The heavy industries that built our world and shaped our lives are dying. The sounds and sights in these grim cathedrals they’ve left behind—the empty vestiges of their once throbbing rituals, the iron foundries and sheet metal works, the copper smelting and cable manufacturing plants—echo and reflect their death throes. A pall of absence as dense as a toxic cloud hangs over things. Yet time continues to move forward: along rusted tracks and corroded rails, down dark alleys, across suspended gangways, past girders dangling precariously in black air, around blind corners through a labyrinth of internal factory corridors. Time that is the ghostly material medium in which we think and act—compelled onward yet never knowing where we’re going, turned aside, derailed, misled, diverted, confused, disoriented and finally lost—continues to grind on, as long as we keep breathing. This world of time through which we travel, which we have made, and which has made us, has only one direction, forward, and one speed, this speed, and one destination, a dead end that repeats itself over and over.