In 1735 Leonard Euler translated the Seven Bridges of Königsberg into an abstracted series of lines. The land masses they connected were contracted down to small black points, and so the physical matter of the city was transformed into a pliable matrix that looked like a drawn bow. It now referred only to its lack of ability to connect to itself, to traverse itself completely, in an even unbroken line, and so graph theory, an early version of topology, came into being.

When a landscape or a piece of architecture is travelled through and documented with a lens, the topographies of the surface are lifted and flattened into the condition of the image. The physical space is discarded as a material husk, and the collected images form their own topological model of the site from which they are extracted. This rudimentary model of a topological model is of course a metaphor — the matter involved is now held wobbling in the field of language, a placeless abstraction as much as a graph is, or does. To reverse the pole again metaphor itself is a form of topology, as language mimics and deforms objects to model and affect perceptions of real space.

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On September 20th 1967 Robert Smithson traced a soft line of footfalls through the topography of Passaic, documenting the now familiar landscape-in-waiting which fizzed with forms for him to fetishise into monuments. The landscape is cast as a written narration that eschews transcendental objectivity, collecting instead a series of perceptual moments as eccentric traces of temporal, cultural and geological time frames writhing in the terrain.

Prefaced by the chance encounters between traditional landscapes, contemporary cultural landscapes, and pulp fiction, the first structure invoked as he steps from the bus ride is an active bridge that spans the river, proposed uncertainly as The Monument of Dislocated Directions. Heidegger writes of spaces emerging, or coming into new purpose as two sides, only with the construction of a bridge. Each span splits the ground. Banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The location is not already there before the bridge is. As a starting point for an encounter with a landscape, how does this bridge begin to gather this landscape about itself?

Noon-day sunshine cinema-ized the site, turning the bridge and the river into an over-exposed picture. Photographing it with my Instamatic 400 was like photographing a photograph. The sun became a monstrous light-bulb that projected a detached series of "stills" through my Instamatic into my eye.

The bridge, baptised immediately as a monument, is by the same gesture elevated from its material function into the symbolic order. It becomes an image-architecture. Not only is Smithson's first monument an image-architecture, but it is immediately encountered in the text as immaterial: made doubly an image by the fact that it is viewed through the frame of a viewfinder, it is framed as an image of an image.

The monument is customarily the marker that both stands and stands in for something else. It holds a place with the perlocutionary desire to imprint a stilling of time: a lugubrious gape in the present that recalls a located historical event, and a desire that this stilling should be iterative. This monument doesn't do this. It is a severed dead thing, for all the shutter clicks.

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Soda Brücke, or 'just-there' bridges, appear dotted throughout in the landscape in Germany. Unconnected to any of their intended infrastructures, they stand as points pushed into the cadastre, abandoned by the roads or rail lines which failed to connect to them. Like Smithson's monuments, the Soda Brücke are Ruins in reverse, and so they stand spanning roads, pathways, or sometimes nothing, with severed sides sliced out and testifying to time's relentless melt. Their arrested function begins to attack the forms, slowly at first, to erode them by gently weathering their skin, to erode the possibility of completing their connection, and to erode the language with which they may be thought. They are no longer capable of freely occupying a specific place, or time, and, unable to disappear into their function they have entered the same visibility as Heidegger's broken tool. If a bridge summons a place into being, as he insists, then the land that surrounds these incomplete and functionless bodies is returned to placelessness.

Flusser writes: Like all mediations, images suffer from an inner dialectic. They are intended to mediate between human beings and the objective world (to bridge the abyss of alienation), but thus they also block the path between the world and human beings. But where does the abyss or the bridge lie if the image is the world?

The bridge-as-image, like The Monument of Dislocated Directions, provides us with a topological model of the metaphor, which is not a single unit undergoing substitution, but takes place between here and elsewhere – in the pair of terms or relationships between which the transposition operates. These are not real spaces, but exist as a model of time – and time itself must borrow from, and create links with space if it is to appear.

Time turns metaphors into things, and stacks them up in cold rooms, or places them in the celestial playgrounds of the suburbs.