SteamSHIFT’s MDAT Blog

The brass corners were attached to the blocks using no.2 * 3/8" countersunk brass wood screws. A marginally longer screw would have been better, but I wasn’t able to find a supplier of longer screws at that diameter.

The raw material - 5mm square brass rod.

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.

Wood

(Containers also come in 45-ft (13.7 m), 48-ft (14.6 m), and 53-ft (16.2 m) lengths)

£90 from R A Bampton; ready fri 30th March

R.A. BAMPTON LTD
Four Maries Yard, 31, Vespasian Rd, Southampton, Hampshire SO18 1AY
Tel: 02380 223937

Brass

Advanced Alloys Ltd
Unit 17, Parham Drive, Boyatt Wood Industrial Estate, Eastleigh, Hampshire SO50 4NU
Tel: 023 8061 8891
Brass & Copper

Brass - Square Cross Section
~ £10 / 3m length

1/8 or 3/16

64.75mm * 4 corners * 30 units = 7770 mm

A block; this is white beech, cut to size - exactly scaled from a standard international 20ft shipping container.

Why shipping containers? What is their relevance to my practice?

In that I don’t have a pre-existing practice, I am using shipping containers as jumping off point to explore the question of what I am interested in; they are not really the subject of the work, but more a foundation to begin to frame my exploration of my own practice as it begins to emerge.

In essence, what I am doing is taking areas of general interest and using them to create a brief for my work. For example in the context of Histories and Futures, the shipping container as a subject creates for me, 4 areas of (continuing) research and critical analysis; Speed (nature?), Hidden (purpose?), Network (process?) and Object (method?). The application for this piece, and the accompanying documentation predominantly explored the first aspect of this - Speed; it modelled the process of shipping goods by container ship, but for digital documents, to expose the relationship between our perception of the ‘digital era’ and the physical reality of 90+% of the goods we consume being shipped slowly by container and ship.

Invisible Architecture Site Study PDF