BBC follows shipping container around the world

The BBC is following a shipping container around the world, and taking videos in an "experiment to lift the veil on the global economy and tell the stories behind the goods inside, those who make them, and how they travel to consumers."

The Box is due to arrive during the broadcast in LA from Shanghai laden with consumer goods for the American market. Matt Frei will talk to officials at the port about the impact of the global economic downturn on the shipping industry and the export market from China.

The program will also take an in-depth look at the auto-industry when Matt Frei visits the port at Long Beach where imported cars have been piling up due to dwindling demand.

Here are the videos so far:

The Box gets painted

The Box ready to start journey

BBC Box arrives in Shanghai

The Box unloads in Shanghai

BBC box leaves Greenock

Shipping ports face economic storm

New cargo for the Box

And here's a papercraft version of The Box you can make.

• [billtron]

  Didn’t Dick Hebdige and the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts do something very similar a few years ago?

• [jonathan_v]

  Check out “Allan Sekula” and “Fish Story”

  http://www.photoeye.com/bookstore/mShowDetailsbycatAmazon.cfm?Catalog=PK807&i2=3933807654

  parts were in the whitney biennal in the early 90s. he’s a calarts professor that is obsessed with containers/ports

  he’s the earliest artist i’ve known of to fixate on shipping containers

• [Anonymous]

  QUICK. Someone intercept this container and fill it will radioactive holes.

  You know, just for fun. Are pirates involved? I’d like if there were pirates.

• [Anonymous]

  ooo! ooo! what’s in the box? is it $100-dollar-bills?

  *runs off to reread Spook Country*

• [brainpicker]

  Brilliant. About time traditional media companies took on two of their biggest challenges – the power of word of mouth and the global exchange of ideas – through the dialogue appropriate for these channels. And what better way than a global guerrilla buzz effort?

• [jburris]

  what about when the box hits a port that has one of those giant stockpiles of empty containers that no one wants to pay to ship back to china?