Pigeon Tour Two

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

(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

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

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???"

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

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

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.