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kottke.org posts about fedex

FedEx Shipping Damage Creates Fractured Artworks

Walead Beshty's FedEx artworks

Walead Beshty's FedEx artworks

Walead Beshty's FedEx artworks

Walead Beshty's FedEx artworks

Since 2007, artist Walead Beshty has been cleverly using FedEx’s shipping infrastructure to create a series of artworks. He constructs glass objects that fit exactly into FedEx’s shipping boxes and then ships them to galleries and museums without any protection against damage. Any cracks or breaks in the glass became part of the work upon display at its destination. According this interview, part of what interested Beshty about doing this project related to the proprietary sizes of FedEx’s boxes:

As for the corporate dimension, I was aware that standard FedEx boxes are SSCC coded (serial shipping container code), a code that is held by FedEx and excludes other shippers from registering a box with the same dimensions. In other words, the size of an official FedEx box, not just its design, is proprietary; it is a volume of space which is a property exclusive to FedEx. When thinking about the work, its scale and so on, it made sense to adhere to that proprietary volume, because, as a modular, it had a real and preexisting significance in daily life, it was common, specific, and immediately familiar. That is, it had an iconic resonance that a more arbitrary form or shape wouldn’t have.

And each time the work is shipped โ€” say from one gallery to another โ€” it’s unwittingly altered further by a system created by a massive multinational corporation:

Rather than thinking in terms of the Duchampian readymade, which is most often understood as operating iconically โ€” as in the appropriation and repositioning of a static thing โ€” I was thinking of readymade systems of production, of using pre-existing active systems to produce a work. No object is truly static anyway, so this opened up broader questions I had about the tradition of appropriation, the way it froze cultural signifiers and reapplied them to other contexts, treated images as dead, static things… The object isn’t treated differently than other FedEx packages, I simply used FedEx to transport an object that registers how the system treated it in aesthetic terms. The result is that the object is constantly changing. Every time the work is shipped it goes through a material transformation.


FedEx Office

Kinko’s is no more: FedEx is renaming the copy store chain to FedEx Office. Catchy!


Fun video of FedEx planes getting into

Fun video of FedEx planes getting into the Memphis airport around a thunderstorm. They look like ants trying to avoid a puddle of water. (via rw)


Shipping upgrades

This may just be the Nyquil hangover talking, but I’ve an idea. UPS, FedEx, USPS, and DHL should offer in-transit upgrades for package shipping[1]. I’m having something shipped and I realize that I would like it to arrive sooner than it is scheduled for. With computerized systems, they know exactly where that package is in their shipping system…it seems simple in theory to pluck it from its current route and get it going faster. The upgrade would probably come at premium price and not be a true upgrade in some cases[2], but it would be a useful (and potentially lucrative) feature.

[1] It’s possible that this is already possible. In the grand tradition of weblogs, no real research has been done.

[2] If you’re two days into waiting for a 5-7 day ground shipment from UPS and want it the next day, it may take a bit to get it from a semi in the middle of Montana onto a plane to Miami, i.e. not truly next-day.


Nimble companies like FedEx have helped stabilize

Nimble companies like FedEx have helped stabilize the US economy by becoming more flexible. FedEx keeps 5 empty planes flying over the US each night to help fill in surprise delivery gaps as needed.