Getting into Rotterdam

Pigeon Tour Two

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 10:30:00 +0000

The part of Rotterdam I can see from my window.

This is a guest post by Barbara Haenen. She lives in Rotterdam. I'm very inspired by it but we can discuss that some other time. It's crucial that we take note of how we interact with the city in these extraordinary weeks. - Henry

In the opening of my first Getting Into Rotterdam article, Pigeon Tour, I wrote that I had known for months I wanted to write it, and that I always knew it had to be about Blijdorp, the zoo. Ever since writing that article- in April 2017- I have known I wanted to write a second one. I didn’t come up with an idea for the second article until a few days ago, while in social co-isolation due to the national measures imposed to prevent the spreading of the novel corona virus.

On the 14th of March Blijdorp announced that they would only remain open to people with membership cards- of which, as I have mentioned previously, I am one- and for one beautiful moment I believed I would soon have the zoo basically to myself. The day after, a Sunday, the zoo closed completely. Now I can’t go to the zoo which, fortunately for me, is the worst thing the virus has done to my life so far. I’m very grateful.

Soon after I decided to find a pen and write my second GIR article. The fact that it took until now for me to make that decision is either a really weird coincidence, or not a coincidence at all. The pigeons may have been trying to tell me something after all.

The day I started writing I was sitting behind my desk, in the spot where I live my whole life these days. I read a few of the articles which alleged that in the absence of humans, dolphins had appeared in the canals of Venice. They said that because there were no boats or people on the canals anymore, the water was clear and lively now. As soon as I finished the article my music was interrupted by a commercial for dairy. It said that dairy (zuivel) is what we eat and drink here, in this country. If we had never had dairy we might also have never had the energy to build our dams (onze dijken). So without dairy, Nederland would have looked different, the commercial explained. Without dairy, we wouldn’t have ‘field cows’, but ‘sea cows’. The implication being, I assume, that sea cows are inferior to field cows. It was fantasy. The dolphin story has since been disproven- there are no dolphins in Venice, but there are lots of fish and swans.

‘Nederland draait op zuivel’ the commercial concluded, and then my music continued.
I think the stories about Venicedolphins were probably an attempt at believing in the beautiful idea that if we made more space, nature would come back, claim it, and forgive us. The dairy commercial was, I presume, an attempt to convince us all that switching to dairy alternatives would compromise our inherent national identities and cause floods. I don’t think the commercial appearing right after I finished reading the articles about dolphins is a coincidence; I think the dolphin story and the dairy commercial are counterparts. The contrast between them also stood out.

In this GIR article we will not be exploring Rotterdam, because we cannot. It would be irresponsible of me to take you on an outside Rotterdam tour now. In these current circumstances, Rotterdam exists only in the form of the street between my apartment and my supermarket, and the view from my windows. This article is about exploring Rotterdam from inside. I am left to fantasize about what the rest of the city might look like now, or what might be happening in it. Maybe we believed (sorry to group you in if you didn’t believe) that dolphins might actually be swimming around in Venice because the fantasy of the outside world is all we have, and it is getting to us.

I forgot, when I started writing this article, that when I was in the zoo in April 2017 to follow a pigeon around, that at the time all the birds had been in social co-isolation. I remembered once I re-read it. To quote myself exactly, back then I wrote: “Then I found out I couldn’t enter any bird enclosure because they were all closed off as a result of national preventative measures against bird flu”. This sentence stood out.

The view of Rotterdam from my desk.

This article is, in many ways, the sequel to Pigeon Tour. Exploring Rotterdam from within an apartment is surprisingly similar to pigeon touring. I didn’t know it yet at the time, but when I wrote Pigeon Tour 1 I was describing these current circumstances. I’m going to quote myself again- I wrote: “in order to carry out a Pigeon Tour effectively, you also need to learn to act like a pigeon, and distance yourself from the people around you. That might be the most challenging part; that pigeon touring is very isolating”, and “In the end I think you can learn the same lesson from both trying to behave more like a pigeon, and from attempting a Pigeon Tour. Which is, that things do not always go as planned”. I think I might finally understand what the pigeons were trying to tell me. This last Friday I was supposed to be at a conference, presenting. No one made it to the conference. During Pigeon Tour 1 I remarked a few times that the birds were in isolation, but I never provided any thoughts on that. I can speculate now that maybe, on some level, I knew then that it would become relevant three years later.

Of course it goes without saying that there are differences between exploring Rotterdam indoors and pigeon touring. Many things have flipped:

In 2017 I wrote that while pigeon touring, and searching for pigeons, I paid most attention to the floor and sky; that everything between the ground and sky became less interesting. The opposite is true now that I’m doing this kind of exploring. The most important parts of Rotterdam are now what is right in front of me (my window). The things I never paid as close attention to before now have to be re-evaluated. The pigeons are exploring Rotterdam still, while I can’t. There may have been a bird flu, but there is no bird virus. The pigeons are freer now, because I can’t fly out my window. But most importantly, the free wild pigeons of Rotterdam now have more room to roam, while we live in isolation. We are the zoo birds now.

Since this article is a sequel, I should pick up where the previous one left off. In the end of the last article, a blackblue bird led me to a closed door. When I looked through a crack in the door, I saw another closed door. Did it foreshadow the pigeons would change places with us this year? That we would become less like the pigeon, which-unlike all other birds in the zoo- does not have to be relegated to a specific place? Is the closed door behind the closed door the door of my apartment?
As much as that commercial may try to convince us that the Netherlands couldn’t exist without dairy, it could. The sea cow may be extinct, but the fish can still live in Venice, and I can live in co-isolation while the birds have the zoo to themselves. I hope to go outside into Rotterdam again soon, but I also hope that some things stay flipped.

A humming bird keychain dangling in front of the door of my apartment,

The Society of the Spectrecle

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 14 Jun 2018 13:48:00 +0000

(Nieuwe Binnenweg except if you were super-dimensional and could walk from and to both ends of the street at the same time.)

When I was about 14, we went on a school trip to the city of York in northeast England. One of the things we did was participating in a Ghost Tour. The curious activity consisted of a guide leading us (a group of maybe 30 kids) through the historical streets of York city centre, while giving us several accounts of paranormal haunting that were attached to storiful locations along the route. The specific mental image is fuzzy by now, but I am 80% certain he had a top-hat and a cane. The experience was coloured with a kooky(-cutter) halloween charm, and I think back to it fondly. I guess it was my first-ever exposure to a cliché form or any form of psychogeography. The notion that places can be populated by stories, which is to say space can be filled with people and events of the (possible) past, came not as revelation but more as reminder. Of course that's true, that much of human reality is just stories. When I was a slightly older teenager I remember explaining to a friend this theory of how ghosts are just the universe's way of recording human beings' interactions with the universe itself. The guy was not convinced but I was.

I do remember several stories from York. This is impressive because I don't even remember many things I've done myself from that relatively distant time. There was a loyal dog trapped in cement in the church's groundwork, barking still at the exact same hour every day, trying to alert his owner of certain danger (serving also as a grimmer version of the church bells). There was the ghosts of an entire Roman legion marching through the houses and cafés , heading toward their original destination but stuck in the timeless action of ghostly mobility. There were the small feeble touches of starved children from times of urban famine, tiny fingers from children's heights reaching for the hands of passer-bys through all eternity, asking for food but are never fulfilled. There was...

Recently I have returned to the earlier habit and hobby of aimlessly walking in Rotterdam (at this point I feel pretentious to call it "flaneren" or "dérive"). A new area of attention is how the streets are filled with the stories of my own lived experience and interactions with others in this city year after year. In a sense these are ghosts of my own making. Over the years I have taken some photos and videos of these experiences in urban space. It wouldn't be such a stretch to geotag these media artifacts with locational information and place them on a map-interface. It would be like a google streetview merged with my own memories, a personalised ghostropolis.

We walked down Nieuwe Binnenweg as it was made pedestrian-only on King's Day, and I stupidly said that the guys in great local bands are starting to be younger than me now. Or I walked to a party in heavy rain to see somebody because I was dumb (still am) and my shoes were super wet (Why did I walk from Blaak to Rotterdam Noord in the rain? Wasn't there a tram?). Or probably the last time I played music in the city on the side of the small bridge on Hoogstraat, when some guy asked me to teach him how to play the guitar, and I ended up really giving him a few lessons, even when I was hardly qualified (but in punk if you know how to play 2 chords you can teach somebody who only knows 1 chord. This is the only way we will get by). And this and that.

More recent and intense is a piece of urban memory that is, in this line of thinking, ghost-on-ghost action. We played Pokemon Go around Halloween time and there was a special in-game event where the game space is saturated with ghost-type Pokemons such as Gengar and Duskull. This is, I think, the closest we got to combining ghost-hunting with location-based mobile technology. We spent many evenings searching for pokemons in Rotterdam West. It was great fun and very precious. I haven't played much Pokemon Go since. In due time we will play again, but maybe not in Rotterdam unfortunately. The recent-past versions of us chasing ghosts here are ghosts themselves.

(Here's something I saw on Gouvernestraat. First I thought the most ghostly item in this artwork is the white rectangle at the bottom corner, having a strong presence by means of absence.)

(However as I got closer I reliased that the tree wasn't graffiti, it was actually dead. Maybe the whole situation wasn't planned to look like this at all. The wall-climbing plant could've died naturally. The story of death and decay only comes alive in the process of death and decay. We can say ghosts are stories that tell themselves.)

--
These ideas may be trite and derivative. As you like to say, with the charismatic confidence of a cult leader receiving compliments, "tell me something new". You also said, of great ideas, something like "not many of them materialise (into successful products or successful businesses)". Indeed, one time I participated in a project in which we came up with a location based augmented-reality ghost-hunting game, but ultimately it didn't materialise. For this project I wrote some characters one could encounter in the AR environment. Some memorable ones are an old pagan god made of an infinite number of hissing and writhing snakes ("Yessss....touch the earth so we may feel your sssskin...") and a (literally) fallen angel who only exists in the sounds of broken wings, and is eager to offer the player knowledge which whilst true may cause him/her great harm.

At the time I didn't think of it like this, but of course that was the first psychogeography project I was involved in the making of. Maybe that or the first ideas for this blog. It was an incubatory period for my urban imagination. In the present moment I can entertain the narrative that the two projects have come to converge in some way. The version of me which is created in the urban sensibility of GIR can be found in Rotterdam as a ghost, not unlike a loyal dog trapped in concrete eternal (isn't the concrete material ideal for horror stories involving death-by-building-construction?), or a fictional ancient god (should any god be considered ancient if believes are not preserved but rather re-created by every generation of believers?), or a Pokemon creature (imagine playing Pokemon Go but as a pokemon instead of a trainer).

As I was writing this post, I found out that Rotterdam has its own historical ghost tour.
I think I have to see it. Maybe when I do, I can really tell you about something newer than ghosts.

Pigeon Tour

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 25 Apr 2017 21:53:00 +0000

This is a guest post by Barbara Josine Haenen.

GIR is very honoured to include her contribution. I am very glad to see GIR growing to become bigger than my stupid brain. Other people from the city have always had immense influence for GIR. Without them I would never have been getting into Rotterdam at all but rather I would've just gotten into my own dumb head. -Henry

Pigeon Tour

One wednesday my roommate and I had breakfast in a café. We decided to do so because I am moving to the Amazon rainforest soon, to carry out some thesis research, and we wanted to seize the opportunity to do something fun together in Rotterdam while we still had the chance. After breakfast I dropped her off at the train station and went to the zoo to write my first ever Getting Into Rotterdam article. I decided months ago to write it, and I always knew it was supposed to be about Blijdorp. Almost every time someone asks me to suggest something fun to do in Rotterdam, I recommend the zoo. When I was very little I lived really close to it. I still visit often, I have a membership card.

On the way to the train station my roommate and I discussed what I should write about. I knew pigeons would be a good focus point. Somewhere on our walk we came up with the idea for the Pigeon Tour; it is a guided tour around the zoo, where a pigeon acts as a guide. Which means that in order to go on a Pigeon Tour, you need to go to the zoo, pick a pigeon, follow it, and see what happens.

Because this idea came to me at the last minute, when I got to the zoo, I first went to the Rivièrahal to think over the plan. The Rivièrahal was designed to look like a cathedral and contains a kind of greenhouse full of birds. Tour. In this big birdcage some of the birds get to fly around freely, outside their smaller cage. Long sheets of plastic in front of the doors keep the birds from flying into any other part of the zoo. I walked in and stood still next to a cage with two toucans in it. After I took off my jacket and my scarf I took a few steps, and the toucans followed me to the left side of their cage. The toucans couldn’t lead me anywhere because they were in a cage. None of the other birds in the Rivièrahal could take me anywhere either, because they were also in a cage, in a way. At that moment I realized, for the first time in my life, that the birds in the Rivièrahal cannot actually fly around freely. The reason I had always thought of it that way before, is that they can stand and walk around on the same path that I walked on.

The pigeon might be the best guide through life because it is completely free. I have been to the zoo many times, always with other people. Sometimes I get the sense that as a result, I end up walking around in the zoo along the same predictable routes. A pigeon could provide a good new perspective. A pigeon in Blijdorp is also a particularly suitable guide not only because no one in the zoo would think to put a pigeon in a cage, unlike a toucan, but because pigeons, like me, live in Rotterdam. There are not many animals who would know how to survive if their natural habitat were replaced with a city; a pigeon, however, finds a way. I also live in this city. Wild animals in Rotterdam generally need to be relegated to a place like the zoo, whereas the pigeon has no need for it. Pigeons don’t have to be in the zoo, but sometimes they go there anyway. So what does a pigeon do in a zoo? Where does it go?

On my way out of the Rivièrahal I accidentally chased a pigeon through the automatic doors. It felt like a sign.

And so I started the Pigeon Tour. The first thing I learned was that going on a Pigeon Tour makes no sense and is highly impractical. Pigeons fly away, and usually to places where you cannot reach them. On the way to the train station my roommate had suggested to look for a diseased pigeon, one that couldn’t fly, to follow on foot. When I couldn’t find one of those right outside the Rivièrahal I went for a walk, on my own, looking for an appropriate pigeon.

Looking for a pigeon guide made me feel like Madeline in the movie Madeline, in the scene where she loses her hat, and in order to find her hat, she pretends to be one. Eventually she finds it under her bed. I spent most of my time either looking at the floor, trying to find a walking pigeon, or at the sky, when I wanted to know how many pigeons were flying overhead. Everything else in between the floor and the sky was a little bit irrelevant. Giraffes became almost completely uninteresting. I saw a white feather lying on the floor and it looked like a clue.

It made sense to me, at some point, that it might be easier to find a pigeon, or try to be more like a pigeon, around other birds. I considered whether maybe the pigeon community in Blijdorp had managed to integrate with other bird communities in the zoo. Then I found out I couldn’t enter any bird enclosure because they were all closed off as a result of national preventative measures against bird flu. I saw some pigeons in the ostrich cage but I couldn’t follow them in there. That made all other birds more interesting, and what particularly drew my attention were the chickens. There are chickens in a chicken coop hidden behind a staircase under a wooden Longhouse.

This is a picture of me standing on top of the stairs, looking down at the hidden chicken coop.

These are some very close-up pictures of chickens, looking straight at me.

Another sign.

The chickens were interesting because they were also birds that aren’t really supposed to be there. I’ve seen many chickens in places besides the zoo and always found them more interesting in those contexts. Today, however, these chickens, hidden underneath a house and behind a staircase, seemed relevant.

In order to carry out a Pigeon Tour effectively, you also need to learn to act like a pigeon, and distance yourself from the people around you. That might be the most challenging part; that pigeon touring is very isolating. At some point I found two walking pigeons walking, so I followed them. I followed them in a circle around the little train that leaves near the zoo entrance and provides a guided tour, two times. They may have been trying to tell me something, but probably not. To other people I probably looked insane. If I were more like a pigeon I wouldn’t have cared, and that would probably have made for a better Pigeon Tour.

I found the most pigeons near cafeterias and restaurants and food stands. They were usually eating crumbs. I followed those around for a bit, in small circles around picnic tables. At the time I felt as though things were not going as planned.

In the end I think you can learn the same lesson from both trying to behave more like a pigeon, and from attempting a Pigeon Tour. Which is, that things do not always go as planned. As they often do in life. Much like being alive, going on a Pigeon Tour makes no sense sometimes. It involves a lot of wandering around aimlessly. During moments when the Pigeon Tour was not taking off, I realized how weird of an activity it was, and how nobody had asked me to do it, and as such I had no idea what exactly it was supposed to entail. In the end that didn’t matter, because I did go on a Pigeon Tour, and saw some pretty things along the way, and the air smelled nice, because it was spring. Nobody asked me to go to the Amazon rainforest for my thesis research either. Sometimes I worry that that is not going to go to plan either, or that I’ll forget why I ever went there in the first place when I get there, or that it will all start to feel ridiculous and unnecessary. But then I remember that there are beautiful trees there too. Just like in Blijdorp.

Once, outside another bird enclosure in a big net, also closed off to me because of national bird flu prevention measures, I saw a different kind of bird. It was black, or dark blue, and looked almost fluffy. I don’t know what species it was. I considered following it only because I couldn’t find a pigeon at the time and this bird was walking slowly along the path, next to lots of green. When I got closer, it flew to the top of a door made out of hollow tree trunks. It sat down and knocked its beak against the tree trunks several times, I don’t know why. But for a second I thought to myself, that maybe he was guiding me somewhere, maybe directing me towards the door.

I looked through a crack in the closed door, and a few steps behind it, I saw another closed door.

Is that you??? practiced on 01/09/16

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 15 Oct 2016 07:32:00 +0000

01/09/2016

at around 09:30 in the morning I went to Rotterdam's Eendrachtsplein and
I waited for a specific stranger who I didn't know (and who didn't know me). He also didn't know that I would be waiting to meet him. I did know his name and I knew what he looked like. I sat in a café and started waiting.

In total I waited for an hour or so. He didn't show up (this is as expected), but some ideas did pop into my head and I have been telling people about them since. A new chapter for GIR should consist of talking to people about urban wanderings and wonderings and hearing their feedback, such that GIR becomes conversational. I've been getting some feedback I liked. I heard my roommate, for example, describe this waiting exercise as "supernatural". It is very flattering. ~~I blush.~~

these are the ideas I've been talking about:

1.
I found that when I am waiting for a specific person, the way I pay attention in public space adapts to my immediate purpose. My attention spikes when someone enters my field of view. As soon as I can see someone, my attention locks onto him as I evaluate whether he is the one I have been waiting for (and an anticipation builds up). As soon as I confirm that he is not (and feel a slight disappointment), my attention shifts to the next person who enters my field of vision. I don't notice anyone who exit my FoV because it is irrelevant to my immediate objective.

I also found that I was paying specific attention to people who looked like the guy I was waiting for. This was a 20-something brown-skinned Asian guy with black hair. Every time such a person appears I notice my anticipation rising. Even though none of them was my target-person, just the fact that they share some physical features makes them more likely to be him. On the other hand, every person who do not meet these physical requirements (anyone who would be female, white, black, blonde hair, red hair, elderly, children etc) were quickly screened out and ignored. Because of my immediate purpose, so many had become effectively invisible, while those who fit my criteria become extra-visible. I know that in this hour I saw a lot of brown Asian men at Eendrachtsplein. I have no idea how many black women walked by.

I think the key meta-observation is that, were the subject of my wait to be a different person, my experience of waiting and seeing people in a public space would also have been completely different. The experience of being in a public space and watching people could, therefore, be designed, by giving the observer a specific purpose. With different sets of purposes, being in the same location in the same city watching the same pedestrians could result in different sets of feelings and conclusions. If you want yourself or someone else to feel a certain way about a city and its people, you could design a waiting exercise to achieve this goal. ( The skin/hair features is just incidental in my practice but one quick idea for a desirable goal would be, for example, to combat or study racial profiling.)

I didn't apply a narrative to the exercise because I wanted this session to be simple. But it is of course possible to do such a thing. I could pretend, for example, to be my subject's long-lost childhood friend. Maybe he had saved my life in the local swimming pool. Maybe he owed me a lot of money but I have recently decided to forget about it. With plot-devices such as these, the waiting (and the anticipation-disappointment cycle) could become much more emotional and theatrical. Alternatively, I can also pretend to be an assassin with a contract on someone's head. Or, as per the assassin trope, I could be an assassin who has a contract on another assassin's head, and I anticipate to strike him at his most unsuspecting moment: as he makes his kill on a target (who is the person we both wait for).

Designing a narrative for waiting would be, in many sense, like directing a movie , only that the movie exists both in the urban physicality and in your head, and you are directing and watching at the same time. For me this also implies an experience that is super-immersive, super-entertaining and super-satisfying (or super-under-satisfying as the target person will most likely not show up). While I am interested in virtual reality and augmented reality via technology, I think I am even more interested in augmenting your own reality via an internal head-theatre.

2.
The other thing I noticed during my practice was that a lot of other people were also waiting for someone. I can tell from the way they look around and pay attention and from their body language of patience and expectation (and slight boredom). Public space, especially those near hubs of transportation, are also waiting space. These are locations that people would typically arrange to meet. You could also say that they are meeting space. Indeed, in any kind of meeting, unless ALL parties arrive at EXACTLY the same time (which is unlikely), there is bound to be some waiting. The wait could be very long or very short, but it is almost inevitable, and therefore all meeting space are also waiting space.

And then, in the English language at least, "meeting" could have two meanings: 1) It could be an arranged appointment where people physically gather, 2) or it could be people getting to know each other for the first time. In both kind of meeting some waiting is involved. There is tremendous poetry in imagining the city as a place where people wait for and meet each other. Did I just say tremendous poetry? Did I mean to demonstrate that my imagination of romantic urban feelings are still those of hazy and blurry teen dreams?

When I was a teenager I had this fantasy that people would be able to find a kind of soulmate who match the exact quirks in their personality, such that when they arrange a meeting, instead of being on time, they would both be early or both late, but exactly as early or as late as each other. In my more recent fantasy I think the city is a complex network of waitings and meetings and what is late for one person could be early for another person. What is late for one meeting could be early for another meeting, etc etc. Waiting, therefore, is the consequence of every unique mismatch between people, and the fact that they eventually manage to meet at all is them counter-balancing this mismatch by making the effort to catch each other in the flow of space-time.

My father has a story of when he was young, he had arranged a date with this girl he really liked, but on his way to that meeting place he got into a traffic accident and his motorbike was wrecked. On that day he never got to go and meet her. There was also no mobile phone in this time, there was no way for them to contact each other, and he wondered how long she waited for him (minutes? hours?). He never saw that girl again. He felt pretty bad about this. And then, some time (maybe years) later, he met my mother.

There is beauty in the kind of waiting where the other person never shows up. The city is full of people waiting for and meeting or not meeting other people, and the city is therefore both a complex network of human intersections and a complex network of human mismatch. As I practice the exercise I participate in these networks and they become overwhelming.

Urban Poetics #1: "Is That You???"

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 13:19:00 +0000

In this series of Urban Poetics, I describe urban experiential exercises and I go perform them in Rotterdam. Some of them are inspired by existing theories and practices. Some of them will be my own invention. Most of them will be some kind of play that induces an atypical experience of the city. You could go do them (and modify them) and record your findings too. These are acts that could possibly generate rich inspirations, or poor inspirations, or an overwhelming-ness or underwhelming-ness, or regeneration or other forms of urban satisfaction.

My current approach is to take the plunge and hope for the best.

--
This first workshop entry, "Is That You???", is an exercise in "waiting for someone to show up" as it's own independent cycle of means and end.

The exercise is inspired by Debord's notion of the "possible-rendezvous." but specified for our time and for (I think) a more incisive effect on the practitioner.

It is a meditation on the city as a place where people meet each other (both in a cosmic-fatal sense and in a day-to-day arrangement sense), supplemented with a meditation of the internet as a place where people meet each other (also both in a cosmic-fatal sense and in a day-to-day arrangement sense). As the ties between urbanity and the internet become tighter and thicker, these meditations become increasingly relevant (in the same ways that meditations are ever considered to be relevant).

The exercise is described in 3 (+1) steps.

Step 1.
Go on Facebook and choose a random person using a random-selection method.

The least complicated way I came up with is to use a random name generator . Generate one name (first name), and search for this name on Facebook.

The first person that comes up should be the person you wait for.

Step 2.
Go to a location where people usually arrange to meet up with each other, i.e. some sort of urban gathering point. You could choose a landmark or a station of public transport (e.g. bus or metro station).You could also go to a café, but then you probably have to order. Any other location where you would meet up with someone is possible too.

Imagine a reasonable time for a meet up and go to this location at that time. This is dependent on your personal interpretation of reasonableness. (I wouldn't go at 3 AM but you could do that if you're okay with waiting for people at this time).

I chose to go to the famous Kabouter Buttplug in Rotterdam at 09:30. This is a most typical location for people to meet. I've met with many people here countless times.

I drank coffee when I waited.
Is there a better waiting-drink? What about waiting-food?

Step 3.
Stay in that location and wait for that randomly selected person to show up at the pre-imagined time.

You could bring a book or listen to portable music, just do what you would usually do when you wait to meet up with someone at a specific spot. Remember, though, to keep your eyes and ears open enough so that IF this person actually shows up, you could notice him/her. Wait until the meeting time, and then wait for as long as you would like to afterwards. I suggest waiting for a minimum of 30 minutes and maximum of a million years. Leave whenever you want to, but try to have some patience.

Step 4. (optional)
blog about it

--
I'm off to talk about this exercise at the TEDxRotterdam open mic. When I get back I will type up a full post about its outcomes and other thinkings. First I need to sort them in my head to be spoken.

National Exhibition of Bollards

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 14 May 2016 10:42:00 +0000

I still remember the first time I saw these poles from across the street, and my immediate reaction was that "duuuude this is GIR as fuuuck". Maybe I should work on being able to pause this GIR-radar from my urban perception. Maybe it distracts/distorts a direct and natural interaction with the city. Writing this blog had, in some ways, influenced what I tend to pay attention to when I walk on the streets. And as you know, to pay attention to something is also (by definition) to ignore something else. Attention is psychic energy and I only have so much. When will I get omniscience? I wonder if King Solomon had that. I wonder if ultimate wisdom can enable one to simulate omniscience. I wonder if the Masons know some techniques in the art of maximising psychic energy and experiencing the universe as built space.

I digress! These poles, or as I've since learned are called 'bollards', convene on a street corner at Vierambachtsstraat in Rotterdam's Nieuwe Westen. The open space is labelled "Landelijk Tentoonstelling Voor Paal", or "National Exhibition of Bollards". The bollards of different shapes, sizes and purposes are brought in from various cities in the Netherlands and collected in one location here. I read that the local resident's organisation set it up in 1994. Whoever that dreamt up this idea must have had a charismatic and affective mind. Building something like this really is an act of empowerment. It is one thing to travel around the country, taking mental pictures of different traffic poles and proclaim that your brain contains a National Bollard Compendium. It is another thing to build the compendium into a physical museum, so that anyone in the presence of the collection has immediate experience to the national variations of this specific street-furniture item. How different can Dutch cities be, when it comes to small details on their street sides? Here is exactly how different they can be. Look. You can see. You can even touch. Feel the difference. Go on. Yes, that IS concrete with extra gravel.

I don't think I have a favourite, although there are some specific ones that I liked.

This thing with a little blue house is nice. It could be a shrine. Maybe as an impromptu mini temple, you could place a small idol in the house and quickly say a prayer. Next person, next sacred item in-house, next god, next religion. Modular micro-worship spot for a multi-religious community. Utopic!

This one is made of wood and looks like it belongs in water. I'm quite sure I've seen others like it in canals and the sides of lakes. It is extra exceptional, then, to see it on land.

"Chaining totems". Ok that doesn't really sound like Channing Tatum. Forced jokes are embarrassing. I remember one time I've seen a toddler trying very hard to step over a chain hung between two poles just like this. I watched the kid struggle for a while, and then, in demonstration of my adult manoeuvrability, I walked up and gracefully hopped over the chain, or anyways I tried. The chain caught my foot, I tripped and fell and almost face-planted on the pavement. Hahaha.

I'm not sure what these guys are supposed to be. A couple? Two dancers shortly before a duet? Rival swordsmen? Two raindrops one millisecond after impacting the ground? All of the above?

This pyramid is kind of like a centrepiece of the exhibition. I like to imagine that it is a live-size pyramid (like those at Giza), and the other poles ancient skyscrapers made of metal and stone. The entire site become mythological and epic from the perspective of an ant-size observer. That's the magic of proportions, no? If you imagine your "true self" resting in an infinitely small centre core of your body, then your physical body becomes like the size of an universe.

I should probably stop demonstrating my imaginaut manoeuvrability before I trip myself some more. The exhibition could look like many things (a chess game frozen in time, a graveyard, a system of sun dials etc etc), but there is tremendous charm and wonder in what it already is. It's just visually amusing to see all these poles hanging out here. I read that local people sometime use this space as a meeting spot. You can even sit on some of the shorter bollards. It's basically brilliant. I dunno if GIR can ever be a physical museum as great as this one, but I hope that these words at least offers an urban mental space for you guys to hang out. I'm hanging here all the time. Jeez, who needs omniscience when you have GIR? Why would I ever pause my GIR radar? I fucking love it.

small picture post 1

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 31 Oct 2015 11:34:00 +0000

I haven't had time to do bigger posts for GIR (but I do have big plans) (my life looks like it's made up of doing 1% of 100 different big plans)

Here is a small post with some loose pictures from the past year

Rotterdam Central Station, February 2015

I'm pretty sure this was valentine's day

I like to make these small gifs because they capture moving moments in a kind of flux

it's the intersection between motion and immotion

I also want to do a blogpost on screens and moving images in the city

we are saturated with them

Nesselande, November 2014

Small bridge. In this case what I like is how I always set my handycam on auto and it always surprises me with bizarre and surreal white balance. This was taken a while ago though, and it was taken at the twilight after sunset. Maybe the colours really did look like that. It is now November again. I should go back.

Spijkenisse, November 2014

Entrance to pedestrian/bicycle underground passage. These pillars have multi-coloured huge marbles embedded in them. The whole underground tunnel section has marbles in their walls too.

Near Luchtsingel, November 2014

Concrete stumps with tops painted yellow. I wonder if their positions map out some astrological sign? They can be used as stools, but also they seemed very appropriate to practice parkour on. I also really liked that snake and I wanted to do a blogpost on the Serpent City, looking for signs and symbols of snakes in Rotterdam. I might still do it, but I think this specific snake is painted over with new graphics now.

Swan Market in Van Nelle Factory, Februrary 2015

Blurry image of the Swan Market so as to not violate anyone's privacy. There is good food at the Swan Market. The Van Nelle factory is also an UNESCO world heritage site. Re-using old factory buildings for new creative industries seems to be fashinable parlance in the grammar of urban strategies. In Rotterdam I also know there is De Fabriek van Delfshaven. There are probably more in the country (I've seen some in Eindhoven). I like them. Sometimes they give off this yuppie aesthetics but whatevr bro it's nice and snug and we are allowed this comfort zone.

Details: Station Noord (& space-time)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 27 Jul 2015 11:49:00 +0000

I spent some time on and around the Rotterdam Noord train station. This is a small station that has two platforms (one for each direction) and a building attached to its southern side. The building was constructed in 1953 and housed a NS office as well as a passengers' waiting room on the top floor. At one time this was a more crucial point of transit, and international trains to Germany used to stop here. Only slower sprinter trains stop at this station now. The NS office also closed down in the early 2000s, and the building, no longer needed for its original purposes, had been converted into an art exhibition space. Usually it's pretty great for everyone if any old-timer finds new life in artistic expression, and especially if the artwork connects with a relevant piece of his/her history.

I don't know what art projects are currently going on in here though. The space has a website, it has a recording of some projects that took place before, but the site doesn't say anything about the now. The door seemed closed too but maybe I should've knocked.

Anyways I was here in the now, and I walked around the station in hope to notice some details. I can share a few with you.

--

==PLATFORM 1==

two Thomassons at Station Noord

I've briefly written about the stamp machines in Rotterdam Central Station before. In that same blogpost I also spoke of Genpei Akasegawa's Thomassons. Thomassons are, in Akasegawa's definition, inexplicable objects that can be observed on the streets: architectural vestiges in the urban environment. As the urban landscape experiences renovations and transformations, some small details from previous times are left behind, for one reason or another. Stairs that lead to nowhere, walls that define no specific spaces, these are objects that serve no real purpose other than simply being there, yet they have been indefinitely maintained in their original places. Therefore, Akasegawa concluded, they must be works of art.

These two things seen at Platform 1 are, then, prime examples of Thomassons. An elevated door on an outer wall that 1)doesn't open and 2)doesn't provide entrance/exit to anywhere, such a door is a classic Thomasson. Its kind had been spotted all over the world (1, 2, 3, 4). This specific door used to connect the waiting room to the platform, but the small bridge in between had since been demolished.

The outdated stamp machine, like its cousins in Central Station, is also a functionless urban object that's maintained in its original place, and therefore another Thomasson. The label, Buiten Dienst (out of service), is appropriate for both items in this situation.

I do find charm and comfort in many otherwise functionless things, but I don't have a great thesis that frames Thomassons in an anti-economic-efficiency meaning-structure. Also I don't know if Akasegawa would consider a comprehensive meaning-structure necessary, he was primarily interested in urban objects as they are. My best shot at this would be to imagine two hypothetical urban societies that mark the two ends of a spectrum, one super-sterile and completely without Thomassons, another super-chaotic and saturated with Thomassons. Neither scenario is entirely desirable, but if our society is placed in a middle of that spectrum, I'm pretty sure I prefer for it to move towards the latter. It would be a culturally richer society that has a physicality which spans across more time.

--
Walking to the end of Platform 1, there are some more leftovers that are less visible. Probably there are many more that I cannot see at all. These don't qualify as Thomassons because they're not maintained but rather are abandoned.

greenery behind the end of platform 1 contains leftovers

(Concrete stubs in the green. The first one is near the building. The last one has the NS name on it.)

==PLATFORM 2==

Image from https://www.burobeleving.nl/

On Platform 2's noise barriers we see the artwork of Aukje Litjens, titled Vogelvlucht (Bird Flight). It is the flying motion of a white bird, presented in a progression of moments in time. When passengers are riding on the Intercity toward Rotterdam Central and passing through this station in speed (the Intercity doesn't stop here) , it may be possible to view this artwork as an animation. It is an example of viewing movement-through-time by experiencing movement-through-space.

Alternatively, I have also animated this artwork as a gif image, so it is now possible to view this animation without being on a train. There were 64 frames, each a different moment in the bird's flight. Note that I chose to perceive this work as one bird in flight through time presented in 64 moments, but it is also possible that these are 64 birds flying one after another, frozen in the same moment in time.Or it could be 32 birds frozen in 2 moments in time, or 2 birds in 32 moments or 8 birds in 8 moments etc. My intuitive perception is not more correct than any other possibilities.

--
At several different points on Platform 2, I have noticed leaves from nearby trees that grew through the crevices between the metal sheets of the noise barriers and made their way in.

Some of them are painted black while others remain green. Presumably the black leaves were painted over when they did the paint job on these metal parts. My initial speculation was that these leaves must have grown out at different points in time, some before the paint job and some after, and if we look at the painting schedules in the last year we might speculate when did each of these strands of leaves breach the barrier.

On second thought, the more likely possibility is that they only did the paint job on specific sections of the barriers in order to cover up some graffiti. Therefore some areas were painted and some were not.

To determine how likely each of these possibilities are (they could be both true), I would have to know the (re)-painting schedule of this station and also the growth schedule of these trees (eg knowing if they shed off dead leaves every year and grow everything anew). The painting information I could not find anywhere. As for the trees, I looked up these trees on the Bomenspotter Rotterdam app, and their species is Platanus x hispanica (also know as London Plane). These are, indeed, deciduous plants that loose all their leaves annually in winter and grow new ones in spring. All these leaves must be new, so I guess, then, that the paint job was done pretty recently in the past 2-4 months or so. The leaves at these different spots on the platform are also roughly the same size, so they can't be too different in age. If we look into recent graffiti photos on the platform (like these) since the start of 2015 and identify which graffiti disappeared, we can probably figure out a timeline.

(and probably the first step in understanding any stretch of history is figuring out a timeline.)

rotterdam sci-fi snippets

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 24 Jun 2015 13:15:00 +0000

Earlier in 2015, I have entered some pictures into a sci-fi contest organised by the Center for Histories of the Future (CHIFT). The assignment was to take and/or modify a picture of some place in Rotterdam, with the purpose to imagine the city in 2115, one hundred years from now. The contest is currently being reorganised. I'm not sure when all the entries will be made visible on their site, so I thought I would share my pictures here. Each entry has a picture accompanied by one short description of a scenario. I have made 3 of these.

-An'Gels-

An'Gels, creatures made of light, have descended from the sky to share with us the Arcane Secret of the Universe (ASU). They ask for nothing in return, but will share the information under one condition:

The An'Gels detest the ground, and will only allow this information to be transferred from at least 150 meters away from the Earth's surface.

In an arrangement between An'Gels and the Dutch government, it was decided that the ASU will be broadcasted from the tallest buildings in the Netherlands, in Rotterdam's Noordeeiland. The information will be broadcasted in light-based wireless telecommunication (Li-fi). During broadcasting, all lights in the city must be turned off.

-Smart Segway-

In 2115, Rotterdam, like many other urban areas in the world, had adopted a mechanism of perfect-traffic. Every type of traffic is connected to the internet and regulated to prevent accidents. Not only are cars and public-transport automated, walking and cycling had also been completely replaced by the Segway. Pedestrians and cyclists were unruly, unpredictable and uncontrollable, and they presented a high level of threat to other road users. The Smart Segway systems, on the other hand, can detect and prevent any dangerous traffic situation. Users will be unable to drive their wifi-connected Segways into danger, as the perfect-traffic mechanism stops them from doing so.

In 2115, the number of traffic accidents in Rotterdam is 0.

- E-B Chronogate-

In the year 2115, one-way time travelling had been invented. Scientists developed advanced Chronogate technology that allows any matter (including human beings) passing through the gate to be reliably launched into the year 3115. There's no way of knowing whether these matter will ever make their way back. There's no way of knowing whether inhabitants of the 32nd century are happy to receive anything or anyone from 2115.

As it stands, many people are willing to find out. There are many reasons to leave the year 2115. Even though there is no way of knowing what 3115 is like, many are willing to take their chances, believing that things can only get better in the future. This popular demand for time travelling grew so intense, that cities around the world began to construct public-access Chronogates. In Rotterdam, the derelict Erasmusbrug had been readjusted to fulfil this new purpose.

After paying an operational fee, Rotterdamers can drive their modified vehicles into the E-B Chronogate and leave everything else of 2115 behind. It is not unlike the ancient folklore of Elves leaving Middle Earth. As this is not an easy decision, however, there are also many who take a U-turn right before the gate and drive straight back into Rotterdam city. It must be noted that those who change their mind at the final moment are not entitled to a refund.

If the best science fiction asks questions rather than provide answers, then I'm probably pretty talented at making sci-fi. I'm way better at posing questions than finding answers. Anyways if we're talking about the future, many answers are not found but rather are made. I like the phrasing of CHIFT founder Etienne Augé: Science fiction doesn't predict the future, the future doesn't exist yet. Sci-fi does, however, prevent and invent many versions of the future. The Rotterdam-based CHIFT aims to cultivate sci-fi in the Netherlands. If successful, it would be truly empowering for the Dutch society to be able to prevent and invent versions of the future to its own liking.

On my end, this notion is relevant to one specific GIR project. On the very first GIR blogpost I wrote about using the Rotterdam metros as a system for fortune-telling. I have been meditating and developing this system since, I will elaborate on this in another blogpost (hopefully soon). The teaser thought, so to speak, is this: Wouldn't it be personally empowering, for you to be able to prevent and invent different interpretations of your own future?

While CHIFT advocates the societal relevance of sci-fi, I have been meaning to advocate the personal relevance of magic practices. As it turns out, we could both design processes to advance our respective fascinations while incorporating the Rotterdam urban environment. I'm pretty excited to see the other sci-fi contest entries when CHIFT eventually makes them viewable. It's usually great fun to experience the city through any kind of genre-specific fascination. In addition to the Sci-Fi City and the Magic City, we can also live in the Romantic-Thriller City, the Noir City, the Horror-Comedy City and so on and so forth.

searching for darkness on the EUR campus

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 13 Apr 2015 23:24:00 +0000

I was at a Surveillance & Digital Rights symposium at the Erasmus University. A specific takeaway I'd like to re-mention here is that the surveillance issue should never be treated as a zero sum situation between security and privacy. That is not the relationship we should assume between two ideas that are themselves never clearly and appropriately defined in the first place.

Later in the day I've used this false-dichotomy to think about lights in the urban night time setting. The modern urban space is usually lit up at night to improve safety and prevent crimes. In being so, however, people (criminal or otherwise) have lost the secrecy of public darkness to conduct their business in. Is public darkness EVER desirable? How about privacy in the public space?

I'm not a lighting engineer/designer/critic, I guess what I am is a fan of lighting, and I think of lights accordingly. I'm directing a horror short film late April ~~(am I not yet the coolest guy you know? Have I told you I also play the guitar?)~~, and the pre-production process had encouraged me to ask myself how darkness makes me feel, both on film and in real life. Does it scare me? Does it make me uneasy? Am I afraid of the dark?

I imagine that most people are not afraid of darkness per se, but rather of the implications of darkness. I can try to categorise the implications into two groups. 1) Firstly, what we cannot see, we also cannot know (or anyways cannot know soon enough to react to). It is a fundamental fear of an Unknown which can be whoever/whatever that resides IN the dark. 2) Secondly, in the darkness we cannot be seen, and we cannot be known. It is the fear of losing connections to the world, of being fundamentally alone, of being cut off, friendless and helpless.

You think darkness is your ally? You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, moulded by it! I didn't see the light until I was already a man, and by then it was nothing but blinding.

-Bane, The Dark Knight Rises

There IS a difference between you and me. We both looked into the Abyss. But when it looked back at us, you blinked.

-Batman, Crisis on Two Earths

Certainly there is not only fear. Each of those two implications of darkness has its seductive counterpart. To phrase them tersely, 1)There is pleasure in anticipating the excitement and curiosity of the Unknown, and 2) There is power in secrecy and mystery, there is power in BEING the Unknown. Indeed the darkness of Gotham City had enriched and empowered Batman and his villains both.

And then there's Frank Miller's famous analogy: "Metropolis is New York in day time, Gotham is New York at night." Rotterdam is, no doubt, the nearest thing to NYC in this country. Accordingly, R'dam at night is the closest we can have to Batman's Gotham. Can we dream, here, of a Dark Knight rising?

On the night of the symposium, I gathered some of these ideas and set out for darkness on the EUR campus, hoping to find its darkest corners. I didn't have equipments to measure darkness, but anyways the kind of darkness we talk about should be experienced (rather than measured). I did a walking sweep on the Woudstein campus at between 21:00 and 23:00. The (spatial) coverage of this small investigation is limited, as is the night-time capabilities of my handy-cam, and I couldn't capture many visual examples in picture. However I think it is appropriate to present locations of darkness in a cannot-see. This single corner, in the following not-very-visible picture, is (in my experience) the darkest point in this institution (or anyways in all of its exteriors).

I will not identify this spot on a campus-map (I imagine this as a polite gesture in talking about the dark and the unknown and the private). For those who do walk on the EUR Woudestein campus it's pretty easy to find anyways. It is not only a dark spot but also provides some level of segregation from the campus' various night noises (eg the water fountains). It is a zone of open-air late-night dark-tranquillity, fit for meditation and/or a breather.

Probably, if we're measuring, this point doesn't have an extreme absence of light. In fact there is a (tube) light hanging not too far from it. BUT it is precisely this tube lamp that give off an obtrusive glare, which made the darkness appear much darker to my eyes in comparison. In every other dark spot I have noticed on campus, there were also always some remarkable relationship between light and shadow. In every case it is the surrounding lights that emphasised the shadows and vice versa. Surely the literary imagery of the light-dark contrast is a cliché, but I think the real-life conscious visual-experience of the literary imagery is not.

If we refer back to the discussion about security and privacy, we may notice metaphorical parallels. The sense of security/safety can be related to privacy in non-antagonizing ways. It is not difficult to see that in some contexts we need to feel secure in order to feel private, and feeling private can also make us feel secure. On the other hand, acts meant to 'protect' our security can 'invade' our privacy, and there are situations where we may find other people's private business threatening our sense of security. Is this not like the empowering-depowering double-nature of public darkness/lighting?

We can take these observations & discussions out of the university campus and into different parts of the city at night time. There are also other night-time light-related observations I want to look into that are outside of this metaphorical framework. (I think people's faces have more cinematic character under yellow street lights than white ones, for example, but I want to find a way to attest this point without too much staring. That's one thing.) Luckily the nights are warmer this season and it feels swell to be outside. Unluckily the nights are much shorter and I have less time. Anyhow these night sessions are on the list of things I should plan for. There are several GIR posts that I have planned and am excited about. On this matter I shall not keep you in the dark for long.

The longest poem in the world and the longest 3-word poem in the world

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 28 Feb 2015 19:51:00 +0000

Let's pretend this is a section of a job interview. Currently my greatest weakness is that I don't know the Dutch language well enough to fully appreciate Dutch poetry. This is a most critical gap in my daily human experience. When I see a street name I cannot recognize its poetic qualities. When I hear people's conversation on trains or buses I cannot convert these lines into songwriting or cabaret, I wouldn't know where to start. I don't recognize puns. I don't know what is an inherently funny word and what is a sad one and what is both.

It is with this weakness in mind that I come to approach the longest poem in the world, situated right here in Rotterdam. That is, funnily enough, not a poetic metaphor for a unique relationship between the city and space-time. The single longest piece of poetry in the entire world is literally, physically, situated in Rotterdam. It is about 900 metres long.

The poem is "Voor Ari" by Rotterdam's Jules Deelder. It was written for his then-new-born daughter, Ari, in 1985. The poem is placed along tiled walls of the pedestrian/biking path of the Beneluxtunnel that crosses the Maas from underneath, between Vijfsluizen and Pernis. Today I have walked through the tunnel and back. The above photo is what it looks like on the inside. These following photos were taken at its entrance. The full text of the poem, together with translations from A View From the Cycle Path, is also posted below.

Lieve Ari

Wees niet bang

De wereld is rond

en dat istie al lang

De mensen zijn goed

de mensen zijn slecht

Maar ze gaan allen

dezelfde weg

Hoe langer je leeft

hoe korter het duurt

Je komt uit het water

en gaat door het vuur

Daarom lieve Ari

Wees niet bang

De wereld draait rond

en dat doettie nog lang

Dear Ari

Don’t be afraid

The world is round

and it has been for long

The people are good

the people are bad

But they all go

the same road

The longer you live

the shorter it takes

You come from the water

and go through the fire

Therefore dear Ari

Don’t be afraid

The world turns around

and it will do for long

If we are being critically precise, I must mention that I've only seen some internet sources claimed this poem to be the world's longest poem, but there is not a Guinness World Record or anything like that so it's not a status approved by an international authority. Anyhow it is not a very meaningful title (internationally approved or otherwise) because there's no definitive measurement when it comes to anything poetic. I can write a 3-word poem, for example, and physically place one word in the Netherlands, one in Belgium and one in Luxembourg. When I connect the 3 words in an imaginary straight line, that will probably be a pretty long line, thus making it physically a very long poem. But I don't suppose this imaginary long line should be very meaningful for me or the poem's readers (unless the 3 locations where the words are placed have specific meanings in themselves!) (wow jesus christ i think I just came up with a geo-poetic smartphone app idea).

Forget the app idea for now. I liked the 3-word poem idea. The poetic urban experience is supposed to be playful-constructive, and when I go somewhere I also want to make something. I have, therefore, written the world's longest 3-word poem, placed alongside the world's longest poem, spanning across the Beneluxtunnel. One word I've placed at the beginning of the tunnel, one word in the middle and one near the end. ~~You may be glad to find that these are not 3 words of a specific psycho-emo-romcom selection (I should stop milking this sensitivity before it tires me out)~~ My poem is as follows:

I decided not to leave this poem at the location but to bring it home. I'm keeping it on the map on my door for now. This is, at the moment, a regular 3-word poem that was once the longest 3 word poem in the world. It is also in this practice that I present my second-greatest weakness: When I don't have an emotional grasp of the situation (notice how I didn't comment on Deelder's actual poem due to language barrier etc) I often choose to distract myself by making my own (mostly irrelevant) poetry and/or other creative work. I think this habitual evasive action does not build a sustainable relationship between my emotions and the environment. But it does produce art that I feel okay about.

Does this answer your question?

Details: Stamp Machines and foot-printed map (Rotterdam Central Station)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 15:01:00 +0000

Genpei Akasegawa (RIP) is a major inspiration for this blog. In the mid 80s, he and several other Japanese architects/artists founded the Roadway Observation (RoJo) Society. This group produced tremendous fieldwork on observations and recordings of objects in the urban environments, objects that are often otherwise overlooked and ignored. I think the keyword is objects. The group was not primarily interested in contexts or in the broader social/cultural structures in which these objects existed. They simply took pleasure in admiring the details of the littlest things. Another way to describe their practice was 'Street Detailing'.

I'm considering copying/echoing some of this group's methodologies in Rotterdam. I want to go hunt for Genpei Akasegawa's Thomassons, and I want to imitate Joji Hayashi's process of observing and typifying manhole covers. Before I do any of that, I thought I would do smaller spontaneous sessions to test the waters. The other night I tried to perform some detailing in Rotterdam Central Station. I'll talk about some objects I saw.

Two stempelautomaten, or 'stamp machines', are located outside the main Metro entrance in Rotterdam's Central Station. If you were living in the Netherlands before 2010 or so, you might remember that before the OV Chipkaart system was introduced, we used paper tickets for public transport, and the tickets had to be stamped by the stempelautomaat to be validated. These yellow porters were made figures of authority. It was only with their approval that we were allowed to travel. It was kind of like going through customs at the boarder and needing to have your passport stamped by some bureaucrat. In truth, machines of this nature can be the perfect bureaucrat.

Alas, the glory days of the yellow bureaucrats had passed, the paper tickets are now completely phased out (since July 2014), and the stamp machines are put out of work. If an innovative repurposing does not come into the picture soon, these machines are also practically put on death row. Currently they are tied up to metal poles in this busy transit spot for (shameful) public display of a medieval fashion, made examples of as bureaucratic figures from a bygone era who had become useless and obsolete. The two machines, numbered 15 and 16, are kept alive for now, as they're still each hooked into the power supply. I don't know when they will finally be disposed, but you can drop by and offer them some consolation before it's too late. Maybe even give them a hug. It really helps to get a hug when you're feeling useless, no?

These are the granite stairs at the bottom of the metro exit toward the bus stations in Rotterdam Central. At the lowest stair there is a strip of exposed cement. I'm not sure what's the functionality of this design but I've seen it on several of these granite stairs in Central Station. I would like to figure out their original purpose soon.

Anyways I paid specific attention to the ones in the picture because they are imprinted with distinguishing patterns. These were probably footprints on wet cement. But they look like maps of some areas in Rotterdam's inner city (near the river). It is most likely a random pattern and this map-look is a beautiful illusion. But let's envision alternative scenarios where it is not:

What if... the inner city map is patternised and strategically used as decoration around the exits of public transport stations?

What if... special shoes were issued for those (cement pourers) employed by the municipality, shoes that have the city map engraved onto their soles? And extending this shoe idea, what if your footprint actually prints something meaningful, and by simply walking about you are taking your city to every place you've been to? People had tried to put maps on shoes, but I haven't seen anyone try to put maps under them. Those would be the perfect shoes to express someone's emotional connection to a specific city. Imagine that wherever you walk to in the world, you are still always walking on the streets of your hometown...

Maps can be the best kind of summary of how a city physically IS. It is, then, extremely suitable to use this visual summary for symbolic purposes. Appropriating maps into usable symbols and patterns is, I think, a crucial design task for every city and even every city district.

Not Rotterdam: Platform 9 and 3/4 at King's Cross (London)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 01 Feb 2015 19:58:00 +0000

still from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001)

Earlier in January I was in London for a few days. On a Thursday morning we went to King's Cross station in search for the famous Platform 9 and 3/4. This platform is, as you might know, the only place to board the steam train to Hogwarts. It's also one of the many entrances to a wizarding world that is very good at disguising itself in plain Muggle sights.

These secret entryways are charming illustrations of the reason why I'm drawn to psychogeography and urban-observation to begin with . I like to look out for "hidden" details, meanings, and possibilities in the urban environment. The idea that behind every dirty brick wall there could (literally) be an entire hidden magical world entertains me profoundly.

We checked into platform 9 with our Oyster cards and walked between platforms 9 and 10 to look for this specific pillar as depicted in the film scenes. There is however no such specific place. After some wandering, a station employee noticed us and asked if we were looking for Harry Potter. He then directed us out of the platforms and toward a brick wall on one side of the station. There was an installation on the wall and a group of tourists lined up to have their pictures taken with it. The scene looked like this:

There were, in fact, two other employees tasked with handling the tourists. One of them was taking 'official' photos that can later be purchased at the Harry Potter Shop some 20 meters away. The other one was readying Hogwarts scarves for tourists to borrow and take pictures with. The scarves come in colours of each of the 4 Hogwarts houses. If you wish to, he would also hold up one end of the scarf and shake it up and down to make your picture looks like you're in motion.

So the place is made touristy and campish and it's perfectly reasonable. It's easy to understand why they would like to direct tourists off the platforms and direct tourists' money into Harry Potter's pockets. An observer should notice, however, that this location for photoshoot is NOT the real entrance to Platform 9 and 3/4. It is at an irrelevant location in the station's floor plan. It is physically manufactured to emulate the real deal, while the real entrance remains between the actual walls between Platform 9 and 10 (as depicted in the Harry Potter books and movies). If I were committed to truly experience a Harry Potter narrative, then instead of taking photos with a merchandised scarf, my preferred course of action should be running full force at a wall between platforms 9 and 10, and upon impact breaking most of my bones. But perhaps that's taking this discussion into the realm of psychotic-geography.

Anyways the discussion is in what-is-real and what-is-not. Can something imaginary be more real than something-else imaginary? Serialised fiction often have the notion of 'canon', the idea is that some imaginary stories are true within that imaginary world, while some of them are not. When that imaginary world intersects with real physicality, such as in the case of King's Cross station, the boundary between realness and falseness becomes even more so contested. Indeed, it is in these contested sites that we're most likely to find some form of entrance to a real magical world: the mystery of the human psyche.

www.jack-the-ripper-tour.com

During our short stay in London I couldn't make it to Whitechapel to walk through Jack the Ripper's murder trails. It's a huge shame. Jack the Ripper is a definitive psychogeography cliché, the Ripper story had flirted with facts and fiction for over a century and it is the perfect model of how one real/imaginary story can interact with places. It'll be the first thing I visit the next time I go. ~~"We'll do it next time" is my personal definitive cliché. This is only an inside joke because I'm an inside joke IS IT FUNNY YET IS IT F0UNNY YET~~

how to move through the Beurstraverse without walking

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 16:29:00 +0000

I've been thinking about the different ways to travel through the Beurstraverse (Koopgoot) underground tunnel in Rotterdam's city centre. It's one of the busiest passages for pedestrian traffic in the city, but it's boring when all everyone ever do is walk. In a previous post I shared a rollerblading video where they went through this thing on rollerblades very fast. Some of my longboarder friends had sometime longboarded through it (although you WILL get stopped by security if you do this). Jackie Chan (or his driving stunt-double) had driven a car through the traverse in the film Who Am I (1998). But options on wheels are also overdone, and if we are to really explore the different possibilities of Beurstraverse, we have to venture into ~~the 4th~~ the 3rd dimension. How can one go through Beurstraverse without touching the ground?

I have come up with two options.

The first option would require a transformation in the traveller him/herself: I'm talking about flying. If we have each learned to fly, we can glide through the air in and out of this underground passage with a level of grace and ease that our humble walking legs can never amount to. If we could envision ourselves among the ranks of Peter Pan and Superman, and contemplate how we would then instinctively navigate through the urban landscape, it's easy to see that a new set of behavioural movement-common-sense will be adopted. First of all we would not NEED to use this underground passage to move across the Coolsingel traffic, we can just fly over the road (Is there even going to be relevant ground traffic on Coolsingel? If people can fly, automobiles will only be needed for cargo or for rainy days). Anyways there IS reason to fly down through a tunnel: it's probably really fun. If I could fly, one of the first things I would do is shooting through some tunnel. The framing limitation of the passage puts an emphasis on how fast and how freely I can move.

Unfortunately in our current human capabilities we cannot fly through the Beurstraverse with our physical bodies, but it IS possible to (kind of) experience flying this way by piloting a small drone with first-person video display. (I think it's illegal to fly drones on eye level in a populated urban area, but if Jackie Chan can drive a car down here it's probably possible to figure out some arrangement.) A short while ago Eric van Vuuren made a beautiful video with drone footages of Rotterdam. The vid looks great, but I noticed that the majority of city drone videos consist of majestic establishing shots, and my favourite drone footages are the ones that feel like emulations of the 1st person experience of a real flying human being, navigating him/herself through the urban environment. I hope to see more of those. I mean, reasonably speaking, when we do learn to fly, we would't float around and gaze at buildings. We would FLY.

The other option of travelling through the Beurstraverse requires a radical transformation in the physical condition of the surroundings. I'm talking about swimming. This requires some sort of water change that puts the Beurstraverse under water.

It'll be a flooding situation, but not necessarily a uncontrolled natural disaster scenario. In a far future of rising sea levels, maybe they'll decide to intentionally flood out some obsolete under-ground spaces to meet water-management needs. One of my most vivid memories from being a kid was watching Steven Spielberg's A.I. (2001) and being super freaked-out by the scenes of this underwater abandoned themepark in future's flooded Manhattan. At the bottom of the ocean there's no place to escape to, only an endless dark-blue. A younger me could not handle the overwhelmingness of that imagery and at this section of the film almost felt out of breath. It didn't help that the movie was super-sad.

Since then I have learned to swim, and my imagination had become flexible. If a flooding of Rotterdam takes place in the far future, I''ll probably be able to equip myself with an underwater future-tech breathing-kit and swim through our underwater tunnels without drowning. That doesn't make the act any less intimidating, but it is more copable. As opposed to flying, an act that's marked by its speed and nimbleness, underwater swimming is very slow and inching forward calls for constant physical effort. Suppose that I'm swimming here and I don't have to hold my breath. Would I have the spare attention level to admire the condition of this underwater tunnel, or would I wish to get out of there ASAP? It's really hard to say. I'm mostly only fascinated by underwater cities because the very idea is really scary, and I don't know if put into that situation I would be more fascinated or more scared.

Anyways maybe you don't share my specific fascination/fear of sunken cities, in which case your imagination of this Beurstraverse scenario may be little dry (hah!). I want to point to two different water-related places around Rotterdam that can assist you in imagining a flooded underwater pedestrian tunnel. They serve as good reference points.

1. To the north-east of Rotterdam, in Nieuwekerk a/d IJssel, there is a monument for the single lowest point in the Netherlands. It's also one of the two lowest points in the European Union (the other one is in Denmark). This spot is 6.76 meters under sea level, you can stand here and imagine sea water washing up on the second floor of those office buildings. It provide a very physical understanding of how deep we're really in it for. It's also worth noting that this only measures to our current sea level, and looking at the way sea level rises, in 200 years this thing should grow a few meters. I'll most likely do a specific blogpost on this place one day.

2. Toward Rotterdam North, in Benthemplein lies Europe's biggest Water Square. This water-management structure includes 3 basins that act as public spaces in dry times, but fill up with water during heavy rains. The basketball/football fields are designed to be temporarily flooded to hold the excess water from increased rain levels in the future. The sci-fi idea of flooding some urban spaces to divert the waterload didn't come from nowhere!

Maybe I'll do another blogpost on this spot too, there's much more to be said on this system than the brief synopsis above. I picked up a Rotterdam Climate Initiative brocheur 2-3 years ago and had been paying attention to this project since. It's one of my favourite Rotterdam projects that I've watched being built. I like to tell people about it a lot, and if I'm near this area during hours of pouring rain, often times I specifically come here to watch the Water Square fulfil its function. I guess an behavioural exception that proved the rule would be the one night of mad downpouring in October where I walked from the city centre directly through here without looking at any functioning water infrastructure because I wanted to get to a place to see somebody for maybe the last time and there wasn't much else on my mind DAMN SON WE TALKING REAL PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY NOW

3. This isn't a place, it's just a little trick, but at this point in the text I couldn't figure out how to insert it without a numbering. The trick is pressing both of your palms against both of your ears and listen carefully. Do you hear the ocean currents? Wherever you are, this exercise takes you (and your surroundings) some place under the sea. Useful, huh?

Rotterdam Coollection 003: Time-lapse Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 17:05:00 +0000

Coollection, a portmanteau, is the collection of cool things. I have coined the term earlier this year and it had a geeky sound to it that I am quite fond of. These are blogposts where I share a collection of extraordinary online items related to Rotterdam. In this specific post we explore my new-found love for the unique aesthetics of time-lapse videos.

--

I found this beautiful time-lapse video by Rik van Aken. The passing of time is an ongoing phenomenon that we usually take for granted, but the technique of time-lapse brings time to the front stage in a powerful visual presentation. In doing so, it also direct your attention to the contrast between the fast-moving, the slow-moving and the non-moving. In these (mostly) night-time shots of traffic in and around Rotterdam's city centre, the iconic city-scape serves as an eternal and stationary context against which every other small trivial being moves about. You can do whatever you like with your life, and the city will serve as an independent variable for the duration of your nightly activities night after night after night.

This is a time lapse-video of the ship MS Renata transporting cargo containers out in the Port of Rotterdam. It records the ship's work from sunrise to sunset. I don't have too much to say about this, it just looks cool, man.

This is a recording of OMA's De Rotterdam being built, 4 years of construction condensed into 2 minutes of time-lapse video. From all the videos collected in this post, this is the one that took the longest to capture in real time. It's always cool to watch something huge and magnificent getting built, it's a feat of engineering and architecture, and a demonstration of the kind of tangible and relevant effort that Rotterdamers are typically recognised by. The time-lapse is a cool overview, but if you REALLY want to see this thing being constructed, photographer Rudd Sies did some wonderful photo-documentary during the 4-year building time, providing a more intimate and human look into the construction process. These are published into a book and everyone should check it out.

Anyways I also shared this video because it provides a contrasting perspective to the first video I shared on top. In here we see the city-scape receiving a man-made addition, the city becoming a independent variable susceptible to change. Some of us are architects and builders, and some of us influence the city in other ways, but I believe everyone who is here brings a little something to the city everyday. Eventually it'll be noticeable (especially on a time-lapse) how our personal contributions make Rotterdam into a different place from before we were here. Maybe the city scape is only majestic and eternal because Rotterdamers had made them so. Now that's a wonderful thought :D

This one is different. It's a time-lapse recording of photo-artist Roy Korpel using photoshop to creat an imaginary vision of a Rotterdam in ruins. I'm not theoretically armed to discuss the quantum-physics of imagining the passing of time that leads to a possible future. But on a poetic level I can say that watching this video is like watching Rotterdam go through a hundred years inside Roy's head. There's something cool in that. I'm also a big geek and a sucker for post-apocalyptic scenarios where cities get completely emptied out of people as result of a zombie outbreak or something. It's cool to see someone getting those imaginations visualised for Rotterdam. For a final quandary carried on from our earlier discussions: if a city looks stunning but there is no one to see it, is it still stunning?

Rotterdam metro time measurements and giants at the end of the lines

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 21:46:00 +0000

A while ago I was inspired to measure (with a stopwatch on the go) the time it takes for the Rotterdam metro to travel between each and every station , in order to find out which two metro stations are the furthest apart. Before I went through with that plan, however, someone reminded me that I was (literally) inspired by the methodology of a psychopathic metro slasher. The general Rotterdam metro schedule is actually available for download on RET.nl (in pdf form too). You can get them for lines ABC, line D and line E, listing the times the metro arrives at key stations in the system. These pdfs also include specific scheduling differences during weekends and holidays. Apart from these standard schedules for reference, the live metro schedule is updated every day on the RET site, informing the public on any newly announced changes. The act of getting on the metro and then personally measuring and composing this schedule for yourself is redundant on every practical level.

On a poetic level, however, a worthwhile produce of this personal measurement would be the very experience itself. Measuring metro times can be an exercise that helps you to REALLY take the metro, an exercise that helps to train your attention on the carrying public-transport mechanism itself instead of on other things in the environment and other things on your mind. Watching numbers go up on a stopwatch has a specific effect on how you experience and understand the passing of time. ~~(I wanted to say it's really fast and really slow at the same time, but that's just gibberish though)~~ The metro ride between the stations Portugaal and Tussenwater takes 1 minute and 34 seconds, for example, but WHAT DOES THAT NUMBER MEAN? Try measuring it once for yourself and maybe you'll figure it out. Anyways even if this psycho-poetics is not up your alley, there is no harm in measurement as confirmation. If you really can't spare the effort to perform measurements while travelling on the actual metro, you can also do it while watching these recorded videos of the Rotterdam metros' entire routes.

As for me, my purpose was never in knowing the exact time it takes for the metro to travel between every single station, but rather to FIND the two stations that takes the longest time in between, and therefore the two that are furthest apart from each other. Instead of spending hours with a stopwatch on the carriages, I have approached this in two ways. First, I've checked the schedule on RET.nl to find the two stations that has the longest time in between: Slinge and Rhoon on Line D. On this schedule the distance takes 5 or 6 minutes to travel, that's more time than between any other two stations in the system. Secondly, I have looked at the Rotterdam metro routes on Google Maps, and through some measurements using the Google MyMaps tools I've determined that truly there are no distance between any two stations greater than the distance between Slinge and Rhoon: 5.25 km (approx).

Only then, as confirmation, did I get on the Metro Line D to travel through those two stations and stopwatch-time it for myself. I did some test measurements in the stations before. The standard is to measure from the moment the metro doors close to the moment they open again at the next station. The final result of the measurement between Slinge and Rhoon was 4 minutes and 43 seconds. This is the longest time it would take to ride between any two metro stations in the Rotterdam metro system. If you wish to perform any activities while travelling on the metro between these two stations, this is approximately the time you can work with in your agenda. Another interesting thing to do during this time may be to listen to a song that's exactly that length. Or maybe play a game of charades? It's 4 minutes and 43 seconds of non-stop travelling in a closed metal box. It's whatever you make of it.

I've never been to the end of Line D (station De Akkers), so when I went out to take the measurement I thought I'd also go on to see what's there. And then at the very end of the metro line I saw two white whales. I definitely wasn't expecting them.

De Akkers

From Google Earth

After some internet research I found out that the sculpture was created by Rotterdam architect Marteen Struijs in 2002, so at least I know where they came from. But the key question remains: what are these things? Power animals? Guardian spirits? Alien intruders? To complete the narrative, I went to the other end of the metro, the far end of Line B at Nesselande, to look for clues.

Nesselande

No whale heads here, but the end of this side of the metros is again situated in water, and maybe that is continuity enough. I think the whales are not guardians or mascots. The whales ARE our metros. Our city is their ocean, and we travel in the bellies of the beasts, under and above grounds, to the day's various destinations. It is at times like these that I wish I've read Moby Dick.

Regardless of whether you've read MD or not, once you have given the metros the characters of living things, travelling with them become that much more fuzzy. It's difficult to lay your emotions on cold metal moving boxes, but it's easier to lay them on warm-bodied mammalian giants if they are willing to share your concerns. There were times where I left some places to catch a metro, but only on the metro did I realize I probably should have stayed. But blaming yourself is the worst. You can blame the White Whales instead. They will let out that all-majestic deep hum, and carry your stupid shit to the end of the lines.

bells and chimes thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 11 Oct 2014 10:09:00 +0000

World Trade Centre at Beurs

Lately I caught a cold. I cough at night and don't sleep too well. The one good thing that came with it however was the strange dreams I've been having. Last night I was in a alternate dimension where the only life-forms are sentient buildings. These were houses and high-rise apartments that were conscious and could communicate with each other. They communicate through ringing metal bells. They sound like church bells. Every building also has a main bell that is hung in front of the entrance, it's the biggest bell and it's shaped like a silver nose. These buildings (mostly yellow in colour) are really chatty and the bells never stop ringing in the village. Ringing bells 24/7. The buildings don't ever sleep because they are buildings. It's a continuous long conversation.

I woke up in a cold sweat at 3 am. It wasn't scary, the imagery was just too cool. This other time last year I was walking outside in Rotterdam on a windy winter night and I thought of an act of terrorism where we could hang wind-chimes up on trees and lamp-posts before the winds come. The metallic chirps that never go away is going to drive all pedestrians insane. Wind-chime city 24/7, this is Batman villain stuff. Regular villains rob banks, but super-villains are fond of messing with your head with urban theatrics that are elaborate and symbolic. Last week I've read the Amazing Spider-Man event-arc Spider Island, where every person in the entire island of Manhattan was turned into a giant spider, and Spidey had to save everyone. That kind of scheme really only makes sense in cities. Take any super-villain mastermind out of cities and (s)he is a fish out of water.

Disregarding the villainy, wind-chimes can be my friends, I like to understand that they give the winds a difference voice. It's refreshing to hear the winds sing small tunes rather than the usual blatant howling ~~or the uncalled-for whispering of your name (wait wait i'm not psycho i swear that's supposed to be funny in its melodrama!)~~. Anyways if the city winds are to drive anyone insane they would do so with or without chimes.

Stadhuis

Rotterdam city centre has several bell towers that ring loud without any winds. I can think of 3 main sets right now. There are bells at the Stadhuis (they play the Westminster chimes which I love), and there are bells at the Laurenskerk. There are bells at the World Trade Centre, when they ring they ring for a long time and their sounds have my favourite echo texture. When all these bell towers ring at the same time they speak to each other in a language only buildings know. I was in Taipei in the summer and in that city there's no tradition of the hourly striking bell tower, but the city has a lot of constructions going on, and wherever there's a construction site there is a constant metallic something-hitting-against-something-else. Gong, gong. It's also a language only buildings know, but maybe in a very different dialect.

Rotterdam Coollection 002

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 21 Sep 2014 20:19:00 +0000

Coollection, a portmanteau, is the collection of cool things. I have coined the term one day and it had a geeky sound to it that I am quite fond of. These are blogposts where I share a collection of extraordinary online items related to Rotterdam. The Coollection may include photos, videos, websites, sounds, and anything that register as 'cool' in my book. Now that we know what this is, let's get to the cool stuff.

Bart van Damme is a Rotterdam-based photographer who takes very good pictures. He's been doing this for years so you can find photos of scenes of the Central Station construction etc. He does a lot of urban architecture and landscape shots and they are phenomenal, he also shoots a lot of industrial sites that you wouldn't usually go to. But even when he shoots at places that I do usually go to, his compositions make the regular street corner appear grand and majestic. This picture of the Pleinbioscoop at Museum Park, for example, I walked passed here during the summer many many times, but I never thought it could be captured like a shot out of a Kubrik film. You can look through Van Damme's material online and, if you wish to, buy his prints and books.

Here's a video of a Ferrari F430 racing through Rotterdam's streets during VKV Rotterdam City Racing 2014. I'll admit I have experienced more car racing from video games than from actually watching cars race. So maybe it's just me who feels that the video makes our city looks like a level in a racing game. Anyways game-like or not, this video feels surreal as you watch the Ferrari drive through our city in directions (and speed) that you cannot usually drive in. I linked a video of people inline skating in the city last time, and it was fast, but this is FAST. And loud. And throbbing.

Markthal 360 Panorama

screenshot from markthalrotterdam.nl

The Markthal had been in construction in Rotterdam's Blaak for sometime. In a previous blogpost I have briefly used this construction as an example to make a note abot realities. Now the Markthal itself had become a reality, soon to be officially opened by Queen Máxima on the 1st of October. This arch is a multifunctional building that include appartments, horeca establishments and a large market in the centre. It's also been getting news coverage for having a ceiling that possesses the WORLD'S LARGEST ARTWORK. Created by artist Arno Coenen, the graphic artwork Horn of Plenty can stretch out to cover two football field. In the future they also planned to project 3D animation onto this ceiling. Click on the title above to navigate a 360 degree panorama from the centre of the building and witness the wonder!

In fact, because of its impressive ceiling art, some promotional/journalistic text went as far as calling the Markthal the SISTINE CHAPEL of Rotterdam (which I think is funny because the Markthal is built right next to Rotterdam's actual most historical church, the Laurenskerk). The Markthal had also been referred to as Rotterdam's new food Walhalla. Such is the age of remixed cultural meanings and metaphors.

Nesselande's Light Transmitting Concrete Cubes

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 11 Sep 2014 14:37:00 +0000

We have all heard of concrete jungles, but have you ever imagined a Light-Transmitting-Concrete jungle? What does that even mean?

I read about these Light Transmitting Concrete (LiTraCon), it's a building material combining concrete with optical glass fibres. While maintaining the hardness and weight of concrete, it lets light shine through like traditional asian paper wall. According to the LiTraCon company website, as the optic fibre hardly loses any light through its length, the LiTraCon material is capable of light-transmittance for thickness up to 20 metres. The material catches a unique balance between heavy and light properties and I thought it sounded really exciting. Imagine seeing something lights up through 20 metres thick of concrete!

And then I found out that the engineering firm Vormtech used this material in 2011 to build street furnitures at a location near the Nesselande beach, to the north-east of Rotterdam. Naturally I had to pay a visit. There were 6 of these LiTraCon cube fixtures along the short Kosboulevard, marking corners of the regular concrete benches. Each of these is a LiTraCon case with light source placed on the inside, and with a fixed metal lid covering the top.

I can see that there is already plenty of regular streetlights in the area, and the way they set up the LiTraCon cubes here is less for illumination and more for decoration. I like the enchanted-runes vibe these cubes give out, it looks like they are inscribed with holy scripture. I like that it's pretty much impossible for external forces to break the lamp inside because they're protected by concrete ( The lamp itself might bust or malfunction though. This was possibly the case with the one cube that was off). But at the end of the day these cubes don't demonstrate my favourite thing about LiTraCon: the way you can cast shadows through it (as sensually presented here).

http://retaildesignblog.net/

When I first saw this material do shadows my intuition speaks shadow puppet theatre. Did I mention LiTraCon also allows colours to shine through? It promises all kinds of exciting visual presentation and connection between both sides of a concrete wall.

From what I've read, LiTraCon cannot (yet!) replace good old concrete because it is way more expensive, so we're not going to see entire concrete structures made of this stuff any time soon. But I'll be very happy to see smart applications of materials like this in cities here and there, infusing the concrete jungle with some visual diversity that any so-called jungle should rightfully include.

p.s. originally I wanted to do this blogpost on new technologies and lights, and I was gonn include another location. I tried to visit Daan Roosegaarde's Dune 4.2 interactive installation at Kralingen's De Esch, but the installation was apparently not there any more. I later researched more carefully and found that they removed Dune 4.2 in early 2013. I's been a few years since they set it up (2009) and it makes sense that higher-tech installations don't stay at one location forever. It's a shame though, I always wanted to see it since it looked ~~hella dope~~ extremely captivating on video.

Rotterdam Coollection 001

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 24 Aug 2014 14:29:00 +0000

Coollection, a portmanteau, is the collection of cool things. I have coined it just now and the word has a geeky sound to it that I am quite fond of. This is a new kind of posts I'm doing on this blog, where every once in a while I'm going to share a few cool Rotterdam items that I've found on the Internet. Videos, pictures, websites, you name it. Actually I'll name it. Whatever. I'll also put down a few words on why they're cool so you'll have greater insight into my taste in cool things.

These guys are doing a project where they travel around the world to shoot rollerblading videos in cities. Sometimes they do tricks. Sometimes they're just fast. They also make cities look very good. In this vid they skate through some of Rotterdam's best-looking places and it's stimulating to see our familiar sceneries re-defined by alternative sets of movements and perspectives. The tracking shots are the best parts. Without rollerblades it would be very difficult to experience these spaces in motion. I mean, sure, you can walk through the Beursplein underground passage, but that's pretty slow.

Brett Bogart, now occasionally dubbed the Netherland's Justin Bieber, is a nascent teen-pop sensation from Brabant. He shot this music video for his new single Rooftop on top and around Rotterdam's Schieblock. The video has bright-coloured teen fashion, some cartwheels, several back-flips, and lots of dancing on the rooftop. It's kind of surreal that people born in 1999 are becoming pop stars now. In 10 years' time people born in 2009 are going to be pop stars. Wow.

snapshot from youtube

Anyways Rooftop is great because while wishing for this video to be an international youtube hit, Brett (and most likely his marketing people) looked for international appeal, and decided on an urban metropolitan feel. Boyz and girlz partying on a rooftop surrounded by sky scrapers, these are colourful kids in a grey city, free and all-so-happy. Naturally they had to film this in Rotterdam because it is the only Dutch city that can pull off this look. After the war, Rotterdam was designed and re-built as the American-styled city of the Netherlands. It had been dubbed accordingly our Manhattan aan de Maas. It is, then, only fitting for the Netherland's JB to shoot his video here.

http://ikrotterdam.blogspot.nl/

ikRotterdam is 3 artists who draw snippets of Rotterdam. They do places, people, objects and whatever else they like. The art is really cool and they make great use of colours to demonstrate that the city doesn't feel so grey after all. The buildings look alive. The human portraits look warm-hearted. They tag each drawing with the area in which its subject matter was seen (Centrum, Delfshaven etc), so you can go and try to find it as well. Their tagline is "I don't need to go on vacation because I live in Rotterdam". It's pretty much how I feel too, but they express it with a charismatic artistic style I wish I had. You can like them on Facebook to get regular updates. I did.

USB dead-drops, physicality and secretly-sharing

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 05 Aug 2014 16:34:00 +0000

When I saw Breaking Bad a while back, one of my favourite things about it was the physical details of how illicit activities can happen in plain sight without anyone noticing. One of those details was the dead-drop sequence where they moved small amounts of meth and money by having different people dropping and picking them up at obscure locations around Albuquerque, places where no one would ever check.

Beyond the TV screen, dead-dropping is a technique that can be (and is) used in real life. Criminals, spies, ~~ninjas~~ and any other personnel of covert operations may be expected to make use of this practice every once in a while to transfer letters and packages. How many of these folks are active in this city?

Dead-drops are one example of the many alternative communication possibilities our urban spaces can offer. It signifies a hidden layer of communicative functions only available to those who know about it. There may possibly be infinite numbers of these layers that you don't know about. Given the way perception works, you can never know how much you don't know. Take the case of language. I don't know Morse code. How do I know if everyone around me are not discussing their murder schemes every time they blink their eyes? You never know with these ninjas. They can be anywhere, anyone, at any time.

Here is something I do know about. Aram Bartholl, a media artist, had taken up the dead-drop name for a project in which he installed USB flash drives in random locations in NYC in 2010. He literally sticked USB drives into brick walls and patched some cement around them to keep them intact. He called them USB dead-drops. These dead-drops are like the traditional ones described above except that they are digital. It is a digital communication network that is anonymous, locally-based and offline. If you know where one of them is, you can go there and upload data onto the drive and also download whatever data that's on it.

I think it's a pretty cool idea, many others thought so too, and since 2010 people around the globe had taken up the initiative to install USB dead-drops in their own cities. It's pretty easy to install one, and if you wish to you can submit its coordinates onto the map on deadrops.com. I have checked out some of these coordinates in Rotterdam, here are pictures of their current conditions.

On the Erasmusbrug

At Westplein

Witte de Withstraat

A part of the excitement in this initiative, for me, is its emphasis on physicality. It is intuitive for me to physically go somewhere and drop off or pick up a message. The travelling to that specific spot is a part of the communication, as is the location itself. While modern communication technologies had significantly cut down the time for messages to travel, it had also completely cut down actual physical travelling OF or FOR these messages, both of which could have carried a lot of extra meanings. By (re)-placing data in the real physical context, we re-include the spatial-locational element into communication. This is not unrelated to the oft foretold Internet of Things, but in the case of dead-drops, things are not connected via the Internet. Actually a dead-drop and your personal devices can only be connected by your movement between/to them. They are connected via you. ~~It's the Internet that is You! (I'm sorry I'm pretty bad at coming up with theoretical catch-phrases)~~

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You may have noticed from the pictures that some of these drops are broken. When you place anything in public you risk vandalism and natural wear. The other thing you risk is security. It's quite possible for an open USB drive to be infected with malware, which can then infect every device that comes into contact with it. This is a pretty serious problem and it is what stops many from connecting their devices to a dead-drop. There is a political discussion in this: can you trust an anonymous people to use a shared tool/property and not ruin it for each other? Instead of approaching it as a ethical-philosophical debate regarding Hobbesian social-contracts etc, a relatively easier way out is to solve these problems through design.

First off, to a limited extent, the problems cancel each other out. As per its current standing, I think USB dead-drops are more of an experiment/artistic-statement rather than an attempt to create a functional information infrastructure, and these guerilla data storage devices are not designed to last. They break pretty easily, and the short life-span of a drop may be a protection mechanism in itself. If a drop is new and fresh, it might not have caught any malware yet. If a drop is old, it's probably already broken anyways and will not be able to infect anything. This system doesn't guarantee security, it guarantees nothing but the fact that an infected drop will not serve to infect many more devices. This limits the scope of damage.

A security measure users could take is to actually keep the discreet location of a dead-drop a secret between a small group (i.e. not publish its coordinates on a website). If only trusted people will have access to a drop, you can then trust in these people's judgement and assume that only trusted devices will be connected to it, thus keeping it clean. This is a form of social security.

If we are to solve these problems through improving/changing the hardware, maybe wireless alternatives can also be a more costly option. Small servers can be placed in a secluded and protected environments, not (easily) physically reachable but can be connected to via wi-fi when you're in its proximity. You go to that pavilion in the park where you always meet up with your friend. You take out your phone, connect to this local network that only you know about, and download a new mini-video that he left for you there. By the time you are watching this video I would already be in Ireland, he said so in his webcam recording, I suppose this was an Irish goodbye. You delete that video from the local server and cry. ~~Your friend was also your boyfriend but now it's complicated.~~ The problem with this scenario is I can't really figure out a way to constantly supply power to that server. Only bring portable power supply to the server when someone wants to access it, maybe? In any case this server-approach loses some of the guerilla charm of USB dead-drops.

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Since we're talking about charm, let's get back to dead-drops' social security tactic for a sec. I want to end this on a note about trust. Maybe one of the few people who use your drop will judge wrong one time and infect the drop. Maybe some of these people are malintentioned from the very start and planned to compromise your device. All of these are possible, but consider it is known that the NSA can alter hardwares for surveillance purposes as they leave the factory, consider that personnels like Edward Snowden were trusted with access to your emails, consider that just visiting FBI targeted websites puts the security of your machine at risk. I think it's reasonable to trust local people you know in your personal network, at least as much as you trust someone you've never met on the other side of the Internet, thus trusting a secret small-user-group dead-drop as much as you trust the Internet (if not more). And if a small group of intelligent people trust each other, they should be able to share a secret dead-drop for all kinds of purposes pretty successfully. Based on trust, it'll be a very communal kind of sharing, possibly ritualistic, possibly tribal.

Not Rotterdam: The longest distance between two metro stations (Taipei)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 05 Jul 2014 15:04:00 +0000

wikipedia.com

I haven't been updating this Rotterdam blog because I haven't been in Rotterdam recently. Instead I'm in Taipei trying to look at as many things as possible. I grew up in TP and it's likely that on a subconscious level this city had curated many of my urban fetishes. Or, in the phrasing of an architecture book I flipped through in a bookstore today, Taipei had taught me my urban mother-tongue. I like car exhausts. I like messy street signs. I like natural colours situated in grey. I like cheap & efficient public transport. I like 24/7 food. I like busy but warm-hearted people. There is a lot to think about and it's taking me a while to figure out where to start.

We can start with metros. It's a good place to start. My very first experience of metro travelling was with Taipei MRT and it's still my favourite metro system today. The Wenshan line is completely automated and runs on elevated rails through the city, it's almost like a theme-park scenic ride. The other lines are mostly underground, they are inviting and cozy and efficient and clean and are everything that metros should be.

eurotrib.com

A few weeks ago there was a metro tragedy in Taipei that shocked the city greatly. While travelling on a carriage between two stations, a mentally disturbed university student whipped out two knives and stabbed 28 people, killing 4 of them. This kind of crazy slasher incident had never happened before in Taipei and many grew paranoid. After the attack, for a while the police assigned special-force operatives equipped with sub-machine-guns to patrol metro stations in order to scare off any similar attempts. A lot of the city's inhabitants felt that this was inappropriate and looked like a police state. If anything it only made the metros scarier.

The emotions had since settled down, the sub-machine-guns are removed and when I took the MRT today it wasn't very scary at all. Anyways I guess what matters the most for commuters is not how safe the metros actually are, but rather how safe they feel about it.

When reading about the young attacker and his methodologies, a specific item drew my attention: He had allegedly observed the MRT system very thoroughly to select the time and place for his crime. The ride between Longshan Temple Station and Jiangzicui Station takes a total of 3 minute and 46 seconds, it's the longest time between any two consecutive MRT stations in Taipei, and this guy figured that between these two stations he has the longest window to stab the maximum amount of people on a moving train before they can get off the carriage. He did end up stabbing a high number of people, and for his purpose this was an effective plan. If he chose a random ride between two random stations, it is likely that his crime would have been of a smaller scale.

At the observation stage he had allegedly timed the metro ride between every MRT station with his wrist watch, to know exactly how long each ride would take. This sounds a lot like something I would do for this blog. Luckily I am not a psycho murderer and my observations do not serve any sinister end. If a psycho murderer does find this blog, however, and were to use my urban patterns to design a ritualistic murder spree in Rotterdam, there is little I can do about it. Urban observations consist of methodologies that produce data, which can then be used to to generate meanings that may in turn inspire further actions. Starting from the generation of meanings, the process gets dynamic and can possibly be volatile. Texts such as this one only offer potentials.

Rotterdam Beurs metro station

When I get back to Rotterdam by the end of the month I hope to also measure and record the time it takes between each metro station. I will then also find out which journey between two specific stations takes a longest time. The practical implications is that during this journey the metro carriage is its own world, for a minute or two segregated from any external authorities or control. It forms a temporary stand-alone space that can develop its own rules. The tragic murder of innocent people is one extreme development, but it is certainly not the only possible development. What else can people do with the metro's momentary social pocket-reality? Here are a few ideas:

1. Practice radical politics
-Leftist, rightist, anarchist, any
-Distribute slogans and pamphlets
-Start your own country, start your own non-country
-Run this (non)country for 2 minutes

(The Netherlands is pretty open with its freedom of speech, and people can often practice political communication without being censored. This is not the case in many countries, in which the metro pocket-reality is more relevant for political actions. In some countries advocating gay rights is considered to be radical politics. If I were a gay man who would like to kiss my boyfriend on the metro as a political statement, in a country where this is taboo, for example, I should rather do it between the two stations that have the longest metro ride between them so we can have the longest kiss.)

2. Practice radical cultist religions
-Evangelism
-Worship & rituals
-Being possessed by a spirit who will use your mouth to speak a prophecy. (S)He has over 2 minutes to do it!

3. Play very very loud music, play very very vulgar music
-"Abrasive", "annoying", "that's not music that's just noise" etc

4. Perform very very loud theatre, perform very very vulgar theatre
-I imagine some form of cabaret

5. Perform an actual orgy
-Variety of participants
-Different genders and sexual orientations

6. Consume drugs
-Alcohol: we already see this sometime
-Others

7. Violate copyright laws
-Screen a part of a movie
-Share other copy-righted arts for free

8. Advertise for cigarettes and other items that are not allowed to be advertised
-Advertise in purposely misleading fashions targeting children
-Subliminal messaging

~~9. Talk about my stupid poetry~~
-Usually no one can stand that sappy tripe, it's basically a crime in the regular social reality, but I imagine a setting in which I can indulge myself the poet's sentiments for two minutes. At the beginning of June I was writing a pathetic song called Season Finale but then oh wait wait wait wrong blog again

10. Combine any 2 or more of the above

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Some of these actions are not necessarily what I would like to see or what I would enjoy. I would be quite uncomfortable if someone is too drunk or too high on the metro, for example. I would also be uncomfortable if anyone practices hate-speech loudly on a metro carriage. The purpose of this blogpost is to point out that if one or more passengers plan to perform any of these actions on the metro, they can choose to do so between the two stations that have the the longest journey time, so as to perform the action for as long as possible before being forcibly stopped by law-enforcement personnels or any external actors (or before loosing the audience). Such is the possible implications of the time-span. Whether and how these actions would offend or disturb other passengers is a different discussion. Why do I smile if I see a gay couple lightly kiss on the metro, but would frown if I see a group of people having coked-up sex while worshipping an ancient fertility god? Does it make a difference whether these actions are performed on a moving metro carriage or any other public/private space?

For one thing, the actual performance of said coked-up sex on the metro would stimulate us to think about the issue. More possibly, just knowing that the specific metro journey takes a relatively long time can stimulate us to imagine said coked-up sex, or any other things we can do with this time. I have listed drastic options, but you can very much also do things like holding the hands of the person beside you through the longest metro ride.

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Update: Since I've written this post I have travelled between Longshan Temple Station and Jiangzicui Station two times. Both times my friend timed the journey with a stopwatch and the travelling time is consistently 3 minutes 10 seconds. Maybe they have speeded up the ride? Maybe the news article was inaccurate? Maybe the murderer was too disturbed to measure correctly? Many maybes.
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Update: In November 2014 I have found the two Rotterdam metro stations that has the longest distance in between.

Eiland van Briennenoord

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 27 May 2014 19:04:00 +0000

This specific spot in the picture has an unique soundscape so outstanding that the sounds alone merit a visit. The A16 highway traffic and the howling underbridge-winds concoct a raw and hard-coming rumbling. The waves from the Maas break on the rivershore rocks and make for constant water splashes. When these sound sources layer up, if you close your eyes and retreat into an audio reality, it is not difficult to imagine a rainstorm taking place around you. This is a storm point, even on a fairly sunny day.

But then, if you're here at the right time, you will also notice the presence of a lively chirping from your local bird-friends, hanging around in the trees on your sides. This lightness dresses up the heavies, and together they satisfy both ends of a tonal spectrum. There is a deep moving force which overwhelms, but there is also this reminder of immediate lives that sing regardless. Buddy, it's like the truth of the universe or something.

It may be difficult to believe that a soundscape as aesthetically complete as this one wasn't designed specifically to be so. Sometimes recorded music isn't even this good. I don't know if they took these sounds into consideration when they built a concrete bridge over an island in the middle of the river. On one hand I would like to live in a world where people have the sense to intentionally create spectacular spaces like these. On the other hand I would also like to live in a world where spaces like these can come to be on their own.

Where is this specific space anyways? Remember in the previous post where I saw some trees in the river after I've crossed the bridge? I managed to walk to where the trees were. It turned out to be an island in the middle of the Nieuwe Maas called Eiland van Briennenoord. I guess I've seen it on the map, but I never expected it to surprise me in so many ways. I guess that's the definition of a surprise.

There's something cinematic about tall, grey concrete structures. Especially when you walk under them and realize how small you are in comparison. You can see this place in a post-apocalyptic movie as a spot where future nomads would settle for a week. There's a lot of graffiti here which gives it an urban personality, even when it's a little far out from the city centre.

For more current information, I have heard about a presence of present-day urban nomads, namely the homeless folks that come here at night and hang around. Some might feel uncomfortable about that and wouldn't want to be here after a certain time. How you choose to feel about the situation and what you decide to do about it is an issue you have to resolve internally. According to numbers from 2006, there are 4000 homeless people in Rotterdam, and this was before the economic recession. I don't usually think about it much lest it keeps me awake at night, while I lay in my bed, under a roof. Anyways what matters is what needs to be done to help them and who is willing to contribute to these efforts. How I feel about it personally is of minor causal significance here except that it is difficult for me to summarise the issue in any short sentence. Here's more details on the Rotterdam government's homeless policies.

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A discussion can be had about whether managed green spaces like this in an urban setting count as "nature". In my preferred definition, anything that people do and build is "natural", as people came to be and act they way they do "naturally" (i.e. we came from cave people to this urban civilization without any artificial third party involvement). As such, a man-made park is a piece of "nature" but then maybe so is a parking lot. There are plants and animals that are active in both environments.

Many plants and animals are active on the island. I've never gotten into identifying them but maybe I should. There are several different kinds of birds here, for instance, and it would be fun to know what species they are. But it is also fun to just look and listen. I think the walking ones are pheasants.

Starting every May and until sometime in the winter, they also place grote grazers on the island, namely Scottish Highland Cows. They are really chill (as long as you don't get too close or irritate them) (anyone who's chill is probably like that). You may find them hanging around the woods or strolling on the footpaths or taking a dip in the ponds. They have younger calves too. In my experience it is difficult to find a person who doesn't like these cows.

People also come to the island for angling. I feel neutral about angling. I eat fish. I don't eat cows. But hey this isn't chiefly a blogpost on how I manage my compassion and how that affects my life choices, maybe I'll stop now. ~~I can write about these topics elsewhere like in these motivation letters I'm sending out~~

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We may identify the island's two specific connections to Rotterdam's urbanity, one historic and one visual. The historic one: in the 60s, Rotterdam built the first metro system in the Netherlands, with a metro line that went from Centraal Station to Zuidplein. After the Maastunnel, a second tunnel under the Maas had to be built for this metro, and most of that tunnel was built on the island before being lowered into the bottom of the river. It was 2 km of solid engineering feats, very much in character with this city. Some traces of the construction process are still left on the island.

The visual one doesn't need much explanation. Initially I planned to stand on the Van Briennenoordbrug to find a sweetspot for viewing the city's skyline. I didn't find it on the bridge but I have found it on the island that the bridge is named after. Come and see for yourself. The city looks pretty good from here.

A line of conclusion? I'm really busy now but hopefully as the summer hits I'll have time to come back here more often. City-dwellers like to talk about the search for an island of composure and retreat, in the sometime-stifling anxiety of urban life. People usually mean that metaphorically but this is literally that kind of island. ~~Lately I've been feeling like I can use some composure and retreat but oh look we're back to my problems again.~~

Crossing Van Brinnenoordbrug

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 05 Apr 2014 10:25:00 +0000

I mostly operate on the north side of the Nieuwe Maas and for all the time I've spent in this great city much of the southern areas remained untrodden by my feet. I thought that's a huge shame and needed to be changed. When I look out from the Kralingse Zoom parking garage roof I can see this bridge and I figured the city skyline would look pretty swell from that angle. I thought I would stand on the bridge and look at the city, and then walk across and take a look at what's on the other side.

The actual skyline-watching from Van Brinnenoordbrug didn't go as smoothly as I wished. The bridge is a part of the A16 highway and thus functions chiefly as a passing for vehicles. The only possible viewing position for pedestrians is from the bicycle path, and the bridge only has a bicycle path on its eastern side while the city-centre is at its west. When looking at the city from this path, highway cars run between you and the city and they distract your vision. Of course, this visual noise has its own raucous aesthetics and together with the audio traffic noises can put the viewing experience through an unique lens. However, on the bike path there were also bikes and mopeds constantly passing through, and the narrow lane does not allow for a comfortable standing space while the non-car traffic overtake you. Rightly so, too, as these paths were made for travelling and not for some free-standing ~~weirdo~~ urban-observer such as myself. But anyways these conditions had made the spot sub-optimum for seeing the city.

To be fair, there were some interesting sights to the east side of the bridge worthy of anyone's attention, and the bridge is still a cool place to be on. Sights like

water purification plant

office buildings Solaris

IHC Merwede Shipyard

After walking across, I wandered around for a while and decided to check out what it's like under the bridge. This turned out to be the onset of the day's most significant discovery.

These columns. They remind me of ancient temple stone colonnades, but are modern and concrete. Like their ancient counterparts, they serve both functional and symbolic roles. They uphold the Van Brinnenoordbrug, there is that, but in doing so they also uphold one of the busiest highways in the Netherlands. Columns like these are the foundations of a modern culture symbolised by a lot of cars. As we move into a post-modern culture and an information-based economy, the symbolic significance of highways is replaced by the internet, the information superhighway. Cars, in the context of this symbolic shift, are loud and heavy and physical and yesterday-nostalgic. Some might say these are all Rotterdam qualities and are integral to the city's personality. Here you can hear the sound of highway cars feed through a pretty effective acoustic space.

Amazing harbour-themed murals in the style of Delft Blauw, created by Ricardo van Zwol quite recently. Behind them there was a stretch of vegetation. At first I didn't know how to get to them because there was river water between us. I decided to find out how and eventually did. It's an actual island in the middle of the Nieuwe Maas called Eiland van Brinnenoord. I had no idea it was there. It deserves its own blogpost.

These pictures are okay but they don't illustrate the sheer size of the columns and their real immediate physical impact. You have to be here to feel it. Another thing that impressed me was the vast open area between them. Between each row of columns there is significant empty space, paved in the same kind of red asphalt as they do for bicycle paths.

As they are positioned under a bridge, they should remain reasonably dry and usable even in rainy days. I get excited whenever I see any kind of public open space, and start imagining what they can be used for. These have such potentials. Street football? Skateboarders' meet-up trick-ups? Weekend battle-rap tournaments? Shadow-puppet improv-theatre at night? Anarcho-outsiders book market? Morning Taichi groups? The possibilities are endless. I looked around for clues of what people might do here. After some amateur forensics I found a collection of evidence:

Broken cider bottle

weed

used fireworks

skid-marks

I can use these components to construct a scene of suburban boyz' volatile chillage. This process is, of course, not the perfect way of seeing the past because these are less reconstructions and more imaginations. To various extents, all studies of the past are like that (consider dinosaurs), but in this case there is a better method of research than looking at leftovers. I can, in theory, stay here until some of these people show up and chat them up. I'm probably not going to do that though. I have a feeling that unfortunately these volatile hangouts might not be my jam. Such forms of social anxiety and the consequent avoidance of certain social situations cause an occasional lack of interpersonal perspective in my urban experience (if not my human experience at large), and I can see how this may come to be an experiential bottleneck. It's something I would eventually need to address.

You know how sometimes you talk about your problems online in a self-absorbed manner, and your fellow internet users remind you that HEY MAN THIS IS NOT YOUR BLOG?

Well this one IS my blog.

ps. I looked up the Brinennoordbrug on google and found this. I'm not sure what to say. I mean, urban exploration usually has more serene connotations than jackass-esque antics, and as such should probably entice more thoughtful responses than what I want so say. But dammmmn son UAIR is CRAy cray. Personally I'm not big on the idea of climbing anything but in forgoing the vertical dimension I'm missing out on heights and on far-sights.

pps. After I've written this post I have since found out that these other guys from JekupaMedia made a POV video of themselves climbing the Van B-brug. It's pretty thrilling to watch. I mean, dammmn sonnnn theze boyz i don't even

who owns the message

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 12:02:00 +0000

"In Rotterdam we speak ~~Dutch~~ THE TRUTH"

"Rotterdam is for you and not for THE criminals GOVERNMENT"

The implications in the graffiti here is that these political campaign ads do NOT speak the truth. But who does? I mean, I love slogans, they're great for motivating and inspiring people, they're great for catching our attention. But after our attention is caught, there needs to be discursive follow-through, because slogans are, by their brevity, not very meaningful. The graffiti artist, the urban communication activist, may be able to appropriate a slogan for it to express an alternative sentiment. But powerful actors such as the VVD have much more than slogans, they have the communicational resources to explain and elaborate on their claims, they have opportunities to make arguments to an audience outside of these posters. The graffiti only has the resources to an extra glance. Truth or not, they do not have the resources to speak.

In the very very near future or even in a futuristic now, the technology of augmented reality allows for an alternative model. Imagine that you lift up your mobile device to look at this altered, graffiti'd poster through the device's camera, and upon detection of this trigger, the device automatically directs you to an online essay which relates a fully fledged-out alternative viewpoint regarding these issues. (Or, alternatively, nevermind that AR stuff, imagine graffiti + a QR code sticker.) How's that for a public sphere? I say heck yes. Now that's communication empowerment.

Speaking of the politics of protest, this is not really Rotterdam related but in my hometown Taipei people are protesting on the streets against the government. I ~~abuse~~ use this channel to invite you to pay a little bit of attention to this development that so far isn't getting much coverage on international media. I'm not really going to discuss the politics of politics here, but I'm quite impressed by the protesters' communication approach. They have new-media professionals among their ranks and they have set up various internet-live-streams around the protests, allowing the world to see what's happening first hand. They even crowd-sourced people to type up live transcripts to what is said by main speakers on the protest's frontlines. They crowd-sourced translators to translate the live transcripts to English so people like you may read it too (the Eng ver. is a few hours behind now but I say they deserve a break).

They have even arranged for online crowd-funding to buy off the frontpage ads in major newspapers in the country, to put up protest materials. They got the money so fast that they then decided it's probably possible to buy off the frontpage ad of New York Times International. They already got that money too, the ad might be up on NYTI pretty soon, Taiwanese Americans are helping them on that. Social movements are, by definition, crowd-sourced, and the internet allows for that on a whole new level. It's quite beautiful.