# Introducing the infra >The possible/implying/ the becoming—the passage from/ one to the other takes place/ in the infrathin.^[The notes of Marcel Duchamp have been published in two parts: Marcel Duchamp. _Notes, Champs- Flammarion. Paris 1980 and Duchamp du signe, Champs-Flammarion. Paris 1975_. The notes are divided into four thematic parts: Inframince, Le Grand Verre, Projets and Jeux de mots. You can find reproductions of the Notes [[Marcel Duchamp's Notes|HERE]]] The concept of *infra,* derived from the Latin prefix meaning beneath, below, or within. Often used as a prefix, infra means below or beneath, or within. This research works with the term *infra* to express the intangible, relational, and barely perceptible realms that require alternative sensing modes, such as feeling, listening, and the haptic. These insights from what I’ve learned as a conservator and art/design researcher, aiming to attune to these often overlooked and under-valued interstitial realms: that is to adapt these modes of conservation-based documentation and material analysis to an environmental awareness. For the artist Marcel Duchamp the infra-mince (_infrathin_) was an everyday encounter with a host of ineffable and spectral dimensions. I will argue that Duchamp’s infra, active in the interstitial spacing integral to photography, resists capture and categorisation, has to be felt and experienced, in its immediacy. This perspective opens up alternative possibilities for these conservation-based encounters beyond the constraints of utility and representation. This study draws on several artistic, literary, and theoretical dives into the infra-sensible. For example, the ecological philosopher and educator Timothy Morton’s _infrasound_; the _infra-ordinary_ of author Georges Perec and elsewhere, returning to Duchamp, the artist Alice Channer’s compelling performance of Duchamp’s infrathin. To give a flavour: In his book _Species of Spaces and other Pieces_ , the author Georges Perec uses the term *infraordinary* to conjure everyday quotidian aspects of life. Not the big events and the exotic for Perec, rather, it is the everyday happenings, the lure of the ‘extraordinary,’ that moves him to write. But the question is how to let these characters and characteristics speak. Perec suggests a new anthropology, not the one that has long pillaged from others, but that sets out to account for how we spend our time. A local fieldwork of sorts. So, echoing Marcel Duchamp, the author challenges us to pay attention to the often-overlooked everyday gestures and habits that compose our lives: >To question what seems so much a matter of course that we’ve forgotten its origins. To rediscover something of the astonishment that Jules Verne or his readers may have felt faced with an apparatus capable of reproducing and transporting sounds. For the astonishment existed, along with thousands of others, and it’s they which have molded us.^[Perec, Georges, Simon Morris, and John Sturrock. _Species of Spaces and Other Pieces: Pigeon Reader_. Acklam: Information As Material, 2012, 210-211.] In _Humankind, Solidarity with Non-Human People_, Timothy Morton describes infrasound as an overwhelming encounter with an abyssal excess. A mysterious background noise that impedes those tasked with measuring and categorising things. For Morton, these ‘fuzzy and ragged’ *infra* dimensions are ecological markers of intimacy, ‘literally the sound of context exploding’. To attune to this resonant precursor of the end of an epoch requires special apparatus: >Very large entities such as mountains and oceans sometimes move in such a way that the vibrations of their movement create sound, far too deep for humans to hear. The sound waves travel across earth, sweeping up all kinds of entities in their waveforms. You can record and broadcast this infrasound, but you have to build a special, very long speaker to push the wave through effectively, and you have to speed it up […], so that humans can hear it – an incredibly deep, loud roar. It’s like the soft roar that is part of the signature of an explosion: not the shattering, but the pervasive rumble.^[Morton, Timothy. _Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People_. Verso, 2017, 104 -106.] We should also not forget that many animals are attuned to and inhabit infra-worlds: elephants, whales, and rhinoceros, amongst others, use infrasound to communicate, often over enormous distances, while bats, use [[Condition Report (a history)#Echo-location|echo-location]] to navigate. Some animals can also sense infrasonic waves travelling through the earth, such as earthquakes and explosions. The _infra_ is typically an early warning sign of danger. ^58f872 In a recent performance to celebrate the 5th anniversary of London’s Large Glass Gallery, the artist Alice Channer summoned the sound of corduroy trousers, ‘which when brushing against itself gives an auditory infra-thin.’ In, _Silk Cut, E-lites and Nanoparticle_, another of Channer’s enigmatic renditions of Duchamp’s infra-thin, the artist seated, wearing headphones, as if listening to Duchamp on the portable tape recorder, intoned; ‘While trying to place 1 plane surface / precisely on another plane surface / you pass through some infra thin moments.’^[See _5-way Portrait/Marcel Duchamp_ at the Large Glass Gallery, London, 2016, accessed 20 August 2021, http://largeglass.co.uk/5-way-Portrait-Marcel-Duchamp/.] This study pivots on the infra. As a conservator in the museum, I’m intrigued by the uncharacteristic, quotidian, experiential and affective dimensions, that challenge the conventions of these methods of documentation and material analysis: that is the preoccupation with the aesthetic/historic object, over and above its associated documentation. Paying attention to these material//social relations can lead to a reevaluation of these hybrid photo-based practices and provide a novel perspective on the intimate relations and [[generative tension "//"]] between the museum and the photograph.