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the desert at speed, ‘the America of the empty, absolute freedom of freeways’. Speed is a vital part of the highway experience; it ‘creates pure objects... a triumph of effect over cause... [and] instantaneity over time as depth’. Driving at speed, for Baudrillard, produces transparency, invisibility, transversality over perception, a form of amnesia.63 Speed is a common theme when looking at highways from an artistic stance of the visual motion. Travis Brown remarked how with the advent of the Interstate Highways System the American visual landscape became a landscape that is ‘mediated by speed’ and that speed is the essence of the ‘brute power’ of the road itself. Brown stated how driving on highways creates a ‘plastic and sensuous quality’, a distinct sensation of repetition like a time-elapsed film. However, the purest form of speed on the road is found at night where ‘nothing exists outside the space of the road’ and vision is punctuated by artificial colour and light.64 Vivien Arnold observed the state of diminishing peripheral vision, tunnel vision, as a possible example of visual art where only the sky and the roadbed is clear.65 In her essay The Image of the Freeway, Vivien Arnold deals with the issue as to whether highways should be considered either a work of art or architecture. Arnold was certain, however, that highways is the most remarkable feature constructed with in the American landscape. On the one hand, roads embody the mythology of the past while on the other the superhighways reach towards the future.66 Jean Baudrillard commented the textural value of the concrete as remarkable smooth surfaces allowing motorists to simply glide, a sensation of frictionless movement.67 While Lawrence Halprin extends the view of highways as an art form since driving offers adventure, excitement, freedom, while simultaneously providing a unique perception of the landscape: a “chorography of motion”.68 In overall artistic symbolism, highways are, as perceived by Baudrillard, as an extension of America’s hypereality the giant hologram of America’s identity of space and grandeur. Highways, nonetheless, do not ‘de-
63 Jean Baudrillard, America (New York: Veno, 1988) pp 5-9, 28-9 64 Travis Brown, Jr, ‘On an Aesthetic of Highway Speed’, Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 30, No. 1 (September 1976) pp 25, 27 65 Vivien Arnold, ‘The Image of the Freeway’, Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 30, No. 1 (September 1976) p 28 66 Ibid. pp 28 67 Jean Baudrillard, America, p 54 68 Lawrence Halprin, Freeways (New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1966)