#25 Three sparrows were sighted in Tokyo

The profound, playful brilliance of Infraordinary FM

Dear friends,

Within the last few minutes, the following things happened:

The international space station passed over Turmi, Ethiopia. 

An ice breaker ship named Nikolai Chiker departed from the port of Mariel, Cuba.

A goldfinch was sighted in Haarlem, Netherlands.

The bowling alley Fun Centre opened in Douala, Cameroon.

Someone found a key in Honolulu, Hawaii.

There was a gentle westerly breeze in Warsaw, Poland.

A new high score was achieved on the Godzilla Machine in Pin Ball Hall of Fame, Las Vegas, Nevada.

The tide was unusually low in Pueblo Benito Garcia, Mexico.

The sun set in Pnongyang, North Korea.

The sun rose in Paysandú, Uruguay.

Somebody reported a full bin in Runnymede, United Kingdom.

How do I know this? As I write, I’m listening to an unusual online radio station called Infraordinary FM, a 24/7 ‘global information service’, where synthetic voices broadcast ‘reliable, real-time information about commonplace and quotidian happenings around the world’, over a backdrop of tinkling bells and spangly MIDI melodies.

If you have a moment, stop and listen before reading further. 

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It’s hard to know what to make of it.

Is it helpful to learn that a pet shop halfway around the world has just opened? Or that a full moon is visible from a far-off city?  

Listening to Infraordinary FM is bewildering to begin with. On one level, it feels familiar – we’re used to real-time news and updates. But on another, it’s disconcerting – what the station broadcasts is bizarre: not useful, not relevant, not really ‘news’ at all. What’s the point of a radio station that tells you that a bookstore in Yemen is closing in an hour, that a streetlight is on in daylight in the UK, that there’s been a sighting of sixteen rock pigeons in India?

And yet, there’s something magnetic about it too. Its updates are so specific, so short, and drawn from such diverse contexts, that the cumulative effect is surreal and strangely fascinating. Infraordinary FM offers a kind of imaginative travel, making the lives and experiences of others feel more present and immediate, reminding us that we’re on a turning planet, with shifting times and tides. I find listening to it grounding and perspective-giving. It feels like an antidote to rolling news and infinite scroll.

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I wanted to write about Infraordinary FM this week to explore why I find it such a compelling and hopeful use of the technologies we live with.

Why do I find it so enlivening? Why do I feel it nurtures, rather than saps, my attention and imagination? And what could we learn from that?

There’s no manifesto or mission statement on the station’s webpage. But there’s a clue in the name. ‘Infra-ordinary’ is a term associated with the French writer Georges Perec. In his 1973 essay ‘Approaches to What?’, Perec wrote: ‘What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary […] as if life reveals itself only by way of the spectacular’.

What if, Perec asks, the focus on ‘the big event’ distracts us from ‘the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infraordinary, the background noise, the habitual?’

So what if it does? we might respond. Some big events need all the attention we can give them.

Perec doesn’t dispute the seriousness of serious events. But he does question our ability to see or think about them clearly if we are not also focusing on the everyday details of the lives and contexts they spring from. And how are we to do that, he asks, when ‘[t]he daily papers talk of everything except the daily’?

We need ‘[t]o question the habitual’, he continues. ‘But that’s just it. We’re habituated to it. We don’t question it, it doesn’t question us, it doesn’t seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither questions nor answers, as if it weren’t the bearer of any information.’

The logics and dynamics of our macro systems play out in the micro details of human and more-than-human lives, in the soil, the water, the air, the weather. For Perec, an alertness to these details can reawaken ‘astonishment’ at the conventions and assumptions that drive our world. ‘In our haste to measure the historic, the significant, the revelatory’, he writes, we might overlook ‘the truly intolerable, the truly inadmissible’: oppression, injustice and degradation that is ‘intolerable twenty-four hours out of twenty-four, three hundred and sixty-five days a year’, not just when a crisis forces it into the headlines.

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For those who haven’t read Georges Perec, what I’ve written so far might make him sound like an earnest, political writer. He was certainly political – but playfully and poetically so. He’s the writer who wrote an entire novel without the letter E and who spent three days documenting everything that happened in a square in Paris, down to the changes in the light and the motions of the pigeons. Perec treats playfulness as a political act.

‘Infra’ means ‘beneath’. The infra-ordinary, then, is that which lies beneath the ordinary. Perec experimented constantly with ways to see the ordinary with fresh eyes: to tune in to the questions that lie beneath the unquestioned details of our lives.

‘What we need to question,’ he writes, ‘is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us.’

He offers some instructions to get us started:

Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare.

Make an inventory of your pockets, of your bag. Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out.

Question your tea spoons.

In the face of pressing global emergencies and a climate in crisis, taking time out to ‘question your tea spoons’ might seem not just pointless but glib and indulgent. But, for Perec, the fact that these questions might seem ‘trivial or futile’ is ‘what makes them just as essential, if not more so, as all the other questions by which we’ve tried in vain to lay hold on our truth.’

His prompts may sound like art-school assignments, but what would happen if we did question our teaspoons? Where are they from? What are they made of? Who made them? How did they reach us? When do we use them? What do we use them for? What social conventions are they part of? Why do we drink so much tea? Where does the tea come from?

They’re only teaspoons. We use them all the time. And yet, they’re not ‘only teaspoons’ at all. They’re entangled with customs and systems, with inequality and oppression, past and present. Question leads to question leads to question.

For Perec, a curiosity about the habitual can bring about major perceptual shifts. Tug any thread and it will lead you to the questions and assumptions that lie beneath the ordinary.

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Infraordinary FM is an experiment in the spirit of Perec. Created by the artist Daniel John Jones and the writer Seb Emina (author of the excellent Read Me newsletter), the station draws on a range of global databases to create a startlingly specific update every few seconds. Skies, tides, pinball results. Ship dockings and shop openings. Three sparrows were sighted in Tokyo. Someone lost a tan duffel bag in Phoenix, Arizona.

It’s absurd, sometimes hilariously so. When I played it to my children, they couldn’t stop laughing. A bakery is opening in Uruguay. So what? Even at the ages of five and seven, they could sense the comic pointlessness of that information.

It’s a strange sonic experience too: the uncanny AI-enabled voices, the looping ambient soundtrack. It’s anodyne and plastic-feeling, yet also hypnotic and curiously soothing. Whenever I turn it on, I struggle to turn it off again. And as my ears adjust, I begin to hear other sounds deeper in the mix: occasional bursts of static, distant voices, snippets of barely audible music, like the world outside pushing through.

The overall effect is playful and profound. Listening to Infraordinary FM, the background slides into the foreground; we open ourselves to the largeness of life; we feel the shock of the ordinary.

What’s happening now? The Fudgieknuckles Sports Pub in Wisconsin has just got a new Star Trek pinball machine. The temperature in Tehran is 33°C. It is low tide at Colonia Town, Micronesia. A gibbous moon is visible from Taichung, Taiwan. A Balkan carrier ship named Cape Pride has departed from the port of Khalifa, Abu Dhabi. From Guatemala City the planet Saturn can be seen. In Minneapolis somebody has lost a tennis racket. In the city of Porto, Portugal, the department store FNAC has just opened. Someone filed a report about a strong smell in Eastbourne, United Kingdom. In Italy, three robins were sighted.

Warm wishes,

Matt