The Society of the Spectrecle

(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.)

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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.

A Bridge for the Passing

I love skybridges, they might be my favourite kind of structures. There were many in my hometown, I grew up around this stuff and now I try to walk on one whenever I can. There's obviously that nostalgic element, but also sometimes when I'm having a day I feel the need to stand in the middle of the sky where I can look down on everyone and no one can look at me. It's not REALLY like standing in the sky, but it IS kind of like levitating on that 2-3 floor height (at least in terms of perspective), which is a very comfortable place for me. All of my flying dreams were sky-walking and sky-running dreams, and when in dreams this was the height I travelled on. I've heard of sky-swimming dreams, apparently they're quite common, but I guess I wasn't made up that way.

When I found out that they have built a wooden skybridge across Schikade in 2012 I was pretty psyched. I like wooden constructions. They were meant to appear more traditional and human and artisenal so they do. When I looked up more info on the bridge I grew increasingly impressed-- this Luchtsingel project got some 3 million euros funding from a direct-democracy initiative where the citizens of Rotterdam voted to choose a project to spend money on. They chose for this, which have consequently made it a bridge of the people.

Furthermore, the bridge acquired another portion of its funding from a crowd-funding model where you can pay 25 euros or so to purchase a wooden plank, with your name and/or a special message written over it. Not only will this plank be used to build the bridge, it will be placed at a visible position where everyone who ever walk over this bridge can see. This is, of course, a great occasion for silly romantic markings like "Josef <3 Marry forever", but it is also an opportunity for organisations and companies to advertise. Some have done this by leaving a web domain on their plank. These messages are not only shown on the bridge, but also on the bridge's website. For anyone interested in the magical power of intentions in a greater building process, there are over 3000 messages and names for you to analyse and conjure. This is a bridge of the people, and evidently people are capable of being and representing many things. A dense collection of meanings directly related to the city and its population is always worth noticing for local sorcerers. 

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I guess there is much to be said about this magic but there was one particular thought that I could not get off my mind: Web domains die when people stop paying for them. Conceivably, at one point in the future most of the domain names on Luchtsingel will be dead, and this bridge will become a graveyard for websites. And then, naturally, the next logical thought hit me: People die as well. People always, eventually, die for sure. If the Luchtsingel is still around in a hundred years, it will actually be a graveyard, like, for people.

Graveyard might not be the best classification for a place like this. Graveyards usually carry physical remains, this bridge will only carry dead names and messages. On the other hand, consider that in a traditional graveyard where people are buried underground,  the actual body will in time be eaten away by the soil, at which point the physical grave only becomes an indicational marking of the fact that the body was once there. At famous historical figures' tombs which are commonly exploited for touristic activities, it is very often the case that the real body is stored elsewhere, and people (knowingly) come to pay tribute to an empty casket. I think the distinction between a grave and other types of memorial locations can be arbitrary. I like to put them in the same category. 

Let's imagine that the Luchtsingel lasts for long enough to become a grave site. Maybe it's somewhat grim to see it like that, but in design terms I think it actually makes a lot of sense. Death is often imagined as a passage. From the known into the unknown, from being into non-being, from existence into the other. For the religious, Death can mean many more things and in several popular religions this passage-understanding of Death is very clearly defined. Walking across a death-bridge seems to be a fitting gesture to remember those who have passed. Future architects may consider to go one step further,  and infuse the ashes of the dead into a bridge of concrete as a new grave form. I'd like to be immortalised like that. I'd like to be guaranteed a part in something humanly useful even after I'm gone.

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Bridges have yet another connection to death. Looking back to my hometown, there was a scenic tourist destination with a historical suspension bridge spanning across some beautiful green waters. There were mountains and children and couples and buskers and the place gives a beautiful, welcoming vibe. What many foreign visitors do not know, is that the bridge is also a popular suicide spot, and in 2012 alone there were 22 suicidal leap-offs (almost twice a month, man). For those who cannot swim, leaping off into these deep waters from a great height is like leaping into a green abyss. There were also those who jumped while wearing a backpack filled with rocks, so that their deathly determination will not be overcome by their survival instinct, and they would sink straight down to the very bottom with no chance of ever coming up. It's sad. It's disturbing. There are a lot of ghost stories in that place.

A few weeks ago, here in Rotterdam, they have started working on the next phase of the Luchtsingel project and they built the main parts of another skybridge, this time across the railroads. I went to see it the day after it was done. At first I expected it to look the same as the first bridge, and was a little confused about the purpose of its heightened sides. But then I remembered all the sad reports we've heard about trains being delayed. I can see people walking through this new bridge in the future and discussing the design's preventative nature. It'll be a somewhat gloomy topic for conversations, but much less so than actual stories of haunting.