inbound
Gazing at a hulking containership, an
observer can’t tell whether the ship is
carrying cars, computers, or kumquats.
Last summer, the CMA CGM Gemini
left Oakland, Calif., with a different load
entirely—an Asian-American graphic
artist named Gabby Miller.
By the time she arrived in Xiamen,
China, Miller had created a project titled
On display until
recently at an
Oakland art gal-
lery, the collection
includes paintings
Miller made with
heavy crude oil
from the ship’s engines, photographs
and videos she took at sea, and the sculp-
tural piece “609 Containers (1967),” a
pile of small-scale ceramic re-creations
of shipping containers.
Like any mariner, Miller struggled
with the monotony of the 21-day crossing, with the additional challenge of
being the only woman on a ship with 30
male sailors, she told California public
television station KQED.
The men accepted her as a welcome
distraction from their four- to nine-month stints, however, and she built
on that trust when she began painting portraits of the ship’s chef, various crew members, and the loved ones
they missed at home. Working from
an ad hoc art studio in the 1,250-foot
ship’s swimming pool room, she soon
found there were other artists on board.
Together, the group began to meet and
paint after dinner, and by the end of
the trip had created enough items for a
floating art show.
Artist opens studio on
board a containership
Most e-commerce companies see packaging
as an expensive nuisance, but online footwear
retailer Zappos IP Inc. has big plans for the
humble shoebox.
To encourage its customers to reuse the
cardboard containers they receive in the mail,
Zappos has printed a collection of templates on the inside of the boxes.
After removing their new shoes, people can cut and fold the box to give
it a second career as a smartphone holder, a children’s shoe sizer, a geometric planter, or even a 3-D llama.
The Las Vegas-based subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc. began shipping
a limited number of the new boxes on June 1, encouraging shoe buyers
to “think outside the box” and reuse the container in additional ways.
Known for its creative marketing and corporate culture, Zappos also
created a two-minute short film to get customers’ creative juices flowing.
Titled “Box Home,” the video follows a young boy who builds a makeshift house out of household materials and donates it to a homeless man
in his community ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD7kFUhcK4Q).
To learn about additional uses for the boxes, check out www.imnota-box.com, the company’s interactive website dedicated to creativity.
Shoebox gains second life as 3-D llama
The technology for self-driving
trucks is advancing quickly, as
engineers continue to test platforms like the Google self-driving
car and Daimler’s “Freightliner
Inspiration” self-steering
18-wheeler prototype.
That process took another step
forward in April when six convoys of paired semi-automated
“smart” trucks arrived at Rotterdam harbor in the Netherlands from
starting points as far away as Sweden and Germany, according to Agence
France-Presse.
Like ducklings trailing after their mother, each truck “platoon” followed a route set by its human-driven lead vehicle, with the following
trucks autonomously tracking the leader through a wireless data link. For
purposes of the demonstration, every vehicle had a human driver monitoring its computers and sensors, said Eric Jonnaert, secretary general of
the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA).
The trucks will only start operating on a fully autonomous basis once
designers address such challenges as enabling data exchange between
trucks made by different companies, according to ACEA. Six European
manufacturers joined the exercise, supplying two trucks each.
Proponents say self-driving trucks will someday offer advantages such
as more efficient transport, a reduction in accidents triggered by human
error, and easier traffic flow thanks to consistent cruising speed.
Convoys of “drone trucks” cross Europe
