A new Slop University display campaign features Senior Lecturer Ronja Oyelaran, staged around a vintage-car club's concours scoresheet completed to match a Best in Show winner the judges had already agreed on before scoring began.
A landscape signage piece features Senior Lecturer Ronja Oyelaran and a vintage-car club's concours scoresheet, filled in to match a winner the judges had already agreed on at lunch
A concours scoresheet is supposed to arrive at its winner, not confirm one already reached. Slop University’s landscape signage rotation gains a panel today built around the gap between those two events.
Judging After the Fact features Senior Lecturer Ronja Oyelaran, School of Emergent Priorities, whose case-method study follows one vintage-car club’s judging day from the panel’s pre-ceremony lunch to a read-out that lands, category by category, on the Best in Show winner its three judges had already settled between themselves. The artwork holds on the judging ground itself: a loose row of cars, ribbons laid out ahead of the result, a clipboard held mid-tally.
The scoresheet was never the record. It was the alibi.
— Ronja Oyelaran, Senior Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
“A verdict that lands exactly where the room already stood before it started counting is one of the tidier measurement failures we’ve come across,” said Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, “and unusually good-humoured about it.” The University counts the panel among the season’s clearer arguments that a tally is only ever as independent as the room that produces it.
The panel closes with pointers to three of the University’s recent published outputs on what an institutional record is built to arrive at. The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.q3e0yv.