A display advertisement from the School of Underlying Conditions invites Open Day visitors to consider what their decisions have been standing on.
A landscape Open Day panel pictures a walker where a footpath divides, with the strata and a single drill core shown beneath
The School of Underlying Conditions holds that most of what happens above ground is arranged, in some measure, by what lies under it, and that this is a view best formed in person. Its Open Day this spring extends the invitation, and a new display advertisement carries it to the University’s bus-stop panels and campus screens.
Every Choice You Make Rests on Something, prepared for the School by Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow, shows a walker paused at a fork in a footpath. Below the path the panel continues downward through banded soil and rock, past a drill core that descends out of the frame.
Nobody is being asked to change their mind about anything. We would be glad of the company, and the pits are already dug.
— Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow, School of Underlying Conditions
The campaign aligns the School’s field practice with a visitor-facing account of choice, footing and consequence, and anchors both in a single image. It makes no claim as to which way the walker should go. It directs attention instead to the surface on which the question is being considered, and to the School’s willingness to describe that surface at whatever depth a visitor has time for.
The University takes a settled pleasure in a school that asks its guests for nothing beyond their footing. Dr Obiora said visitors were welcome to arrive undecided, and that the School “has always found it easier to begin from where people happen to be standing”.
Those wishing to attend may register their interest through the University’s website. The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.boxbow.