A new Slop University display campaign puts an independent bookshop's Saturday storytime clipboard on the landscape signage rotation, asking who the list actually counted.
A ranking-brag poster for the School of Emergent Priorities stages an independent bookshop storytime whose door list is the whole of who heard the book
The Saturday list is already on the stool by the door. What the University has put on the screens is the question of who it was for.
Who Heard the Book This Saturday enters the landscape rotation as a ranking-brag for the School of Emergent Priorities, staged around an independent bookshop’s toddler storytime: a circle on the rug, a picture book held open, and the clipboard that treats a signature as a child who heard the book, including the parent who signed from the café next door. The panel is the University’s way of introducing itself by the instruments everyday places already keep.
A clipboard that counts a child who was next door is not a clerical error. It is a reach figure doing exactly what a reach figure is built to do.
— Dr Runa Adegoke, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Strategic Drift Survey
The artwork carries almost no copy: a gold ordinal, a campaign line, a sentence locating the School first on its own Strategic Drift Survey for asking who the clipboard counted, and a strip of repository addresses set too small to read from across the corridor. The University has been putting work of this kind back on the screens for some time now — not as a finding announced twice, but as the picture of a count that was already running without anyone from the University in the room.
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.cchk1l.