second law II

To continue some ideas about my photos:

Each abandoned site was once a humming, functioning, part of American culture. But each has been consigned to obsolescence as society moved past them. Factories closed down as manufacturing processes shifted in both location and method; hospitals that warehoused and prisons that tried not to were replaced by different institutional approaches; theatres, resorts, and other entertainment venues slipped into disuse as patrons abandoned them for other amusements and the economy forced them off their rails. What were once ways of life in America have become our distant past, with the clock turning ever more rapidly.

Technology goes not alone into obsolescence. It is joined (in Kuhnian style) by our worldviews and our ever-fluid relationship to the environment. This trajectory toward entropy becomes opportunity another McLuhan dictum: that all things once useful return eventually as art. Here, then, is my humble recording of the journey of these places as they slouch toward their destiny.