In her Hunter MFA thesis, sculptor Alice Aycock meditated on the newly-opened New Jersey turnpike as a symbol of postwar art, “The highway is a path on which one moves through the heterogeneity of the world. When one drives along the highway the world goes by in all of its relatedness and unrelatedness like a movie.” Her essay was inspired in part by Tony Smith’s infamous nighttime drive on the unfinished turnpike where he had an epiphany that led him to make some of the largest and most monumental geometric sculptures produced during the 1960s and 70s. Both Aycock and Smith saw the highway as an enigmatic artwork—a kind of infrastructural sublime that seemed to organize nature, heavy industry, raw materials, and human culture along a rigorously engineered spine. 

The animation that inspired my contribution to this piece—a collaboration with Allie E.S. Wist with audio by Nick Kopp—pictures an unmanned vehicle as it drives along a highway lined with postindustrial detritus, landscaped elements and infrastructure-in-realtime-demolition. As the UV moves along the road, it searches for movements and attempts to identify objects of interest. The viewer occupies the UV’s machine-vision perspective. The highway is a structural/narrative anchor. It samples a series of 3D models downloaded from a digital warehouse with special emphasis on industry, housing, transportation, and machinery. As the viewer makes their way down the path animation, they are presented with the detritus of the 20th century’s built environment littered with: stadia, apartments, water treatment plants, bridges and aircraft. Like Ayock’s drawings and writings, different styles, architectural types and fragments of cities are neatly lined up as a cinematic assemblage.