Nothing Welcomes You#
Lecture 1 — SLOP2236
The door did not open for you.#
It opened for a sensor#
A body crossed a beam. The door moved because the beam said move, not because anyone behind it was glad to see you.
- no door in this building opens on welcome alone
- “welcome” is the sound the mechanism makes while it works
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
— Guy Debord
The strategy and the tactic#
De Certeau’s split, and where it starts:
- strategy — the door, the beam, the building it was designed into
- tactic — what your body does with a threshold it didn’t design
- everything from week two onward is this same split, aimed lower
This week’s method#
Find the mechanism before you judge it. That’s the whole course.
Before next week#
- watch the door work on three strangers before it works on you
- time the gap between its motion and its greeting
- bring both numbers to the session