Infra-Ordinary

Creativity is about connections, and connections are not made by siloing everything off into its own space. New ideas are formed by interesting juxtapositions, and interesting juxtapositions happen when things are out of place.

Over last ten years, the geometry of the cities did not change much, so it determines our movements as much as it did in the 1960s. But what did change is the presence and role of maps. Digital interactive maps are now built into tens of thousands of apps for mobile devices, and we use them daily. Looking and working with the geometry of the cities... See more

New medium of photography could in principle capture the “real” real, as opposed to types. But in its first decades first it was too slow and cumbersome for that. Eventually, it was artists rather than photographers or filmmakers who finally focused on making visible the everyday without generalizing, aestheticizing, or editing it: Andy Warhol’s Sc... See more

We can easily introduce new categories and subcategories – but we can’t describe what social media gives us with a single term. Often, it is more than unmediated everyday, but less than highly mediated news. Neither this nor that, but everything side-by-side. And it is this side-by-side which gives social media its uniqueness as genre of representa... See more

In view of these characteristics of social media, what does our frame captures? Some of it is the exceptional as news define it – but that’s only a one part. The rest is something else, but it is not Perec’s infra-ordinary. People often carefully construct their “ordinary” for Instagram. And they also do share what is exceptional to them: birthday ... See more

What would Perec say if he was alive today to see our data-centered world? Numerous companies and agencies – NSA, telecoms, advertizers and marketers, stores, and so on – are capturing detailed data about behaviors of people: phone numbers dialed; ads clicked on the web; Twitter posts; GPS tracks. But their goal is not the science of un-expectional... See more

Another important difference from infra-ordinary is the tiny number of images people intentionally share per day.

People often stage their lives for social media, and they use Instagram’s own and third party image editing tools to refine the aesthetics of their images in ways that in the 20th century were only available to professional photographers.

So in principle, our frame can capture the infra-ordinary along with the exceptional. So does it?

Introducing the book, Perec writes:

"Many, if not most, of these things have been described, inventoried, photographed, written about or itemized. My intention in the following pages was to describe what remains; that which we generally don’t notice, which doesn’t call attention to itself, which is of no importance: what happens when nothing happens... See more