Infra-mince and the poetics of gas
Marcel Duchamp was fascinated with the quantum difference between air inhaled and exhaled. The same can be said of having read newsprint. How do we measure that difference? And what does it mean? For Duchamp infra-mince, the infinitely small, was his po-faced readymade concept for thinking about the minutiae of experience that is forgotten in the name of big culture. As well it was an aesthetic thought experiment for thinking about differences that make a difference in the materiality of culture.
Gas and breath are not only vaporous but elusive, on the way to disappearance at the moment of their manifestation. In our ongoing Classical Gas project the nano difference of vapour as infra-minceis remixed as the semiotic misprision that makes the cover art of easy-listening albums momentarily become philosophical works from the maverick history of ideas. Here infra-mince is détourned as the potential moment of epiphany when a Shirley Bassey album cover elides, if only momentarily, into An Ethics of Sexual Difference by Luce Irigaray. What it is, is it what it is, are aesthetic and conceptual understandings and judgements that are always already in the eye of the beholder. The fine and always potentially elusive grasp of difference is an epiphany that is always a risk, and always a gas.
Lisa Gye is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at Swinburne University. Her research interests include the use of media in creating social change and making media that matters. She is a former facilitator for the Fibreculture network and is currently working on this year’s Memefest, a global festival that promotes the use of socially responsive communications to encourage and foster public engagement with issues relating to environmental sustainability and social justice.
Darren Tofts is Professor of Media and Communications, Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.
He is a well-known cultural critic who writes regularly for a range of national and international publications on issues to do with cyberculture, new media arts, remix culture and literary and cultural theory. He is the author (with artist Murray McKeich) of Memory Trade. A Prehistory of Cyberculture (Sydney, Interface Books, 1998), Parallax. Essays on Art, Culture and Technology (Sydney, Interface Books 1999) and Interzone: Media Arts in Australia (Thames and Hudson: Sydney, 2005). With Annemarie Jonson and Alessio Cavallaro he edited Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History (Power Publications/MIT Press, 2003) and with Lisa Gye edited Illogic of Sense: The Gregory L. Ulmer Remix (ALT-X Press, 2007). His most recent book is Alephbet: Essays on ghost-writing, nutshells & infinite space (Prague/Litterraria Pragensia, 2013).