(Available on DVD- one day real soon!).

Our highways are haunted. Ghosts peer at us from the roadsides in the frail shapes of white crosses bedecked with plastic flowers. In Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, a highway pushes its way through a graveyard. In Douglas Adams' Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the planet Earth is destroyed to make room for an interstellar bypass. In Underworld, Don DeLillo's LA highways are haunted by a lone gunman who likes to take pot-shots at his fellow drivers. In Warner Brothers cartoons, the hapless Wile E. Coyote is consistently outwitted by his feathered nemesis, the avian hot-rodding Roadrunner, and usually ends up being splattered across the Arizona highways (much like Thelma and Louise).

The highway is clearly a key image in post-war literature, art and media. Highways, of course, are by no means new artefacts in cultural production; roads and highways appear a long way back in literature, whether as the path carrying the pilgrims of the Canterbury Tales, or the 17th-century post roads upon which banditry and derring-do took place. Highways have always been haunted by ghosts - of bandits, pilgrims, and beasts that come out in the night. Highways have thus been both exciting and fearful places, pointing us towards an uncertain future destination, while waylaying us along the roadside with tales of woe or wonder. The superhighways of the twentieth century, however, starting with the Autobahn and then the Interstate Highway System, have raised the cultural stakes. The road movie lives on, it is true, but these new superhighways are about the future - some goal of ultimate speed and destination (Le Corbusier says: "Cars, cars, speed, speed!"). A highway system visible from space and built for unprecedented numbers of travellers, evacuees or troops is no longer a place to experience as a series of adventures that happen by the wayside - rather, the Autobahn and Interstate are built to be experienced in their own right, as the embodiment of perfect speed.

In the last years of the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first, highways have morphed from concrete and steel to virtual superhighways, a sometimes ill-fitting, and other times apt, analogy. In this way, the figure of the highway has begun to be visualised in terms of its ghostly other, a wired-up high-bandwidth network which promises to move information at "the speed of light." The highway, attempting to evade the ghostly labour of its creators and its more recently documented environmental impact, has tried to become something both more and less than material.