The University College in Sogndal. Filler directly in the wall, hight ca. 7 meters.

 

This work, commissioned for the new building of the University College in Sogndal is both an informal research project in itself, and a meditation on research or scientific exploration in general.

     Maps of ignorance could appear in many shapes, this project present one possibility. I used my personal ignorance as a source, collecting unfamiliar words, phrases or concepts that I would look up in Wikipedia. I educated myself by reading the explanatory articles, but the texts usually featured more unfamiliar words. They had to be looked up too, and so it went …

     From each initial word a circular linguistic family tree would grow. 5 families were allowed to expand until they all had connected. At this point I stopped the search, leaving the outer generation unexplained.

     The main map is located on the wall in the stairwall of the new university building. It’s simplified to a minimalistic binary code, an inverted relief where holes in the walls perforated plaster plates have been "erased". Each erased hole represents a syllable in an unknown phrase.

     The wall piece was supplemented with an app for Android phones, making it possible to zoom in on different parts of the image on the wall and decipher the pattern. The app had some flaws, so the content is also presented as a hand drawn wall map in the school’s library.