dodgeville

Urban Body: Red Light District Intervention

2007-07-02T03:39:00.000-07:00

As a part of our studio, Urban Body, this spring, we did an intervention in the Red Light District in Amsterdam, which is geographically almost intertwined with Chinatown. In spite of the closeness, many people in RLD are not even aware of CHT's existence. By placing a chinese red lantern in a RLD-window, and showing the movie "Spirited Away", we were hoping to make people stop, question what we were doing and maybe get a new perspective. Enjoy!

MAPPING THE RHYTHM

2007-03-06T02:24:00.000-08:00

The rhythms observed from an apartment window, seen from the window', to be pedestrian...

Several recurring themes emerge in Henri Lefebvres Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life Continuum (London, 2004): the difference between repetition and rhythm; the nature of cyclical and linear repetition and rhythm; the focus on the body as the source of multiple 'natural' rhythms; and the dialectical play of different rhythms, particularly the tense interplay of rational, industrial, linear time with natural, cyclical variants.

Some people just drift through the place, automatically lead there from Amsterdam Centraal, which is described with the word “derive” by the French artist and Situationist Guy Debord.
(Some of his work is exhibited in “mapping the city” in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam)

By doing this exercise we realized how many cctv cameras from the police are installed in the district and that people are hardly aware of that they are monitored all the time.
We got a high response from civilians, interested in what we are doing, doesn’t seem to bother them to much being captured. Amongst them, an American researcher who lives in Haarlem, the Netherlands and who and was interviewing artist working in Chinatown. He publishes everyday about the perception of art on his website www.ArtAndPerception.com

Standing out on the street at night, at the crossing point between Chinatown and the red-light district, gave a completely different picture than we had during the day. As soon as the light goes down, the audience changes. And surprisingly, you hardly see any Chinese people anymore.
The same cars were passing in every few minutes, with dark windows and men inside looking suspicious at us, and realized that now we became highly monitored ourselves. The rhythm gets definitely faster at night and the redlight district reaches its arms into Chinatown.

EVERYDAY SHOPPING

2007-03-06T01:15:00.000-08:00

by studying Walter Benjamins arcade project i found this link worth sharing with you:

http://www.othervoices.org/gpeaker/Prostit.html

Amanda Lear - Queen of Chinatown

2007-03-05T11:29:00.000-08:00

The Music video Odyssey continues... For this week, retro-active aesthetics and heavy bass vocals by Amanda Lear!

Seizing the day

2007-03-05T08:27:00.000-08:00

Friday we went to Amsterdam to work with our rythm analysis.We wanted to film at three scales simultaneously, capturing one event from the detail to its context. Originally we wanted to have one camera on street level, and the other two in a slightly higher position in order to get a better view. That proved difficult, though, so we ended up having all three cameras on street level.

Camera 1 was placed in one of the alleys between Chinatown and the Red Light District, directed towards a window in which a prostitute was working. Camera 2 was placed in the Zeedijk, where it intersects with the alley, capturing people going in and out of the alley. Camera 3 we put on a tripod in Nieuw Markt, directed towards the Zeedijk.

We captured people, mostly men, passing in the alley, looking at the women in the window, pausing to consider whether or not to go inside. Some did, some didn’t, some changed their mind and come back.

We saw herds of tourists walking from the alley and up the Zeedijk, we saw chinese women and men carrying shoppingbags from one of the chinese supermarkets in the area, a man picking up trash, police on bicycles, a horse and buggy.

We saw more tourists, cars running, people going in and out of cafes, people stopping in the street talking to eachother, a woman with a baby stopping to talk to us.

At the end of our day in Amsterdam, the pace of movement seemed to change a little, in a way everything became more dense, concentrated, focused. Many of the random tourists are gone by this time, the ones that are left seem to have more of a purpose. Taxis were almost the only kind of veichle passing in Zeedijk, though passing isn’t exactly the right word, because almost all of them stop at our intersection, letting people on and off. When the everyday-life is coming to an end and leaves the place to the every-night-life, it takes with it a lot of the activites and the people performing them, and the activities brought by the night don’t quite make up for the loss.

On prostitution in Amsterdam in general

2007-03-05T03:33:00.000-08:00

After having talked to the Ghanese girl (a prostitute in the Red Light District), we wanted to check her story by talking to some “reliable source”. Maybe it was our prejudice against prostitution that was so strong that even though our girl gave no signs of being a liar, we felt we had to get her story confimed. Is it really true that most of the girls work there without having someone pushing them into it? Or is that just something they tell us and themselves in order to make their lives more bearable?

The sex industry is probably one of the businesses with most prejudice connected to it, and the woman at the Prostitution Information Center (PIC) was quick to inform me that most of them are based on myths. Of course there exist women who are being exploited, but the big majority of the sex-workers work there out of own (free) will, and aren’t forced to do so by anyone.

The renting of the windows works more or less like a mall, she tells me. There are about 60 different landowners renting out windows in Amsterdam, providing the sex workers a place from which they can sell their services. But quite as a mall it doesn’t seem. The women pay up front per shift, each shift lasting 8-12 hours. Depending on the location of the window, the time of day, and day of week, the prices vary from 50 to 135 euros per shift. A normal start out price for a 20 min session is 50 euros. As in everything else, there are good days and bad days, sometimes you barely make the rent, sometimes you go home with your pocket full of 50-euro bills.

For the time being the market isn’t too good and there are plenty of empty windows. This might be the reason why some owners now start to ask for a week’s payment in advance- in order to secure their own income. Of course, this for the women is not such a good idea- if they fall sick one day, they loose the money. It’s less risky for the prostitutes to pay per day, of course, which also allows them a bit more freedom of movement. But it also means that in the beginning you must be prepared to move around a bit, taking one shift here and one shift there. When you’ve established a good relationship with the owner, and they know that you show up when you’ve said you will, chances are you’ll get a more permanent spot.

The window-owners, or the bosses as the woman at the PIC somethimes called them, are licenced by the government. They are obliged to provide a security service for the women working there. Every window is equipped with an alarm-button in case the prostitute should be in any kind of emergency. Even though customers very seldom get violent, there might be some minor quarrels, or there might of course occur some kind of health emergency. The bosses have people on their staff that come to help in these occations, only seldomly the police is called.

The bosses also often have offices where the prostitutes can by safe sex supplies. Everyone is responsible for his or her own health, so there are no compulsory check-ups for the girls. Hopefully both workers and customers are being responsible, but as with everything else, money makes a difference for some. Some customers are willing to offer double payment to put their own and the prostitute’s health at risk, and a strained economy sometimes make the women accept such an offer. The authorities are trying to provide information and help, and there are free clinics available. There also exist special teams that go around to clubs and brothels, to make it easier for the women to have their health checked.

The nationalities represented in the Red Light District varies a lot with the political and economical situation in the world. At least on the worker side. You have to be an EU citizen to work there legally, so most of the women are from European countries, or they have traveled through Europe in order to get a European passport. Since the Eastern European countries joined the EU, there’s been a boom in prostitues from these countries. Changes in the economic situation in different countries manifest themselves in changes in the number of workers from each country.

When it comes to the customers, it’s seems to be a bit more stable. The clients are mainly toursist and men in Amsterdam on business, and there seems to be an overwhelming majority of British men. Most Dutch customers go to one of the many other Red Light Districts in Holland or Amsterdam, avoiding the largest one. If you do see a Dutch man in “our” Red Light District, chances are that he’s there for one special woman only.

Check out website: www.pic-amsterdam.com

Creative Practice Workshop

2007-03-01T10:05:00.000-08:00

Asignment:
Find a place in the Faculty of Architecture that you’d like to change. Movement patterns, behavior, focus. Make an intervention that you think will lead to this change. Document it. Document what happens.

Result:
We picked our spot in the cafeteria, and wanted to create more order. We tried to change peoples routines for cleaning up their own mess, andt raise some environmental awareness. This is what happened.

A girl from Ghana

2007-03-01T08:38:00.000-08:00

Subject: Prostitute in the red light district. To where and who is this subject connected? Our scope is to be able to untangle the threads attatched to this person, make maps of her movement and her connections, see how she uses the city.

Going around in the red light district we worked up the courage to try to talk to some of the sex-workers there. A girl from Ghana agreed to talk to us. She’s a quite nice-looking girl/woman, I’m guessing she’s in her mid-twenties, she doesn’t look so tired as so many of the other women in the area. She told us she came here seven years ago with her father. Three years ago she began working as a prostitute, simply because it seemed like the easiest way to earn money. Easy has to be an exaggeration, at least according to my idea of it. She said she’s working 18 hours a day, from 10 am to 4 am, six days a week. Not exactly my idea of easy money.

Working 18 hours a day means that she doesn’t really have time to use the city she’s living in , to experience it. For us it also means that our mapping of her will have to focus on other things in addition to her movement during the day. Finding out how the business is organized, what her clients are like, from who she rents her window etc, are all quite interesting factors.

We discover that our girl is not only a subject, she is also very much objectified. Not merely as an object of lust for certain clients and bypassers. By confining herself in such a narrow space that a red-light window is, she limits her own possibilites to affect her environment, she is very much dependent on people coming to her.

But obviously, in other ways she’s as much a subject as anyone else. She tells us that she’s working independently, not being organized in any way, no pimp watching her back and taking his share of the money. So if she sometimes decides to not come to work, that’s her choice. How long she stays at work, is also her choice. She tells us that she normally works very hard to make her rent, and that she allows herself a bit more slack when she has secured the day’s profit.

I must admit that what we discover by talking to this girl, is very different from what I expected to find. I was imagining that by interviewing a prostitute, a whole spiderweb of connections and relations would reveal itself to us. I was expecting to find unexpected connections of some sort, seeing that everything in this city is somehow tied together. Ok, I was perhaps hoping for too much. But what we’ve found actually contradicts all my assumptions. At least I would think that the Red Light District and Chinatown would be connected, if only by the fact that our girl would go to one of the chinese restaurants in the area. Of course these connections might still exist even if we haven’t discovered them yet.

But honestly, I don’t think we’ll find these links through our prostitute. In the little free time she has, she sometimes goes to a nearby bar to get a cup of coffee with one of her friends. They’re all prostitutes, for as she says, when should she have time to meet anyone else? So she seems to be operating in a very limited space, and the people connected to her aren’t making it a whole lot bigger. Tomorrow we’ll try to find her again (contrary to our assumptions she’s not in the same window every night, we recently discovered), and ask her more about her father and sister. Maybe that will be the link we need to a bigger web. Maybe.

_if you walk across the univer with me II

2007-02-28T11:05:00.000-08:00

your hands will get burned.
mao was 70% right and 30% wrong.
great leap forward.

'...I'm caught up in a spiral'

2007-02-27T12:05:00.000-08:00

Workshop: 'Choreographing Space'
Delft School for Design/ 12-13 February, 2007
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Keywords:
body, space, harmony, choreography, sensation, intensity, information, visualization, representation, mapping, diagramming, performance

Asignment:
modify a space in the TU Delft School of Architecture in half an hour to provoke a different relation of body in space

Result: a body-challenging task/ try to get to the upper level of the DSD, using the spiral staircase, avoiding the lazer-cutting toilet-paper threads. Entrapment-chic.

Recommended listening: William Orbit - Spiral

_if you walk across the universe with me

2007-02-23T17:22:00.000-08:00

allow me to introduce, myself with no excuse. my name is deng xiaoping. to get to know my name i didn't need a jury . i took the crown myself and put it on my head.

illustration deng xiaoping with soft PS filter

paraphrasing miss universum

_working title

2007-02-23T16:28:00.000-08:00

a whole life in a block

PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY

2007-02-23T07:33:00.000-08:00

take a look at some fellow researchers work
http://emptystreets.net/blog/

_line rider + fl0w

2007-02-22T08:52:00.000-08:00

indie gaming. tool? go you tube for line rider clips. open-ended play experience.

UNDERWATER ADVENTURE

UNDERWATER ADVENTURE II

_define:serendipity

2007-02-22T07:06:00.000-08:00

The art of finding something by looking for something else.

_psychocartography of conceived space

2007-02-22T06:18:00.000-08:00

Atlas of emotions

Human interaction / simultaneity

conception of presence

Multiple space

Understanding of reality(ies)

impression ¨

reminiscence

_ruins of the map

2007-02-21T03:35:00.000-08:00

… In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild drew a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, coinciding point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography saw the vast Map to be Useless and permitted it to decay and fray under the Sun and winters.
In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; and in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

‘On Exactitude in Science,’ Jorge Luis Borges

_fonts

2007-02-21T03:09:00.000-08:00

same font for the blog posts??
trebuchet small for the bread text

Music video of the week! #1

2007-02-20T09:29:00.000-08:00

Hi there. This is the first post of a series of china-related music videos that will be (hopefully) posted here every week by oxotnic! Most of them might hard to bear in audio terms, but there's always a mute button there to protect sensitive ears. To start-off and get you into the mood, I've chose an instant cult classic, Modern Talking - China In Her Eyes. Beware, the imagery can be quite powerful and funny at the same time - you choose. Don't be fooled by the preview frame and Enjoy!

Project website

2007-02-20T09:20:00.000-08:00

Hopefully you'll be seeing more of this soon on ... http://www.urbanbody.org/students/group_02/index.html
our website for the Urban Body course. Beware of immitations.

LIFE IS LIVE AND PROSTITUTION

2007-02-20T04:52:00.000-08:00

Still back in Amsterdam, we tried to find the perfect place where gamblers, prostitutes, visitors, voyeurs, tourists, locals and apparently me come together. In one of the side alleys across the windows of the prostitutes and close to the gambling house there was this place, the HONNY BAR. The place is run by a man around sixty from Turkey, who is looking forward to his retirement. After he lived for in Tyrol (Austria) before, Amsterdam seemed to worn him out. He was tired of the location.

Georg Simmel, a German sociologist called prostitution a “transnational survival strategy”(1978). Prostitution has become a central metaphor for the choices people make and the pressure they face in moving across borders in search of better lives. Is this not also what the old man is doing?

In the Netherlands prostitution is legal and nobody hopefully is forced to do this job. For more information see also www.pic-amsterdam.com

Currently confronted with the computer game “second life” it came into my mind, that the gambler, spending his day in the playhouse, the prostitute not recognized by her father passing her window is also a form of second (secret) life. And every other form of dressing up like Carnival as well.

The origin of Chinatowns outside China was a self supporting ghetto for Chinese people in order to survive abroad. Isn’t this a transnational survival strategy, what Simmel was talking about, as well? Today Chinatowns all over the world turned into a promotion of commercial Chinese goods, but it still has the notion of hidden places and powers in twilight.

_dodgevilles

2007-02-16T11:29:00.001-08:00

there are more than one, no? the one dodgeville is only a beginning. dodgeville is the place a conventional map cannot spot. dodgevilles are not stable values. dodgeville is a responsive narrative connected to other dodgevilles. their relations are not distance, but unforseen events. or maybe not unforseen and maybe not events, but hidden proximity. you have to move through that something to see what is really there. but you might not have to move that far. or you even have to move further that you can imagine. through a door or endless time zones. dodgeville is always there, but may appear as a condition you don't recognize. just until the momen you shift focal point...

_on narratives and stalker

2007-02-15T20:30:00.000-08:00

...Stalker was founded by a group of architecture students during an occupation of Rome University in 1990. That they describe that occupation as ‘an opportunity to get to know a lot of people’ provides a key to the architectural thinking behind much of their subsequent work. At the same time, Stalker (the name refers to Andrei Tarkowsky’s cult film) is a loose and open collective that consistently shies away from any conventional description as ‘architectural’: members and collaborators have included artists, art historians, theoreticians, an astro-physicist, a geologist and a dentist. The first Stalker project, a five-day dérive through the city of Rome, mapped the territory in which they would operate.

Yet to say that this project resulted in a map is to say nothing at all, for in essence this was a map of the unmapped and the unmappable. That the dérive should be such an apparently self-negating exercise is hardly surprising given its origins in the work of one of the most richly self-destructive avant-garde groups of the last century, the Situationist International (the various protagonists of which are obvious and important influences on Stalker’s work). Guy Debord, the chief theorist of the movement, describes the dérive as a passage through the ‘ambiences’ of a city, a search for and awareness of its ‘psychogeography’. It is an encounter with effect, with strange attractors and with the often unpredictable collision of various urban processes. In many respects it is the search for a narrative of the city. ...

(Rappolt, Mark, ARCHITECTURE: STALKER: BARBED WIRE AND WINDMILLS)

_les particules élementaires

2007-02-15T19:39:00.000-08:00

"Griffiths's stories were introduced in 1984 to relate quantum measurements in plausible narrations. One of Griffiths's stories is based upon of a series of random measurements taken at different times. Each measurement express the fact that a certain physical quantity, possibly different from one measurement to another, is included, at a given moment, within a certain domain of values. For example, at time T1 an electrone has a certain velocity, determined by an approximation that depends on the type and mode of measurement; at T2 it is located a certain place in space; at T3, it has a certain spin value. Based upon a subset of measurements a logically consistent story can be defined, but which nonetheless cannot be said to be true; it can only be sustained without contradiction.

[In these stories] everything happens as if the world were made up of seperate objects, possessing intrinsic and stable properties. However, the number og Griffiths's conscious stories that could be rewritten based upon a series of measurements is, in general, far greater than one."

(Paraphrasing HOUELLEBECQ; MICHEL; The Elementary Particles)

_röd längtan

2007-02-15T17:05:00.000-08:00

röd längtan means red longings. china is politically red. infrared? dragon red. neon red - pink. consum communism. red as in orientalism. hot red. hotter than india? red as in dangerous. the american way. red ducks. cities of fire (ringo lam) toshiba red. no red stop signs?

chinatowns are red longings. made in china.

a try to get a hook on the world out there

2007-02-15T11:28:00.000-08:00

FIELD TRIP TO AMSTERDAM 070209

OCJECT: gambling house
SUBJECT: prostitute

nice topics to investigate in and pretty interesting but how to do this?
after a coffe and realizing that we are way to many people to have a normal conversation with a prostitute or a gambler, we decided to split up in groups and go by ourselves for a while to get an impression.

my first reaction was, entering the sex-shop right next to me, but on the other side of the canal, means not situated in chinatown anymore. the shop itself was terribly small and i got immediately confronted with the owner, and had to tell him my shopping target. well, there were this porno videos all over and everything else i could see and imagine myself buying was this gel, standing at the counter. so i got the whole instructions about using it while i was thinking very concentrated about what i could ask him about the red-light district, the prostitutes, the connections to chinatown. a few minutes later i found myself back on the street with an overpriced item in my pocket and the idea, i just have could asked him: "do you live here"? well, i kind of messed up my firts chance and wandered around for a while to clear my mind.
back in chinatown i decided to have a break in a coffeeshop, the JOLLY JOKER. it was quiet and nice and warm in there, the air so thik that you could cut it and lonely men sitting at the bar dreaming in their own world. i installed myself between them, ordered an exotic tea and waited for reaction.
well, i didn't wait for long. the guy on my right side started to talk to me about art and was pointing out some nice design work in an art magazine, so there was something to start a conversation. he is american, fiction and scene writer, lives in amsterdam since ten years, married to a dutch woman and knows the place. quote: you came to the right place here! seems like JOLLY JOKER is a meeting point for intellectuals who like to chill out for a while. i am not mentioning real names here, so lets him call KARL.
after KARL told me that his main interest is to write about sex & art, i felt encouraged to tell him about our project. at this point i was not sure myself what exactely i was looking for and what the endproduct would be, so i was very careful in not limiting my approach from the beginning.
as you can imagine, there is some hesitation to go straight and interview a girl working there.
but i found out that KARL has connections to prostitutes to find the stories for his own work. so there he comes into the picture, telling me what kind of women he meets, about their life and motivation doing this. well at least the motivation is easy to figure out: money. as simple as that, and quite good money.
he told me about this girl he knows, who started business in the window when she was eighteen. and after her third month, she bought an AUDI TT. she is 24 now, still doing the same job. i have no idea how long i would have to work as an architect to afford this nice car. probably three years?

KARL adviced me to find a place in chinatown, where i see all the potentials and opportunities coming together; and just telling the truth to the people working there, and maybe offering a service vice versa, maybe a website? not a bad idea actually.

well, tomorrow i will write about this place i found, the HONNY BAR, and that everything is about the need to feed our aspirations, and that the gambling place and the girl in the window try to meet this longing. but why in chinatown?