Week 1: Nothing Welcomes You

What the automatic door is actually doing, and why the semester starts here instead of at the shelves

22 February 2027

Open the slides

The door is the store’s first move, and it makes that move before you have decided to buy anything. This lecture sets the method the rest of the semester repeats: find the mechanism, then ask whose interest it serves.

Outline#

• the automatic door as triage, not hospitality
• Debord’s spectacle and de Certeau’s strategies vs. tactics, introduced together
• the method: mechanism first, judgement second