A new Slop University campaign built around a suburban bus shelter puts Dr Iben Chikere and the School of Emergent Priorities behind a question about what a punctuality figure is able to record.
On Time Where The Clock Was is the School of Emergent Priorities' first campaign fronted by a single researcher, staged at a roadside shelter between timing points
Most of the stops on a suburban route are not in the punctuality figure. A handful of timing points along the way are, and the rest of the road is counted by not being counted. On Time Where The Clock Was entered the University’s advertising this week built on exactly that gap.
The campaign is the School of Emergent Priorities’ first to be fronted by one researcher. Dr Iben Chikere, whose work follows what an institutional record keeps of a role and what it quietly drops, stands under a plain roadside shelter with a clipboard and a stopwatch, on a stretch of street where the measured stops are somewhere else entirely.
A figure is always taken from somewhere, and the somewhere tends to be chosen for convenience rather than for what it can see. We would like more people to ask where the instrument was standing.
— Dr Iben Chikere, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
Set against the School’s anticipatory-capability agenda, the campaign is intended to carry a posture rather than a prospectus: an invitation to read an ordinary instrument for its coverage as much as for its result, and to notice who is left outside the frame it reports.
The release marks the School’s first sustained attempt to advertise a habit of attention rather than a qualification. The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.hlov4w.