The Infra-Ordinary Journal is the result of a daily practice of visitation to the Etherington House. In the first two weeks of the exhibition and micro-residency A guest + a host = a ghost, I spent time in the empty home each day to do situated writing, beginning with infra-ordinary observations about what I was seeing and hearing. The entries, transcribed below, at times build out into wider, rough reflections about the home, haunting and curating. It is my hope, especially for those of you who are not in Kingston, that The Infra-Ordinary Journal can give you some eyes and ears and sensations from the house. Anyone reading this is welcome to join the journal with Infra-Ordinary observations of their own, which can then be transcribed for inclusion on this page.

<aside> 🤔 What’s the “Infra-Ordinary?” This idea is taken from the writing of French novelist George Perec, and in particular his book *An Attempt at Exhausting a Place is Paris* (1975), in which he tries to inventory and record in writing everything that he sees and hears as he sits in a public square in Paris. The short book transcribes and captures, in bullet-point form, what Perec calls the “infra-ordinary” sights and sounds of his environment - the overlooked images, events, and materials that erase themselves in their own banality.

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Feb. 8. 2022

Three students walk by outside. Footsteps on the ceiling. Door opens somewhere. Knocking on a door upstairs. No one answers. Possibly Agnes staff? Voices entering the home from the main atrium of the gallery. Cannot understand what is being said. Dead quiet now in the home. The hum of the ventilation. A truck drives by outside. My foot on the floor tapping. More chatter from the atrium. Sun making long streaks of light across the wood floor of the empty house. Chair sliding on the floor above, puncturing the silence. Sound of birds outside. Frost melting on the windows. Doors opening and closing in the hallway leading into the house. Everything is still again in the house. My pen moving across the page. More movement heard upstairs. Constant ambience entering the house from the outside - cars driving by on University avenue. Wet footsteps making squeaky noises on the hard floor in the main atrium. Steps approaching the house and then walking away again. A person is heard whistling a tune. Footsteps now entering the house. A person enters the room I’m in. They are wearing a long white parka. I say “hi.” They say nothing back to me. They walk to the staircase as if looking for something or someone. They peer up the stairs, pausing for about a five seconds, looking and waiting. They seem to see nothing, or they see what they are looking for. Then they turn around, and walk in the other direction without saying a word to me. Footsteps walking away from the house. Down the ramp you can hear wet boots again squeaking on the hard floor of the gallery. House is dead quiet.

Images from Feb. 8

Feb. 9, 2022

Overheard on my way into the gallery: person on their phone said, “Well that’ll keep him young.” I’m in the house now. Upstairs someone unlocks a door. Possibly Agnes staff again entering their office. It is just after 10am. Start of their workday? When I arrive, Agnes welcoming staff are still getting set up for the day of visitors. Today, the main doors were being cleaned and sanitised. Benches in the house have been moved since my last visit. Vivian’s mirrors in the study, too, have shifted - now placed horizontally on the floor rather than vertically. Who did this? Door to the closet moves slightly. Listening back to the ambient sound recording now playing in the space, coming from a speaker that I embedded in the walls yesterday. Brown noise raising and falling volume. This seems to ‘mute’ the space. When the volume of the noise increases, I can’t hear the emptiness of the house or the sounds from the outside. A kind of ambient noise cancellation. Eventually the natural ambience of the house returns - thinking about what Dylan called its “colonial loudness.” How to wear this down? To break it down? To silence it?

Considering my daily visits here as a kind of “possession” - myself performing as a ghost haunting the house.

Today new sound elements will be added to the soundscape. A deeply fragmented version of My Bloody Valentine’s “Only Shallow.” Trying to think about how rhythm can interrupt the relentlessness and insistence of the architecture - its stasis and continuity - can work to cut-up the house in time in the same way that cuts in a video edit break the house down into smaller components or observations. These make it more “thinkable,” less overwhelming. Outside a seagull calls. Had a conversation with Scott Wallis yesterday as he was preparing to mount the platform for the show’s signage on the wall. We made a joke about John Cage’s 4:33. It seems there may be safety concerns with the leaning plank - Scott was bolting it to the wall. We had hoped that this would be a modular plank, travelling around the house. We may need to try harder to win a “provisional” state in this place...

Sound of snowplow outside bleeding into the house. Curious about this possibility for “bleed” happening in both directions - sound from inside the house moving outwards to passersby, and inversely sound from outside bleeding into the house. When temperature warms, there is possibility to open windows to accentuate this dynamic. In that case the house can speak and project outwards. The My Bloody Valentine sequence added today ends with static from a blank groove on a vinyl record. This is good. The Blank Groove emphasises and doubles and replaces the stillness of the house. Static on a record as a kind of sonic “preparation” for future acts. The house is waiting to be played... finding its groove.

”The rhythm, the beat, was to become the central underlying principle.” - Sylvia Wynter, Black Metamorphosis

Page from the Infra-Ordinary Journal, Feb. 9.

**Feb. 10, 2022

I was wrong yesterday - the snow plow isn’t actually snow plow. There is a boom stationed next door doing work on the neighbouring University building. Another concrete brutalist structure. This makes me think of the two overlapping “genres” of architecture that are present here on campus, and in great overlapping proximity: the colonial Victorian style of the house and the brutalism of campus buildings. I’m thinking about China Mieville’s *The City and the City* where two different cities share an identical geographical position but cannot see each other. Cities are described as being “gross-topically” enmeshed, and through other great neologisms from Mieville. Are these two genres of architecture competing, unseeing each other, or advancing the same narrative, with their desires in harmony?

House is dead quiet again. Not a sound from upstairs. May endeavour to place speaker upstairs but likely this will aggravate Agnes staff who have offices up here. What is it they are working on? Thinking now of Kurt Schwitterz’s *Merzbau* which (I think?) had speakers embedded all over the home. Still uncomfortable here despite daily visits. Space is eerie. Thinking about this writing project a kind of competition with the space - asserting daily that it is possible to think and make and reflect here. But still very strange and dulling... Feeling the demands and desires of the architecture always pressing in - to civilise, to elevate, to make proper - must find ways to press back.

On way in, listened repeatedly to My Bloody Valentine’s Only Shallow. This song is now embedded in the space through the hidden shadow speakers in the broom closet and original entrance. Have been reflecting on this gesture as an expression of desire. Only Shallow simply because it is my favourite song. Thinking about the weird desire to share with someone your favourite song, and about how ghosts are also driven by their own desire. Ghosts want something (they want you, the haunted) or otherwise they wouldn’t have emerged. Can we counter the insistent desire of the house with other desires? Use our desire as forms of blockade and interruption? What if ghosts are not malicious presences, and if reckoning with them means learning to see what they see - to love what they love?

”Protect me from what I want.” -Jenny Holzer

My Bloody Valentine warped edit (for embedding in the house):

ShallowChannelling.mp3

“Blank Groove” video edit temporarily projected in the Franks Gallery. The video working away at the site, trying to break it down into building blocks.

Feb. 11, 2022

Later arrival today. 4:00pm. Gallery closing in 30 minutes! Must hurry with this journal entry. As I walked into the house, heard the sound of Judith Butler reading from Benjamin playing back through the walls. This audio is from a selection Sunny made, which was added into the soundscape. This is part of an exploration of potentially using the speaker array as a medium to deliver the exhibition’s didactic / citational support. Hidden sound as a kind of scaffolding and marginalia. Light rain falling against the window pane, blending and bleeding with the sound of vinyl static that is now playing back through the speakers. Thinking about citations as load-bearing. What is it they are supporting? Strange to read or hear or make citations without the body of the text, without any works present in the exhibition. Gallery remains empty - no artworks, no activity, just me and the attendants. The didactic panel leaning against the wall has no writing on it, no paint, no vinyl. Yet we are building up now, through the soundscape, a citational scaffold, a texture of preparation and supports. Feels like we are leading now with the shadow or the trace or the margin before the arrival of the main text. Leading with footnotes.

Last night I was in here with MA students in Sunny’s Situating the Curatorial seminar, listening to the soundscape together. Observations were made about how the sound renders the space more relaxing. A “yoga retreat vibe.” Funny and reassuring the hear this! Confirms that the house, even in its silence, is loud, and requires acts of muting, noise cancellation, softening...

Thinking about the Butler excerpt again. How she annotates ‘on the fly’ in her reading of Benjamin’s text. Says, “Huh, really?” before proceeding with delivering the Benjamin quote. An open invitation was given to the students in the seminar to engage in on-the-fly citation, using the speaker array as a way to thicken the building’s margins, populate them with more annotations. The house as the body of a text, to be thickened and deranged by future anonymous annotators? From building to texts - from texts to volumes - from volumes to speakers - from speakers to voices.

Butler annotating Benjamin on the fly:

cessation of happening (1).mp3