Shipping Container House By Ross Stevens
all photographs used with permission of Petra Alsbach-Stevens It is a wall of containers, built against a hill in Wellington, New Zealand, designed and built by Ross Stevens. It uses the spaces between the containers and the hill to expand its living space beyond that limiting interior dimensions of a standard ISO box.
(Via Treehugger.)
Finland- and UK-based artist-researchers Loca were running their project in downtown San Jose. They had molded hollow concrete objects which they attached to various lamps, traffic lights and signposts. Being made of gray concrete makes them effectively invisible which is important because they contain sneaky cargo: inside, there’s a mobile phone and a power source which lasts around a week. Using a custom software, the phone will continuously scan for devices that have bluetooth enabled and set to discoverable. Every occasion of a tracked device will be sent to the central database and archived there. At their booth they would print out a receipt-style list of the places you’ve been to which in my case was approximately 2 meters long, others were gigantic. Now here comes the fun part: Loca not only collects your data but also tries to combine it with the context of the “urban semantics” it is operating in and tries to draw conclusions from that. Having checked out a few shops and the park for instance, you would suddenly get the message: “You were in a flower shop and spent 30 minutes in the park; are you in love?”.
Another thing that Loca do is the tagging of photos according to the electromagnetic context of the device at the time they were taken, i.e. the identities of the nearby bluetooth devices. The pictures they have been uploading to Flickr for some time now contain information about the presence of other’s cameras, which already represents quite a history of social encounters, opening a wide field of possibilities for mining and combining the data. There was another work called BlueStates which apparently works in the same direction.
IN[ ]EX is a project by a Canadian art group which acts as a nice low-tech approach to the spread of digital information. Their piece consist of a shipping container with (initially) 3000 wooden blocks of various sizes attached to it with tiny magnets. There are also a few bigger ones that actually contain sensors for the smaller blocks. The setup has two functions: a sound installation inside the container which is being generated and influenced through the way that the small blocks are attached to the wall of the container and around the bigger, sensitive blocks. The other part is actually participatory since the artists ask visitors to pick a block and take it with them. Ideally, they should attach it to another metal surface in the city, spreading the installation all over the place. IN[ ]EX is meant to “explore the migration of capital, goods, and people through the ports and public spaces of Vancouver and San Jose”, and the Canadian wood did migrate quite a lot. By the time this photo was taken, almost 1000 pieces were already gone and you would see them in the most absurd places, some people get really ambitious with these things.
The exhibition-space at South Hall in San Jose, being a giant temporary tent-like structure, was a bit remindful of the Cargolifter hangar close to Berlin, blimp and blimpsters included!
(Via we make money not art.)
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.
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
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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
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.”
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.
