Infra-mince and the poetics of gas: Liner notes, vinyl records and the difference that makes a difference

At the Istanbul biennial in 2011, Israeli artist Dani Gal's Historical Records Archive (2005 - present) installation blew our minds. Here was a collection of real LP albums of significant twentieth century historical events, speeches, and political debates. But it was also an archive in which the actual records were deliberately absent, foregrounding the planar cover art as information about something elusive and leaving visitors with the speculative task of imagining how they might or could sound. [1] But in its own uncanny, quantum way, it echoed our work in Classical Gas project (2011 - present) in its transformation of classical album covers from the “easy listening” tradition of popular music into canonical texts from the history of ideas. What follows, then, is a series of probes that explore a form of molecular semiotics that we perform to suggest uncanny epiphanies that can occur when, for instance, a Shirley Bassey album becomes An Ethics of Sexual Difference by Luce Irigaray [2] or Music in the Morgan Manner segues into a fighting title by Roseanne Allucquere Stone. [3] Drawing on Marcel Duchamp's readymade concept of infra-mince, or infrathin, as well as Gregory Bateson's informatic "difference that makes a difference," our ongoing Classical Gas project freeze-frames this poetic moment of transformation from one semiotic state to another. As in physics or digital vectors of information exchange, the fine and elusive epiphany of transformation is always in the eye of the beholder. Art isn’t necessarily about what you see, but what it prompts you to see.