That Ribbon of Highway looks back at 2020 through the lens of Los Angeles’ freeway infrastructure. Composed entirely from audio found on Youtube, "That Ribbon of Highway" explores shifting speed, altered perspectives, and pedestrian incursions on the historically homogenized highway space. Sourced from car vloggers, hobbyist helicopter pilots, and archived live-streams of news footage, this new audio collage documents alterations to and subversions of normative road usage. Utilizing YouTube’s crowd-sourced structure, "That Ribbon of Highway" presents a portrait of the freeway in 2020 from shifted perspectives - high above, moving quickly through, and entered on foot. Ordered chronologically, the audio begins with a pre-pandemic helicopter traffic report where on-air hosts hallucinate a beauty onto insufferable traffic. This coverage shifts to the ease of movement and flow of traffic at the onset of Covid-19 restrictions.

Documented by first-person video filmed on a newly vacant freeway system, these diaries subvert the private bubble long associated with the automobile. As Black Lives Matter protesters disrupt traffic, this speed is halted in a stoppage repeatedly labeled by breaking news coverage as a “violent” act. Finally, audio from this month (January 2021) details new traffic congestion around Dodger stadium as Angelenos queue for the vaccine.

Alex Lukas was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in nearby Cambridge. With a wide range of influences, Lukas’ practice is focused on the intersections of place and human activity, narrative, history and invention. His field-work, research, and production reframes the monumental and the incidental through intricate publication series, sculptures, drawings, prints, videos, and audio collages. He is an Assistant Professor of Expanded Print and Publication in the Department of Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara.