Tip Highway

One of the things that struck me on the way back from camp was how meditative a car ride can be especially when you're a passenger and when you've taken the road many times. On a bypass (we were driving the Geelong bypass at the time) a lot of effort is made to erase the views between the suburbs and the highway. You are always looking at that same middle ground; grass, a fence, the occassional planting of shrubs as habitat for animals that will get run over on the highway eventually.

There's a lot you can read into that view but I started to think about how it could be used differently. Passengers are a captive audience and these more enclosed bypass areas set up a kind of animation space. As you don't want anything too disrupting for the driver, I thought of a repetitive image that the passenger could contemplate on their journey.

The Rubbish Highway

Utilising the accessibility of the highway (and the fact that it is already often used as a dumping ground) the highway edge could become a linnear rubbish tip, giving users the opportunity to contemplate their waste and the drawing links to the car as a polluter, albeit an invisible one.

I found this idea expanded on by Lee Rozelle in this article
 Rozelle, L. RESURVEYING DELILLO'S "WHITE SPACE ON MAP": LIMINALITY AND COMMUNITAS IN UNDERWORLD Studies in the NovelWinter2010, Vol. 42 Issue 4, p443-452

In our desire to distance ourselves from our waste, Nick and Brian suggest, we project our landfills and toxic sites to the margins of perceptibility, urgently seeking to affirm fixed categories of environment, home, community, and body. But the refuse out there was once a part of us. The landfill, like the test site, is a locus where a culture's incomplete and misspent past is interred, to be fortes that "it's the kind of human junk that deepens the landscape...the soul of wilderness signed by men and women passing through" (460).