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O+O (Objects + Operations)
LOT-EK is a design practice that believes in being unoriginal, ugly, and cheap. Also in being revolutionary, gorgeous and completely luxurious. LOT-EK's works reveals extraordinary transformations of ordinary things - from their famous shipping container projects onward - combining maker culture and hacker culture into beautiful and radical visions for sustainable and meaningful living. The projects in this book - built, unbuilt, and in-progress; polemical, practical, and in-between - are complemented by photographys from LOT-EK
's multi-year URBAN SCAN project, a vast photographic document of infrastructure and incident; as well as essays by Thomas de Monchaux and interviews with founding partners Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano. To operate on an object is to objectify an operation. This book/text is an object; your act of seeing/reading is an operation. Read before operating. Remove before flight. Pull to arm. Discard packaging. Open other side.

Credits

Type: Monograph
Author: LOT-EK (Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano) with Thomas de Monchaux
Publisher: The Monacelli Press
Release date: August 29th 2017
Graphic Design: MTWTF

O+O can be ordered on:
Amazon
The Monacelli Press
Barnes&Noble




SPILL  @ HOSFELT GALLERY

Type: Art Exhibition
Location: San Francisco, CA
 
One 20-foot shipping container is cut into 29 pieces of different sizes and shapes. It is designated ‘out of service’. It is container number AKLU6022124. It was built in 2006. It is red. Its travel records, entirely typical of the almost inestimable 5 to 170 million shipping containers in the world, are mostly unknown. We know that over the past two years it has been in China, Singapore, Korea, Myanmar, and between those places, in international waters, on the lawless sea.

SPILL begins in response to the elusiveness and opacity of the shipping world. And to its excess. Our container has been vivisected or dissected – or cut apart or broken open – to incite pause. Its fragments are literally spilled: to welcome, to allow wondering, seating, connections and conversations, around them and in close proximity, as this completely mysterious object is now fully exposed to all.

Cuts that favor the 90-degree moments of the containers create leftovers that are simply propped up and steadied to be used and occupied. The entirety of the container is utilized—a moment of awareness and recognition; and celebrated—the ingenuity of the object and system, its essential simplicity in endless transformation.



SPILL invites proximity and intimacy. Of people with one another, And between those people, individually or collectively, with the shipping container as an object: now so very close, so very small, and so very accessible.
A set of projections, also mined from existing imagery, displays and uncovers the relentless repetition of container ports along the shorelines of our planet. With their fantastic geometries and geographies. With their violence to the richest ecology on Earth, found always at the threshold of ground and water.
We notice. We celebrate. We ruminate. We are surprised, shipwrecked, joyful, outbound, abroad, aboard, overboard, at sea, off course, and on alert.


Team

Ada Tolla, Giuseppe Lignano, Hector Song, Reza Zia, Romain Dubettier, Tala Salman, Virginie Stolz, Francesco Lagioia, with the contribution of Sanober Khan, Thomas de Monchaux and Marci Pei.

Our work on the container ports is accompanied by a collective recording. Reflections of personal experiences of the threshold between ground and water from around the planet are interspersed with data on shipping and its environmental impact.

We thank our friends who shared their stories:

Vasudha Karnani / Goa, India + Barcelona, Spain
Andrea Lagioia / Parma, Italy
Francesco Lagioia / Stromboli, Italy
Irmak Turanli / Istanbul, Turkey
Tala Salman / Beirut, Lebanon
Patricia Anahory / Cabo Verde + Atlantic Ocean
Farouk Kwaning / Tema, Ghana
Maliyamungu Muhande / Democratic Republic of Congo
Sumayya Valley / Johannesburg, South Africa
Omar Badriek / Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Usman Iqbal / Karachi, Pakistan
Rizwan Khan / Banaras, India
Praditi Singh / Mumbai, India
Thomas de Monchaux / Sidney, Australia
Hector Song / Tianjin, China
Hein Song / Busan, South Korea
Peter Miller / Seattle, Washington, USA
Devina Deo / Hayward, California, USA
Melanie Ide / Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
Inés Yupanqui / Bogotá, Columbia
Daniela Beraun / Lima, Peru
Agustina Capurro / Montevideo, Uruguay
Pedro Rivera / Rio de Janeiro + Belém do Pará, Brazil
Clare Walsh / Yarmouth, Maine
Manaal Farooqi / Kuwait + New Brunswick, Canada

Photography

Marci Pei
Napkin Poetry Review
Miles Petersen / Hosfelt Gallery
and courtesy of LOT-EK


Special thanks

BMarko Structures for their support and for letting us use their shop to do the work


Learn More

Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco / ︎

SPACER LIGHT

Type: Lamps

A “spacer band” is a steel ring at the core of the wheels of flat-bed trucks – typically used to transport shipping containers. Spacer bands need to be replaced routinely. We encountered a pile of them on a visit to our NJ container fabricator, loved their shape, simplicity, and wear, and pulled them out of their dumpster.
Cast in natural-color rubber within the spacer band, an entire 5-meter LED light strip takes a different circuitous path in each spacer band.

7 pieces – all unique

Each piece:
Materials: 1 spacer band + 1 LED strip + cast rubber
Dimensions: 20” diameter x 4” depth

LIGHT-SCAPES SF


LITE-SCAPES SF is an edition of lighting fixtures. One liter of clear colorized latex rubber is cast and threaded through with a 20” tube of LED flexible neon. The topology of each fixture derives from the packaging insert that mediates between an electric toothbrush and its shipping box. These inserts are transfer mold castings of fibrous recycled paper slurry, sprayed from a pulp pool against a metal mesh mold, to which it is adhered by a vacuum.

LOT-EK designed a special edition of LITE-SCAPES for STOREFRONT' spring benefit. This is a limited edition of 20 light pieces made with clear colored rubber molded in a small appliance (electric toothbrush) packaging insert.

These LITE-SCAPES come in 5 colors - only 4 pieces per color: red, orange, yellow, green, blue.
This is the first iteration of Storefront Editions, a series of works from the worlds of art, architecture, and design specially commissioned for STOREFRONT annual fundraiser.

Click here to view on STOREFRONT's website.



Credits

Client: Storefront for Art and Architecture
Type: Light Fixtures
Location: New York, NY
Completion: 2017

Learn more:

SINK-WALL
Client: Edizioni Press
Type: Furniture
Location: Chelsea, NYC
Size: 8’6x6’x1’deep / each
Design: 2000
Fabrication: UAF/Marc Ganzglass
Photography: Danny Bright

Two large pivoting panels are composed by assembling 12"-deep stainless steel kitchen sinks to serve as a Storage/Display/Divider System. Hinged on a central pivot, the panels are used to outline three different areas within the office of a publishing company - a conference room in the center with offices on either side. The SINK-WALLS rotate to divide or connect the spaces while they also function as storage and display units for the company’s publications. The back of each panel is coated with orange automotive high-gloss paint and finished with a layer of clear rubber. Air, light and visual connections are granted by the presence of the drainage holes located at the center of each stainless steel sinks.

THIIS ITEM IS NOW AVAILABLE FOR SALE:
Mark McDonald
330@markmcdonald.biz (518) 828-6320