A new display advertisement from the School of Underlying Conditions puts Associate Professor Ragnhild Uzoma at a sorting table and invites the public to meet the University's researchers.
The Lead of the Basement Relations Group fronts a new panel on reading an archive for its recurring subjects
Passers-by at the University’s display panels this month will meet a geologist who is not, for once, looking at rock. Find the Themes Nobody Wrote Down, a display advertisement from the School of Underlying Conditions, shows Associate Professor Ragnhild Uzoma, Lead of the Basement Relations Group, at a long table in a core shed, dealing log sheets into piles.
I have been pictured beside a good deal of core over the years. This is the first time it has been the paperwork, and I think the paperwork comes out of it rather well.
— Associate Professor Ragnhild Uzoma, Lead of the Basement Relations Group
The campaign brings the School’s holdings of drill logs into contact with an established family of methods for discovering what a large body of writing keeps returning to. Nobody who filled in a log was asked to give it a subject; taken together, the advertisement suggests, the logs supply several, and an archive read all at once may be sorted by them. The panel directs readers to the School’s published work on drill core, on bores and on laboratory logbooks.
The University holds that a school is fairly introduced by whatever its people are found doing on an ordinary afternoon, and is content that on this occasion it was filing. Associate Professor Uzoma said the piles on the table “were in that order when the artist arrived, and we have tried to leave them so”.
Members of the public wishing to meet the University’s researchers are directed to slop.university.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.sztstd.