Navigating the Eisenhower Interstate System: Paving the way for cyberspace

Abstract

This project discerns an early cybernetic paradigm for the internet in the worldwide movement towards uninterrupted motor travel that developed in the first half of the twentieth century. Freeway designers, especially in Germany and the United States, pursued utopias of control over nature, independence from the topography of a particular locale and unrestricted transportation on a national scale. As a physical analogue of the digital landscape that would follow it, the execution of the Eisenhower Interstate System prioritized modern technological values in real space that went on to guide the design of virtual space. Moreover, in recent years physical and virtual transportation networks have become even more closely linked through location-based social navigation technologies such as Waze and Google Maps. Located at the intersection, or rather at the interchange, of media ecology and urban communication, this project seeks to illuminate the utopias of design that guide real and virtual space in the era of the interstate and the internet, with ramifications for those who seek to navigate them thoughtfully in the twenty-first century.