipping container has obvious associations with minimalist sculptors such as Donald Judd, Carl Andre or Sol LeWitt. The inherent inherent physical qualities of the ‘ready-made’ container are key interests for me, which are enhanced by the etching of time and space onto their internal and external fabric.
May 31
The idea is quite simple in some ways; it is just to partly model the process of shipping a product. So it looks like this - you upload files to the web application until it tells you that the ‘container’ is full. Then you hit the button to load the container on to the ‘ship’, which, when the ship is fully loaded with ‘containers’ then delivers them, slowly, to their specified recipients. You can view the progress of loading the ship on the web site and its progress in navigating the virtual oceans. Unlike web services of a superficially similar nature, the important thing with this project is that it takes time to both load and deliver the containers. Obviously if the system were to grow, then more ‘ships’ would be ‘sailing’ and there would be a constant flow.
The piece is designed to explore 4 themes:- Speed, Secret, Network, Object.
Continue reading »May 31
The Shipping Container as Object Oriented Code
From the perspective of my daily work, as a web developer, the parallels between shipping containers and object oriented programming are obvious; a standardised design for the shipping of goods across different modes transportation (which interestingly took hold because not only was it standardised, but also it was open - given freely to the ISO standards organisation), which is turned into many many instances of the design (or class), and which is extended in many different ways (inheritance).
<?php
// object oriented presentation of the shipping container:
class shippingcontainer {
public $height;
public $width;
public $length;
private $contents;
function __construct( $height, $width, $length )
{
$this->height = $height;
$this->width = $width;
$this->length = $length;
}
function storeGoods( $goods )
{
$volume = $this->height * $this->width * $this->length;
if ($goods->volume > $volume || isset($contents))
{
return false;
}
else
{
$this->contents = $goods->contents;
return true;
}
}
function unloadGoods()
{
if (!isset($this->contents))
{
return false;
}
else
{
$goods = $this->contents;
unset($this->contents);
return $goods;
}
}
}
class politicalmeaning extends shippingcontainer
{
public $meaning;
function __construct( $height, $width, $length )
{
$parent::__construct( $height, $width, $length );
$meaning = array();
}
function addMeaning( $new_meaning )
{
$meaning[] = $new_meaning;
}
}
?>
May 31
About Steam Shift (My Company)
The name Steam Shift comes from an industrial process which combines coal and steam in the presence of a catalyst to produce CO2 and Hydrogen. This process is known as the Steam Shift Reaction.
This process is an ideal metaphor for the creative process - taking two disparate elements and combining them in the presence of a catalyst (ideas, concepts, technologies) to produce something new.
Steam Shift Ltd itself is a product of this process - it is the synergy of of creativity in art, design, music with technology (Web, CD-Rom, Kiosk, Email).
May 31
About Artisans
Peculiarly (as I found myself unable to agree with almost every expression voiced in ‘The Digital Artisans Manifesto‘), the notion of the artisan has a particular resonance to me …
a worker in a skilled trade, esp. one that involves making things by hand.
New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd Edition
For me, it is the latter part of this definition that holds the key, and perhaps forms part of my dislike of the Digital Artisan’s Manifesto; I will need to explore this in more detail.
May 31
William Gibson: Idoru: Waverider
Much of the joy of the novel resides in the details, the meditations on the nature of a postindustrial, postmodern, mediated and simulated social milieu. For example, one of the novel’s main protagonists is Laney, a researcher and data collector for the SlitScan media organisation (a kind of hyperreal metatabloid, somewhere between The Sun, Celebrity Nudes and schlock TV). Laney’s a channel surfer, a waverider, a station zapper, with a short attention span, who is an ‘intuitive fisher of patterns of information…a dowser, a cybernetic waterwitch’. Intuitively, magically, he can browse the info-gestalts in data banks and, by finding the node point, a strange attractor, uncover the scandals in celebrities lives. He’s kind of like Case from Neuromancer, a console cowboy of sorts who thieves the horrors and disasters from people’s lives; the hacker as tabloid journalist, you might say. It’s in these thoughts on data and information, its relations with the subjects lived experience and actual life that Idoru is at its most interesting. In a sense Gibson’s offering an update of a Foucauldian panoptican: the lives of the individual citizen and subject are constantly open to surveillance and intervention through the traces they leave in cyberspace. In Gibson’s near future, the life of an individual is entirely open, ever present (albeit virtually); s/he can have no secrets, every action and gesture can be known by the data it leaves behind.
Reading the notes on Wark’s Hacker’s Manifesto, this is what came to mind; there is something of Gibson’s character Laney with his ability to uncover ‘node points’ that speaks of the interplay of context that I am interested in, in my work.
May 31
General Thoughts
Thinking about my work, it has occurred to me that the way I work is as a hacker. By this I mean someone who uses existing materials and disassembles them, at least in part, in order to reconfigure them, often incorporating other unrelated materials, with the purpose of creating something new. I am often drawn to particular materials or processes because of the cultural meaning attached to them.
There is a general ambiguity around the term hacking but a general definition sounds positive in describing: ‘any process of knowledge where data can be gathered, where information can be extracted from it, and where in that information new possibilities for the world produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old.’
Whether the material is steam, or computer, the politics imbued in (or for that matter the physical characteristics of) a shipping container, or a historical materialism (or any other) methodology, I seek to explore the ‘material’ and how it might relate to other ‘materials’ that also catch my eye. In this respect, it could be seen that my methodology is from a postmodernist school in the sense that postmodernism is often perceived to be predominantly concerned with collage, juxtaposition and the interplay of context.
Postmodern scholars argue that such a decentralized society inevitably creates responses/perceptions that are described as post-modern, such as the rejection of what are seen as the false, imposed unities of meta-narrative and hegemony; the breaking of traditional frames of genre, structure and stylistic unity; and the overthrowing of categories that are the result of logocentrism and other forms of artificially imposed order. Instead, they value the collage of elements, the play and juxtaposition of ideas from different contexts, and the deconstruction of symbols into the basic dynamics of power and place from which those symbols gain meaning as signifiers. In this it is related to post-structuralism in philosophy, minimalism in the arts and music, the emergence of pop, and the rise of mass media.
However, in contrast to this statement, I feel that it is not possible to sweep away the old in favour of the new nor to reject ‘imposed unities of meta-narrative and hegemony’, partly because there are fundamentals that do not change; human nature is a constant (both good and bad). It is from this, perhaps peculiar, dialectical standpoint (perhaps in some ways none too dissimilar to the intellectual contradiction that Walter Benjamin encountered between his Marxist and Kabbalistic views) that I am seeking to frame my practice.