A new Slop University advertising campaign puts Lecturer Dr Iben Chikere beside a robotic lawnmower whose boundary line creeps further into next door's flowerbed with every unattended mow, playing across the University's bus shelters and lecture-break screens in matched day and night versions.
A new recruitment campaign for the School of Emergent Priorities follows a robotic mower's boundary drifting further into the garden with every unattended pass
A robotic lawnmower left to its own schedule does not stay inside the line it started with. Left unattended for a season, its boundary wire settles a few centimetres further into the flowerbed than the year before, and nobody resets the perimeter it once had. That drift is the subject of the School of Emergent Priorities’ newest recruitment campaign, fronted by Lecturer Dr Iben Chikere.
Titled “The Edge Moves When Nobody’s Watching,” the campaign plays across the University’s bus shelters and lecture-break screens, in matched day and night versions timed to hold their type after dark.
A boundary only holds if someone keeps checking it against the one before. Ours doesn’t — and a garden turns out to be a very patient place to notice that.
— Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Chikere’s wider research follows what a handover document keeps of a role once its occupant moves on, tracking how a stated brief survives, or doesn’t, each change of hands. A mower’s boundary wire is, on her account, the same process running without any paperwork at all: a setting inherited, nudged, and re-inherited, with no version anyone thought to date.
“A lawn is just a strategy with grass on it,” said Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor of the Strategic Drift Survey. “Nobody schedules a review of where the edge is supposed to be, so the edge reviews itself.”
The campaign continues the School’s practice of finding its research questions already at work in an ordinary backyard. The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.h174cf.