Escape Velocity

“Speed now illuminates reality whereas light once gave objects of the world their shape.” - Paul Virilio

The history of the American interstate and highway system is one of war: both a preparation for a foreign invasion and an attack on its own physical and psychic landscape. Like much of American technological progress in the second half of the 20th century, the idea for the interstate system was modeled after the Nazi regime’s blitzkrieg additions to Germany’s autobahn system. It gave the military the ability to quickly transport troops and supplies or evacuate cities in the event of war, nuclear or otherwise. It also gave the average citizen accelerated access to the whole of the country and provided a deterritorialized railroad system for American capital. Aristotle writes, “The essential object of any social system must be to organize the military institution like all the other.” America inverts this formula.

Its consequences are far-reaching. Cities have been built and destroyed based on their connection to it. Once vibrant neighborhoods have been razed leaving no trace, the unceasing hum of rubber on concrete drowning out their ghosts. It’s fortress yet fluid-like structure was used to enforce neighborhood segregation. Roadways and cars have woven themselves into the American mythology becoming a metaphor of the expression of ultimate personal freedom. The trucker, the troubadour, the truant, and the traveller have all been immortalized in cinema, music, and literature while the highway acts as a supporting role, a character in its own right.

Underneath all of this lies the way in which the speed of the roadways fundamentally alters our perception of the world around us. Speed obliterates everything stationary and turns it into a flow that twinkles like the troughs of a stream. It anesthetizes the body in an escape from itself and whatever is behind it. Speed has now become an object in itself, a wall. Just try to cross a busy highway if you don’t believe me. Like all technologies of modernity, speed is both a freedom and prison. It allows us to escape the world and the pain of using our bodies while trapping us in a world where everything slips through our perceptive faculties. In our quest to escape ourselves we have escaped the world around us.

These images attempt to capture speed’s elusive objectivity and document America’s roadways in a way that captures the sublime and melancholic nature of the simple act of driving.