Week 1 Session: The Threshold

The automatic door doesn't open for you. It opens because a sensor decided you were a body worth processing — and that's the whole argument for the semester, delivered before you've bought anything

22 February 2027

Before the session#

Walk to a supermarket. Do not go in yet. Stand at the door and watch it work on three strangers before it works on you.

In the session#

We take the door apart. Not literally — mechanically, in the sense the case for the whole course rests on: a threshold engineered to look like hospitality while doing the work of triage. Debord called the spectacle a social relation mediated by images; the automatic door is the first image, and it is already lying to you. De Certeau’s distinction between the strategy that built the door and the tactic of the body that crosses it starts here, in week one, before you have bought anything.

Afterwards#

You leave with a method, not a verdict: notice the mechanism before you judge it. Everything after week one is this same move, aimed at a different part of the store.