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The BBC comes up with some seriously cool ideas.

They’ve stuck a GPS device device in a 40′ shipping container to track its progress around the world for a year to display the logistic chain that underpins globalisation.

Sort of like Pietra Rivoli’s excellent “The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy” – just a bit more mass market.


Not that it’s a new idea, of course.


The Arp Museum in Rolandseck recently exhibited a project that dates back to 1980 in which 200 wooden suitcases were distributed to 200 European artists who duly artified them with the sort of things that artists do.


All sorts of wondrous stuff, from yer common or garden oil painting to electrickery things that flashed and made sounds to chess boards to my favourite – an accelerometer that documented the suitcases travels from A to B by rail (Long periods of hanging around interspersed with bouts of terrifyingly violent behavior at the hands of the railway staff. Pretty much par for the course…)

But the thing that sets the BBC’s effort apart from the rest is the fact that they appear to have created a Time Machine in the best traditions of Dr Who and the Tardis.

It starts off in Glasgow
on 10 September at 09:35

but by the time it gets to Southhampton, it’s 06:35 on 9 September – 27 hours earlier.

If it keeps on going at this rate, we’ll be back in the 18th century in no time.


They’re certainly going to get their minds seriously f%@*ed when this thing turns up.


On a sailing ship……