Counter-Mapping the Supermarket

A détournement of a real or invented store's layout, built from the semester's twelve mechanisms rather than restating them

Due: 28 May 2027 · Weight: 60%

The brief

Make the map the store would not make of itself.

A counter-map is not a critique bolted onto a floor plan. It reroutes the building: relabel the fresh wall as a perimeter tax, redraw the queue as the only unclaimed territory in the store, mark the endcaps as checkpoints. The form is yours — a redrawn plan, an annotated photo series, a fictional store guide, a rewritten receipt — but it has to reroute something real, not just comment on it.

Twelve weeks gave you twelve mechanisms. Four is the floor, not the target; use as many as the map can carry without becoming a list.

What you submit

The counter-map itself, in whatever format carries it, plus a one-page key naming which mechanism each part of the map reroutes and from which week it came. A marker who has read your dérive report should recognise the same store; a marker who hasn’t should still be able to read the map cold.

The spec

The brief poses the problem and leaves room for a response. The spec is the fixed part: what a marker checks. Some lines can be checked mechanically; the rest call for judgement.

A counter-map of a single store. It actively reroutes, relabels or détournes a physical layout — a standard, descriptive floor plan fails.
Integrates a minimum of four mechanisms from the twelve teaching weeks, explicitly named and deployed as evidence.
Total standalone legibility. A marker who has not read your previous dérive report must be able to follow the map's argument completely cold.

How it is marked

Judged as a whole against the brief — whether the counter-map stands on its own without the semester there to explain it, whether it integrates at least four of the twelve mechanisms as structural evidence, and whether its scope fits a project built in the closing weeks of a twelve-week semester rather than a full year of fieldwork.