The Dérive Report

A documented drift through a real or invented supermarket, read against at least three of the semester's mechanisms

Due: 6 April 2027 · Weight: 40%

The brief#

Drift through a supermarket the way Debord drifted through a city, and bring back a report, not a shopping list.

A dérive has no destination; it follows what the terrain suggests. Yours still needs a destination, in the sense that a marker has to be able to follow it: photograph or sketch as you go, note the time and the aisle, and name the mechanism operating on you at each point. The report succeeds when someone who has never set foot in that store can reconstruct the route and recognise the argument. It fails if it reads like a list of things you happened to notice.

Pick one store, real or invented, and stay inside it. A report that jumps between three supermarkets to find enough evidence hasn’t looked closely enough at any of them.

What you submit#

A written report, 800–1200 words, with your photographs, sketches or field notes attached as evidence rather than decoration. If your store is invented, your evidence must be sketched, structurally mapped, or generated rather than photographed. Cite the week each mechanism came from — “the fresh wall (week 6)” is a citation, “the layout felt manipulative” is not.

Essential Reading#

Three texts, non-negotiable. Read them before you drift, not after, or the report will read like a tourist’s diary with theory bolted on afterward.

• Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive” (1958). Four pages, and every syllabus that claims “psychogeography” since is a footnote to them. Skip it and you will wander with a destination in mind, which is not a dérive, it’s an errand.
• Georges Perec, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1975). Perec sat in one square for three days and refused to decide, in advance, which parts of it were worth writing down. Read it before you start editing your store for interest — Perec already ruled nothing out.
• Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1992). The concept your car park is already living in, four weeks before the course names it for you in week eleven. Read it now and your report will recognise a non-place on sight; skip it and you’ll mistake it for déjà vu.