The Architecture of the Image

It is ‘post structuralism’ that offers us a working notion of images as systems of signs whose ‘semantic spaces’ are defined by networks of changing conceptual relationships. As a dialectical method it has provided useful paradigms for addressing our conceptual interaction with, and interpretation of, diverse art, design & media visualisations. However, it is limited in effectively accounting for the significant interaction between the abstractions that are media images and actual behaviours and in the sciences, it is ‘systems thinking’ that emphasizes a concern with relationships, systems and networks. Here, ‘emergent behaviour’ is accounted for as a recognizable characteristic of ‘complexity’ and it is argued here that as the abstractions of synergetic brand architectures and designed identity systems are used more and more to underpin user experiences, this type of distributed, networked, ‘cloud semantics’ can be recognised as the soft engineering of participatory semantic systems where the emergent actual behaviours are the intentional result of generating metaphoric ‘virtual’ avatars for us all to involuntarily inhabit as part of the natural ‘autopoetics’ of the digital age