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

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