Jun 25
Photos from Container City
Jun 11
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.
Jun 11
The raw material - 5mm square brass rod.
May 31
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 24
Wood
| 20ft long | 40ft long | Width | Height | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Size in M | 6.1 | 12.2 | 2.44 | 2.59 |
| scaled @ 1:40 to CM | 15.25 | 30.5 | 6.1 | 6.475 |
| scaled @ 1:40 to MM | 152.5 | 305 | 61 | 64.75 |
(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
May 24
A block; this is white beech, cut to size - exactly scaled from a standard international 20ft shipping container.
May 16
The application comes in 3 parts; Containerizer, ContainerShip and ShippingLines:
Containerizer: An application for creating a shipping container and filling it with contents. To use it, simply drop files onto the application; the application will create a uniformly sized container with a unique id number on the desktop. Each container will hold up to 500K.
(Technical Overview: This is a GUI front end for a simple BASH shell script; which creates the container (a 600K Disk Image), with a unique id.)
ContainerShip: An application for loading containers onto the ship for delivery. To use it, drop a container onto the application; you will be asked for an email address for the recipient, the sender’s email address and a password, which will allow the recipient to download their container.
(Technical Overview: This application, again a GUI front end for a simple BASH shell script, sends a POST request to the web server, passing the recipient’s email address, the sender’s email address, the password and the disk image. On receipt of the data, the container is assigned to a ‘ship’; if that ship is full it is given a ‘sailing date’ and a new ship is created ready to take the next consignment of cargo.)
ShippingLines: This application is used for showing the progress of a container. To use it, drop a container onto the application; assuming the container has been loaded onto a ship, it will show the progress of the container.
(Technical Overview: A GUI front end for a simple BASH shell script, which simply opens the user’s browser to the progress page on the web server passing the name of the container. The progress page checks the current date against the sailing date for the container’s ship and works out what percentage of the journey has been completed.)
When a container reaches its destination, an email will be sent to both sender and recipient informing them of the arrival. The recipient will be able to then download the container from the system using the password set by the sender.
(Technical Overview Behind the Scenes: A timer runs an update script on the web server twice per day, checking for arrivals (ships where the journey percentage is 100%) and emailing recipient and sender with details of the transaction.)
Mar 22
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.
Continue reading »