Signal. Image. Architecture.

"In a prodigious inversion of Plato's Allegory of the Cave, May brings us all back into the darkness, where we are occupied looking at screens, except now there is no way to go from the appearances to their hidden reality...The message from the Cloud is clear: 'Thou shall get only images.'"
--Bruno Latour (from the Foreword) 

Architecture today is immersed in an immense cultural experiment called imaging. We can feel our images changing us. Our relationship to our thoughts, to our sense of time, to the cadence of our attentiveness--all of this is now subject to rapid revision. To patiently describe the world to oneself is to prepare the ground for a politics that does not yet exist. Signal. Image. Architecture. is a pathographic manifesto: a philosophical diagnosis of architecture's technical consciousness before and after electronic images. What happens to the architectural mind when it finally realizes that images are not drawings? Or when it realizes that all politics are now first a politics of imaging? These are questions that the design fields have scarcely begun to pose, imagining that somehow their ideas and practices can resist the culture of imaging in which all of life now either swims or drowns.