Category: Tin Ethnography
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From the Infra-Ordinary to the Pocket Archive
If there’s a gravitational center to my small experiments with the urban, it’s Georges Perec’s insistence that attention belongs with what barely appears—the infra-ordinary. In his short essay “Approaches to What?” (in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 1997), Perec asked what happens every day and recurs every day: “the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common.” Rather than…
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From Neat Things to Urban Fragments
Tin Ethnography began with a tin I used to carry everywhere—not an Altoids tin, but a more generic one. Inside it, I kept what I thought of as daily essentials: a small lantern, a few pills, a magnet, a cloth for cleaning my glasses, Band-Aids, a small brush to dust my devices, and a multi-port charger.…