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.

National Exhibition of Bollards

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.