Tjebbe van Tijen via Chello on Fri, 4 Sep 2009 22:58:28 +0200 (CEST) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
<nettime> A deadly beach party shooting in the Netherlands & the resurrection of the tactical media idea now with hooligans as actors and internet posters |
On August 23 a big free for all party was organized near Rotterdam on the beach of in Hoek van Holland by the Dutch commercial televison and radio station Vewronica: Sunset Groove. Fifty thousand people are said to have massed together, but in the end, around midnight, the groove turned into a riot leaving one man dead and six wounded after some unclear shooting incident. At first the local Roatterdam Hooligans group was pointed at as the ones that did the fatal shootingm but after a week or so the authorities had reluctanctly to confess that it was a police bullet that killed a dancer on the beach. The article I have written is in Dutch, as it targets public opnion in the Netherlands in the first place... I have posted it on my blog The Limping Messenger and have also added some layers of English text telling a side story in the form of longer captions below a series of visualizations/tableaus. The full version is to be found here: http://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/hoekje-om-bij-hoek- van-holland-zoooo-wat-een-kanker-er-wordt-gewoon-helemaal-geschoten/ The text has an epilogie in English and also the conclusive sentence of the article has been translated by me: Hooligans are a product of the the entertainment industry and to solve the hooligan problem the cultural value system of this branch of our economy needs to be changed, irrespective whether it is about a football stadium or a beach party at Hoek van Holland. Central in my story are the videophone movies posted right after the incident on Toutube and other public video sharing places. It made me think back to the 1991 incident with Rodney King in Los Angeles and the camcorder document that became the inspirational source for the idea of "tactical media". As the nettime list is also an offspring of that idea and subsequent movement, I think it may interest people - beyond the language restrictions of Dutch - to have a look at the images... play some of the viseo posts that are linked and read some of the fragments in English as posted right below here Tjebbe van Tijen 4/9/2009 =================== Two screenshots merged into one picture from mobile phone videos uploaded to the Internet that document a mass free beech party with DJs in Hoek van Holland, The Netherlands on August 23. 2009. Video taken during a riot at the end of the party, whereby the police at that spot felt so threatened by a crowd that they fired their arms which left a few wounded and one man dead. If the alleged Rotterdam hooligans have also used firearms has not been established, though it was suggested at first. See footnote (*) for the video sources. Click image for a full size view. Enlarged screenshot at 2 minutes and 12 seconds of the Youtube mobile telephone movie posted by Karim1001. I have lightened up the picture information in Photoshop with the ‘curve tool’ because otherwise one sees only a dark screen with some moving lights. The conversation just before, during, and just after this moment goes as follows: “kanker, kanker hee… [pif paf poef] ik hoorde gewoon die kogel daar afketsen [poef paf poef pif hee ga liggen Matti ga liggen vriend..." (cancer, cancer hey [bang bang] I just heard that bullet rebounding [beng bang] hey go dug down Matti, go and lay down). When one more listens than looks at this 2 minute movie and counts the rounds of shooting the level of police panic can be well understood. The fact that one of the boys in this movie shouts after just hearing a bullet rebounding indicates that the gun shots were not just warning shots into the air. Click picture for a full size view. The new mayor of Rotterdam Ahmed Aboutaleb and his challenge to go beyond scapegoating as he - declared war on a group he labeled 'hooligans', after the shooting incident of Hoek van Holland. An official inquiry is under way but as usual public authorities know already where to put the blame. This makes one think back half a century when the Ducth 'nozems' (teddy boys) were group branded as well and were declared enemies of the state by all city authorities. Blaming individuals as a group tends to strengthen their collective identity. Abusive words against group identities are often taken as honoures titles, from the Dutch 'provo' movement of the sixties to the international 'punk' movement of the late seventies and beyond; or back in Dutch history with the abusive French name used for the Dutch insurrectionists at the court of the ruler of the low countries "gueuses" (beggars) that was taken as a name of honnor and survives till today in the Dutch language as Geuzen. This does not imply that the alleged today Rotterdam Hooligans can be equalled in any way with the Dutch revolt against Spanish rule, my intention is only to point to the dangers of hasty and over-simplified scapegoating. For an impression of what the Rotterdam Hooligan football supporters group stands for see footnote (**). Click the picture to see a full size view. Video posted on Dailymotion.com “Welcome to Rotterdam Hooligans” which give some insight in their activities; one sees mainly confrontations between rival football supporters groups and intervening riot police and the last ones becoming a target as well. The candid camera (videophone) shots are montaged on a continuous music track which may be compared to the DJ type music performed at the Veronica beach party. A fast pulsing beat with a transformed voice-over with the text “the dynamo of the universe is war”. This seems to be an early hard core cult song (other sources name it hard style gabber music) by a group/artist under the name Knightvision… That sentence in relation to the Rotterdam Hooligans puzzles me a bit, so I did yet another search on some discreet parts of that sentence and what may be a connection is an American evangelist Wilbert L. McLeod (1918-) of a Baptist church in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan who is said to have had a vision in 1971 whereby he was connected to the “dynamo of the universe” (see Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism page 439); the term “dynamo of the universe” is apparently also used in astronomy as a metaphor for the sun. I see this motto also appear in some forums of game players. I will not further dwell here on the aesthetics and possible inter-textuality of the Rotterdam Hooligans (but one may not exclude such groups of having their own set of historical references), it could simply be just the favorite song of the maker of this video. Someone with a claim to know it better, is invited to denounce or correct my academic bullshit, right here, on the spot. Almost half a million people have watched this video posted by Karim1001 on Youtube and almost 2000 reactions have been written by the people who have seen it. We are entering a new area of public scrutiny, police inquiry and instant sociology, with this available for all document and several other comparable recordings from different points of view, both in the sense of space and mentality and live comments of their makers. What will be the effect of this transparency whereby mass-media potential lays in the hands of any one with a up-to-date mobile phone and access to the internet. Almost two decades ago there was the Rodney King incident in Los Angeles where police brutality had been captured by a personal video camcorder and became evidence in the court case. As this footage had been distributed publicly on local television networks, many people had been able to see with their own eyes what bad things had happened to Rodney King When later an implicated police officer was acquited by the court a mass revolt broke out. This event became an inspirational source for an international media activist conference held in 1993 in Amsterdam with the name Next 5 Minutes International Festival of Tactical Media. I did get involved in the archiving of the mass of conference materials of this first and later conferences on tactical media (in total 5 conferences have been held over the years). A few hundred video-tapes of the Next 5 Minutes conferences have been catalogued and can now be found in the archives of the International Institute of Social History. The Youtube footage of the beach riot in Hoek van Holland made me associate - at a certain level - these crude videophone images with the crude camcorder materials of the 90s in the Los Angeles incident. I can not yet say who are the goodies and baddies of the Hoek van Holland incident, but media distribution wise interesting comparisons may be made. In some way the intermediate function of established media in distributing camcorder footage has become obsolete. The statistics of the Karim1001 video on Youtube proves that. Half a million (almost) viewers and mostly in the Netherlands is some kind of audience comparable to a print run of a national newspaper or a non prime-time television coverage. The Youtube video-footage as such - on the other hand - has not been contextualized at all. It has been thrown just as raw footage on-line and did generate the forementioned 2000 reactions which are most of them as wild as the imagery taken at those confusing moments on the beach. Whoever reads Dutch and can handle strong language in a cool way, may like to access the links to the video and read through some of the many comments. In between scolding, hefty speech, macho talk and sporadic racist remarks, one finds what may be useful witness accounts, sane observations and frequent rebuttals of of nonsense entries and sloppy ways of arguing. The video itself does proves little, but still conveys strongly the atmosphere of the moment and - more importantly - the apparent loss of control of the police officers (or whoever else used firearms at that moment) who seem to fire in an uncontrolled way above and/or into the dark beach environment lighted up by random flashes of the party projection system with the lcd-screens of mobile phones swirling like fire flies through all this. The fact that there were several casualties, one dead and six or seven wounded, attests to this. To coclude... all the tools are there for anyone to make their own inquiry and publish it... to challenge whatever the official reports will tell. Will that happen at all? Time will learn. tj. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org