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.

Renga - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Renga (連歌, Renga?) is a form of Japanese collaborative poetry. Ren=connected or linked. Ga=elegance. A renga consists of at least two ku (句, ku?) or stanzas, often many more. The opening stanza of the renga chain, called the hokku (発句, hokku?), later became the basis for the modern haiku style of poetry. As the renga was a popular poetry form for many centuries, there are many sayings that find their roots in renga traditions. The Japanese phrase ageku no hate (挙句の果て, ageku no hate?) means “at last”, as the ageku is the last stanza of a renga.

Shipping containers in Architecture: Quik House : Adam Kalkin

http://www.quik-build.com/quikHouse/QH_main.htm

“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.”

http://www.aavc.vassar.edu/vq/articles/Containing-a-Home

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.

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;
}
}

?>

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).