The first of may, the communists are marching. Multatuli is the pen name of one Eduard Douwes Dekker,  The Dutch writer was an satirist and an early critic of the colonial abuse by Holland. The fair-trade brand Max Havelaar takes it’s name from his literary breakthrough novel. The pseudonym comes from latin:  “I have suffered much”, or, more literally “I have borne much”.

Some flea-market finds:

It is beautiful, but what is it?

“Wij zijn NIET te koop” – we are NOT for sale. So, what the heck are you doing there?

I thought it said “God sees me, here one cannot escape” but it simply forbids you to swear in his sight. Pleasant in any case.

I should’ve bought it, but puerile army marching band music is not my favourite.

The local launderette even has retro washing powder. I wonder if they are using up some stash from the seventies…

A view along the kaai.

Sitting on the kaai, what mostly functions as the park here in Antwerpen. Photo by Caroline.

There was a mother of a thunderstorm one night, and I sat up trying to catch a lightning hitting that antenna. It never did. Strangely, most of the discharges stayed in the clouds.

The invading hordes of tourists are still mostly asleep, and the inhabitants proper are walking to work along the cramped pathways.  In a small cafe, two policemen are drinking espressos, having parked their boat in the channel outside. I follow their example, sans boat, then continue walking in a general direction of the attractions.

It is strange to find a city so silent, since the morning rush is all by foot. It is never a crowd, but still the streets are filled with smartly dressed locals walking in complete silence. It seems there is a Venice where people live, working in lawyers’ offices, architecture agencies, real estate agencies… and for the tourism industry.

In the morning you also see how the upkeep of the city is arranged. Heavy transporting is done by the waterways, small boats carry supplies for restaurants, building equipment, the like. Heavy things are pushed on small carts along the alleys. Fascinatingly, Venice is something as rare as a city for all practical purposes completely devoid of cars.

Different goods for different customers.

Outside a closed kiosk.

Small head –big nose, big head – small nose.

Venetian laundry.

Some peculiar wooden dolls with felt details. I wonder whether they are undressed or supposed to look like that.

Still life with trophies.

“The Pooh” is still going strong.

The pope has a job to do here.

The skew tower skews the picture.

The common italian “pericolo di morte” skull is quite awesome. Nice type, too.

Someone had been hacking the street signs, although it remained unclear if the purpose is to show alternate routes or to distract tourists. I found my way to the Rialto rather well by wandering at random and following a sign when I felt like it. Venice has a strange circular-labyrinthine structure to it, which surprisingly makes it quite intuitive to orient in.

Clever and pretty.

A massive pidgeon perch.

Morning rush under the Rialto.

Wow, a Real Gondolier. I heard one of these guys make a complete monkey of himself to his american passengers “Wanna a-takea pitture? “Say-a cheese! Fromaggio! Pizza! Pasta!” The americans giggle. What a job, to turn into a ridiculous national stereotype for a living.

I took a break in the shade of the Rialto. The “Union” was a souvenir from Slovenia.

Everyone wants a ride.

Decorations of the season.

Piazza San Marco.

I swear, I didn’t hit it. Although, the San Marco pidgeons are the most fearless flying rats on the planet.

And another little girl was shouting: “Oma! Ich hat ein Taube auf mein Kopf!”

Some famous house.

There’s something growing in the water.

It’s Fido Dido!

Fear and Loathing in Venice.

All in all I spent around ten hours strolling about the city. By five in the afternoon I was quite full of it, and found it hard to muster much more interest for crooked channels and picturesque vistas. It being monday, no art museums were open either. Otherwise the local Guggenheim might have been a worthwhile distraction. But apart from the Biennale and the film festival, there isn’t that much of cultural interest after the novelty starts to fade, perhaps unless you are packed with money of course. One could imagine that there might be all sorts of fun to be had here with a well-fed bank account.

I was happy to get on with the journey towards Antwerpen, with a stop in Bologna, where I had a great pizza and an annoying one-and-a-half hour wait for a delayed night train to Paris. Bologna had these odd arcades covering the sidewalks over a large area in the center. Eventually I got to Paris, had to re-book my ticket to Antwerpen, and finally the excellent Thalys high-speed train. That is in my book by far the best way of travelling. Build that tunnel from Helsinki to Tallin!

The city seemed lived in and rather pleasant, and might warrant a re-visit sometime.

Air raid sirens (?) on a house in Bologna.

All our works can be seen in the online gallery;  Team Finland did rather well when it comes to results, and even some official recognition was to be had.

Additionally there was an exhibition of posters on social issues by acclaimed designers, “masterpieces”, and a smaller exhibition of posters on “coexistence” by Polish designers.

Especially as the tourist season had not started yet, Ljubljana turned out a very pleasant town to visit, with pretty vistas and a relaxed atmosphere. It’s compact size also allowed for walking as the preferred mode of transport.

A Blade Runner -like view in the center of Ljubljana. The tower is a bank head office.

The workshop took place at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design at the University of Ljubljana, some two kilometres from the center. We were divided into six groups, and as it turned out our group was especially lucky with regards to our tutor, australian Jason Grant of the design agency Inkahoots. Jason has worked on Eye magazine, amongst other things, and his engaged approach to social and enviromental issues was very suitable to the theme at hand.

Jason ponders. Instead of diving into our sketchbooks, Jason saw it more productive to start by discussing the subject, so that everyone in the group would be on the same chart. It turned out that the organizers of the event had geared the workshops into a competition as well. This was something which Jason strongly disliked, as it harms cooperation, after all something closely related to the theme of the entire workshop. He has previously written an article on the subject of the “awards madness” that makes working together in the context of design a challenge.

The deeper point of this is that competition seldom leads to ideal results, even though we might have been brought up to imagine otherwise. Competition is proffed as a goal in itself on many levels of society, although in most real-life interactions mutual benefit is the prevailing theme. This follows from the fact that situations where the involved parties have directly opposit or conflicting interests are rare indeed. For cooperation to arise we need not even assume altruism or mutual warm feelings, as co-operation can happen even between enemies. In light of this, it is absurd to think of, say, a design agency, as having interests diametrally opposed to those of another. So why arrange artificial battles of excellency where only one emerges victorious?

For an interesting and concise discussion on this very acute issue of co-operation, I can recommend the book “The Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod. There is no reason to leave it unread.

Jasons sentiments were eventually shared by many in our group. When he brought up the suggestion to make the posters, but refrain from participating in the competition,  most of us sided with it. As could be expected, this was met with some surprise and protest by the arrangers.

Eventually we also started on the actual work, after discussing at length about climate change, social issues and design politics.

I had cheated a bit and brought along a computer, which was forbidden. Eventually it was used more actively by a few fellow workshoppers than by me. Cockta is the slovenian local cola, with headstrong levels of coffeine and an agreeable flavour.

During my travel to Ljubljana I decided that I was going to make a poster that involves the trace of a process. I wanted to make the poster an index, rather than an image; putting the actual poster in the realization of what process lay behind it’s creation. This approach can also be seen as being informed by conceptual art, something which I’ve been following more closely than before during the last few months.

To achieve this I started out by counting carbon emissions. It turns out that the average emissions of a finn is as much as 1.5 kg of CO₂. I turned this knowledge into a sort of penitence for  emissions, attempting to put as much graphite as possible on the poster. Graphite, of course, is an allotrope of carbon.

Some experiments on the technical aspects of the poster. I decided on using a letterpress that luckily happened to be available, to emboss the letters into the paper, which I then colored with the graphite.

Thirty minutes of drawing: It turned out to be surprisingly hard to put enough graphite on the paper to come close to the carbon in the emissions over a significant time, so the finished poster wasn’t exactly accurate regarding the facts, thereby betraying the Tuftean approach of convincing with information. However, the visual impact of the carbon was rather pleasing. Of course one can not avoid creating an image also, but I feel that the tombstone-like appearance is rather appropriate. In the end, the image might well be stronger than the rather obscure message.

Somewhat ironically, one from our group who didn’t want take part in the agreement not to compete with the workshop posters, eventually won the first price.

A big thanks to Jason Grant and the rest of you in the group. The change was from the discussions.

*

Ljubljana tourism imagery follows:

Interesting calligraphy and a stylish frog character, decorating the walls of a restaurant. The first letter is a special variant on ž.

Pidgeon house.

Post-modern buildings of a characteristic style, of which several examples can be found around Ljubljana. I don’t know the architect though.

A little parking hall.

A part of Team Finland posing in front of the self-same parking hall.

Postmodernism Lives.

Ljubljana’s famed modular kiosks. This one was, like many, filled with porn.

A guard- and surveillance company logo.

Another guard company. The mountains are taken from Slovenia’s coat of arms.

A third guard company.

The bank and the All-seeing Eye.

The eye could be seen in many places around town.

A former bar called Muca, cat in slovenian.

A city view from the castle hill, that looms over the centre of Ljubljana. The city lies on a plain, surrounded by the foothills of the Alps.

In the distance, a colorful factory for making sunshine and joy.

A surprising theme turned out to be graffiti culture, on which I got a whole new perspective by some masters of that field. The world’s most widely practiced form of visual art can be thought of as a tradition-conscious modern folk art, ideologically related to calligraphy and with it’s own subcultures and particular modes of evaluation. This even led to an unexpected tribute, skillfully rendered in the 70′s New York style.

Finally, a big thank you to everyone who met for the workshop in Ljubljana. It was memorable.

After Ljubljana, it was time to head back to Antwerpen, but not without a detour through Venice, that sinking city. Somehow that seemed a fitting destination to the theme of climate change.

The man behind that undying contribution to western music was german Uwe Schmidt, now residing in Chile. No-one could be blamed for doubting that he would release anything very significant after that. However, this winter he made a rather impressive return under the alias Atom™ with an album called “Liedgut”.

Here Uwe Schmidt creates a sublime piece of music in a tradition of German-romantic mysticism fused with technology. Sublime is indeed the correct word, seeing references to Schubert, Nietzche, Goethe…  German-romantic mysticism fused with technology?  This citation from the Raster-noton page should explain that concept:

“Atom™ absorbed a universe striving for clarity and simplicity, where science and irrationality, ornament and mathematic purity were the key elements of a (still) oscillating social and mental order. “Liedgut” therefore oscillates between those poles: scientific exercises on Schubert chord progressions, digital waltzes and romantic lyrics.”

Think of that what you will, but there is plenty going on in the album that is divided into 20 short musical movements. Schmidt creates surprisingly organic textures out of complex digital treatment, and does some weird things with the interference sound created by a cellphone near a speaker. An obvious point of musical reference is of course the romantical leanings of Kraftwerk, but  Schmidt manages to make a rather original, contemporary vision of this future from the past.

If all this seems patently pompous and pretentious, it is good to think of what one commentator (sadly I can’t remember who or where) noted about Kraftwerk: The audience outside Germany didn’t always see the smirks on their faces, when they were singing that they were robots.

With only 30 minutes of waiting I had no possibility of actually visiting the town, but at least the platform afforded interesting views of the “LED light district”. Oh, pardon that.

The next leg took me over the Belgian border and into Germany, for yet another train change at Aachen, which didn’t allow for getting an impression of it either. From Aachen the destination was Köln. On that train I had the possibility to train my ad-hoc german skills (oh, these puns!) by reading interesting articles about land-based fish farming, and electrical bicycles in the on-board magazine of DB, which actually seemed rather well edited. Apparently, bikes with assisting electrical motors are increasingly popular in Germany.

Arriving in Köln at around nine in the evening, I had a good two and a half hours to whittle away until my connection to München. The train station in Köln is nicely right in the middle of the center, but more curiosly right at the doorstep of the pretty little Kölner Dom.

After marvelling at that gothic wonder for a while, I saw that some german beer-serving efficiency would be in place. The glasses are small, for sure, but that was compensated in the sheer size of the place, and the robotic efficiency with which empty ones were refilled from huge copper tubing systems.

I think that is a logo for a radio channel. Straight win, in any case.

My next train was an Euro Night Line sleeper carriage. I must say that the concept is neat, and the couches rather comfortable. However, I wasn’t entirely fortunate when it comes to travel companions. When the train was gliding in to the station, I spotted a severely obese man through the window. I thought to myself that the experience of having to sit beside a guy like that was something I’d rather pass up.

Climbing on board the train I quickly found my seat, which turned out to be occupied by the man I’d seen through the window. I double-checked my ticket in the vain hope of some indication that there may be other seats with the same number in some other carriage. Realizing this was not the case, I had to ask him if he could allow me my seat, which was the one to the aisle.

The man was as said very obese, but in a way that made him look rather more like an inflatable swimming toy than a mountain of flesh. He was german, and wearing a conspicuous green felt hat with “Oktoberfest” embroided in gold on it. He seemed to be some travelling salesman of sorts, since he had an assortment of odd briefcases filled with brochures, in front of him.

Luckily he understood that there was no way he’d fit in the window seat and still allow room for me, so we swapped seats, which allowed him to expand out into the aisle. I would be exaggerating if I said the night was horrible, but occasionally my travelling companion would bulge over to my side in his sleep, forcing me to lean closely against the window. Additionally, he wasn’t sleeping very well either, and would at regular intervalls wake up to go stand in the aisle, breathing heavily through his nose and cursing the uncomfortable Deutsche Bahn, not at all suited for a man of his bulk. At one point he startled in his sleep, so that he hit his hand on the seat in front of him. Naturally more cursing followed: “Aie! Aie! Ferdammte DB! Scheiße! Sheiße DB!” Seeing him waggle away like a toy penguin on the station in München the following morning I hoped that our roads wouldn’t cross on any future night trains.

München was yet another slightly longer stop-over. I had the time to do some wandering in the parks near the train station, but in all the impression remained a bit vague, apart from the opulent neo-classicist architecture and interesting travelling entertainment waiting for deployment.

The train from München to Ljubljana travelled through increasingly Alpen landscapes, with ridiculously green rolling hills and white-tipped mountains. There were some excellent views of such things as a motor-glider dragging a streamer with the words “ICH LIEBE DICH!”, and two men on a ladder, both photographing the same cow. The journey was relatively peaceful, despite a noisy school class on a holiday trip sharing the carriage. I tried to do some sketching in anticipation of the workshop but for the most part the landscape kept drawing my attention from the sketchbook.

At around three in the afternoon I then arrived in Ljubljana, slightly desoriented. In all my journey Hasselt-Liège-Aachen-Köln-München-Ljubljana had thus covered some 1000 km and taken about 21 hours, inclusive waiting time. The experience was on the whole a pleasant one, apart from the unfortunate night train.

The bar in the tunnel under the rails of Ljubljana Central Station was pumping out the nigh-forgotten tune “Sandstorm” by former finnish trance hitmaker Darude. After deciding on the probable direction of the city center, I soon found my bearings, and set out looking for some internet to snatch.

Interestingly I hadn’t been provided with any information regarding meeting points, housing or other trivial matters of the sort, but this was quickly arranged with a phone call. I found myself waiting around with the group from Kroatia, until I was eventually shipped to my lodging by the wisecracking hostel owner / driver man. The hostel turned out to be a pleasant villa, and being first on the turf I quickly chose a bed in one of the shared rooms, and promptly went out to explore the nearby city park. Later that evening, my fellow finns would arrive from the airport.

The view from the hostel room.

Some mysterious tree platforms in the park.

A decaying villa opposite to our hostel, Villa Veselova.

The reason for this excursion wasn’t the presumed taste, but the last weekend of the rather nicely branded SuperStories exhibition. This SuperStories was the second edition of a triennale combining exhibits of art, fashion and design; as such a laudable concept. However, it turned out that the branding was one of the strongest point of the whole biennale, which was split over several locations in the pleasantly walkable center of Hasselt.

Those would presumably be scooters, but the meaning eludes me.

Some local ceramics artist had an obsession with UFO’s, but the pleasantly immaculate objects were standing there, waiting to be ruined by imprudently applied glazing.

Some of the works in SuperStories were worth the while, but there was a fair share of less exciting things. The highest quality in displayed items was in my opinion offered in the Z33 art and design center. As far as art goes, the best works here were not even part of the SuperStories as such though;  it was a captivating spatial installation by one Gabriel Lester:

This was a changing landscape on a conveyor belt, the small plastic characters coming into view and casting shadows on the walls while moving along.

The chandelier was slowly sinking and rising in a dark room, by means of an electrical winch.

Some works in SuperStories proper:

Part of a series of collectible architectural kitsch items with a history, by Boym Partners Inc., called Buildings of Disaster.

Artist duo Driessens & Verstappen displayed The Factory, where a booger of green wax is cycled along conveyor belts and perpetually re-melted.

What looks like joke poo is a huge pile of chocolate spread (Nutella), called Untitled, that gave off a faint, but nevertheless sickening sweet aroma. The man behind it being Thomas Rentmeister. His webpage is teeming with similarly excellent work. There is no limit to where Nutella will go.

An exceedingly bizarre sculpture / photography installation by Sylvie Zijlmans.

Conceptually interesting pieces of design were the minimal furniture items by Casimir, such as a bench in the shape of an I-beam, and the cut-up design classics of Martino Gamper. Gamper works extensively with reconfiguring and restructuring found pieces of furniture into new objects; the work displayed at SuperStories consisted of sampled and cut-&-pasted pieces of damaged furniture by italian designer Gio Ponti, entitled If Gio Only Knew.

Additionally, at the fashion museum were a few of the amusing Exactitudes photographs, and at the Hasselt cultural center some excellent animated drawings by Catharina van Eetvelde, borrowing the visual languages of different disciplines of information design.

On a schoolyard was a disabled wood pidgeon, otherwise seemingly in good condition but unable to stand.

“Du villa ha sallad? … Salladen är slut!”

After the exhibitions were visited and the full sleepyness of Hasselt savoured, it was time to jump on the train to Liege (or Leuk), the first leg on the way to Slovenia:

Be-rail’s logo has a delectable vernacular clunkyness to it.

The program has it’s core functionality more or less in place, but should not be regarded as finished. Actually, the question of it being finished is strictly not important, since it is more of a modifiable toolbox likely to change considerably further on. The program is created in Processing / Java with the Geomerative library, using the neat NetBeans IDE.

What does it do, then? It reads a short text file that stores the instructions for drawing shapes to the canvas. These shapes can then be manipulated by clicking to select them. All functions work both for single and groups of shapes. Multiple shapes can be selected by shift-clicking or by catching them with a “marquee”.

Selected shapes can be dragged around the canvas, rotated and resized. Pressing backspace deletes the selected shape. The hue value and brightness values can also be cycled. If the user right-clicks the canvas while shapes are selected, the shapes are copied at the position of the cursor.

Two or more shapes can be grouped, which means they behave as a single object. A group can consist of other groups, and it can be disbanded or “ungrouped”.

Rotating a group of objects in a satisfactory manner is still an unsolved issue. Grouped objects behave correctly, but when a rotated group is disbanded the group rotation is not retained and the shapes snap back to the unrotated position. Likewise, a specific resizing behaviour for groups is not yet implemented.

Canvas states can be saved and loaded, but these functions are as of yet rather unreliable. A more fundamental limitation is that the currently used format for storing the canvas state doesn’t support groups at all, so grouped configurations cannot be saved or loaded at all.

I am the first to admit that the program is rather trivial, but this is a first step, and most importantly a learning exercise. It is easily modifiable, so it will be useful for
trying out different explorative byroads. As of now, there isn’t any generative component in it’s functionality, but most of the work on the current program has gone into the interface and the visual front-end.

Some things to experiment with further on would be different file systems and different ways of constraining the interaction. Now the placement of shapes is governed by a grid, but this could be avoided by enabling a shape to be “aware” of proximity to other shapes. The placing of shapes could also be more Tangram-like, by disallowing overlapping shapes. I also have an notion of combining it with sound analyzer input and adding keyboard commands, which could be a way to create a tool for live visualisations.

I was curious to try out my new bike on a longer ride, and got Caroline to come along with me on the excursion. The road to Doel went through all manners of industrial areas, along a rather boring stretch of highway.

Between the refineries and the docks where patches of grass, grazing grounds for thriving populations of rabbits and Canada geese. You coul really feel how nature is constantly poised to take over those areas, if they ever be abandoned.

The Bike, outside an abandoned shop. The white things in the window are part of an art project in Doel, which strives to “reinhabit” the abandoned houses with artworks, most of them rather dreadful.

“28 days later”.

The coverings of new leaves filling the letters of an old gravestone.

The hand of a christ figure hiding among some trees in the graveyard.

This Art Decó style of lettering was used on several gravestones. Most of them also had portraits and an identical porcelain jesus-heads.

Art, or perhaps politics.

The revealed insides of a house with interesting wallpaper solutions.

The view to the north.

Someone was still keeping goats in the village.

A radar tower of the encroaching harbour.

On the way back to Antwerpen; a refinery at night.

A feisty totem commemorating Holland’s heroics in WWII.

Ted à tête…

Tête à Ted!

Two wins in a row: Chinatown, Amsterdam.

No sneaking onto the terrace here!

* * *

Back in ‘t Staad we decided to do the thing any tourist does, namely: some shenanigans in the giant playground slide in Suid.

The height is deceitful; it is very slow.

After the sliding we decided to visit the unmissable Antwerpen in Miniatuur. That attraction is situated in a rather derelict-looking warehouse on the dock of the Schelde, or the kaai in the local idiome. Walking around the building, following scruffy signs saying “entry this way”, our expectations of the place actually being open steadily sunk. But lo, after walking around the whole thing, what passed as the main entrance was agape to the dark inside.

When we walked up to the doorway a lady appeared, asking  if we were looking for something and whether she could help us. We replied that we wondered whether the museum was open, and if it would be possible to visit. She seemed slightly surprised by this, but the museum was indeed open, and she decided she had time to guide us before a group would arrive. After paying the rather hefty 8.50 € entrance fee, we were ushered into the museum.

The first display was a queer row of glass boxes, explaining the construction history of the museum displays using snail characters. According to the story, some rather intense research had gone into making the miniature city.

The first room held a display of late medieval Antwerpen. In the background, the gold elephants of the Miniature Café club space can be spotted.

The zoo, sponsored.

The opera and the “Boerentor” skyscraper. The odd stilts of the display is to protect the models during occasional flooding of the premises, as the warehouse is outside the wall that keeps the Schelde from overflowing into the city proper.

The building to the left is the police headquarters, quite the piece of stranded 70′s space hardware.

The lack of decoration in the rooms was remarkable, and the place was peppered with odd, old-looking sponsor signs. Curiously, several of the models also had price tags with exorbiant sums, the stated value of the miniatures. The train station (above) was valued at nearly 300 000 €, but I suspect it would be something of a feat to get that sum for it on Ebay. It is not updated to match with reality, since the station has been expanded several levels downwards.

The main display; something like a third of the center of Antwerpen in the same scale as Märklin trains (1:87) , my own house being just outside the cut. This display was enhanced with a show of light and sound, which started out with the Top Gun theme. Following this awesomness, a short history of the city was told by the pre-recorded voice of a young girl.

Her accent was rather funny, and the delivery had the uncanny air of someone who’s been told to sound cheerful, while reading a text she hardly understands. This remarkable little tale contained several tidbits of interesting trivia, for instance that Kristoffel Plantin printed the first book in the world, right here in Antwerpen.

Upon leaving the museum, the apparently lonely guide asked if we would be willing to give her an additional tip, admitted to not liking it very much to wait for visitors in the light of a lone pink fluorescent lamp, and told us she’d visited Finland when “about our age”. She told os that during the museum’s heyday there had been as many as ten guides, but now they were only three. Even that wasn’t of much value though, since both colleagues were on sick leave since last December.

* * *

The next day, bike trips, beers, a smoke on the kaai. Then Kennet left by slow-train for the untold excitements of Frankfurt, the next stop on his tour.