Blacktop Wonderland is a revolution disguised as a roadside attraction, with an agenda for a particular worldview, an all of universe.  Blacktop Wonderland operates as a laboratory of innovation within the realms of an artist’s life, including aesthetic, economic, social, and environmental. 

The aura of the roadside attraction is tied into the allure of the open road, particularly in the context of the desert, where a singular vision can create a universe unto itself.  If the road is America’s “primordial sculpture” (Carl Andre), the desert is its spatial counterpart.

The speed, scale, and freedom of the road still inspire the curiosity, fantasy, and revelation that drew tourists to roadside attractions in the early twentieth century.  But its present grim reality now also includes commercialism, expansive sprawl, and fossil fuel consumption.  Blacktop Wonderland shall be progressive and responsive to environmental needs and changes, using art to tap into sculptural and mythic aspects of the road while also acting as a counterpoint to its negative forces.  Blacktop Wonderland shall redefine the roadside attraction to be both critically charged and self-sustaining. 

The power of the roadside attraction exists in the collusion between proprieters and travelers to join in a fantasy world spurred on by the sense of discovery associated with the open road, and the feeling of wonder provoked by things unknown and unusual.  Playing into that aura of opportunity and abandon, Blacktop Wonderland will imbue its environment with theatricality, merging fiction with fact to create an artistic lens through which this new paradigm of development can be perceived and experienced.  In an ideal scenario and the do-it-yourself spirit of historic roadside attractions, the artist-inventors shall also be the proprietors of their own creations, actors within the performance. 

Blacktop Wonderland shall be an encyclopedic open-air museum, a desert landscape filled with wonders that in their concepts and juxtapositions convey a dense and layered meaning extending across the natural and cultural spheres.  Wonders of art are often also wonders of engineering, combining natural and cultural forces to produce astonishing effects.  At the borderline between sensation and thought, wonder can enchant information.  The wonders of Blacktop Wonderland shall draw on precedents of roadside attractions, art tourism, artist colonies, desert earthworks, and renewable energy.  We shall reuse and reinvent these prototypes, blending and morphing them, or discarding and replacing them; manipulating them to address inherent issues of art, highway culture, and energy consumption, as well as a conceptual artistic agenda.  

Precedents for investigation include roadside museums, gardens, and zoos; curio shops of natural phenomena and artificial marvels; campgrounds and RV parks; gas stations and motels; restaurants in unexpected forms; billboards and gigantic sculpture; souvenirs and postcards.  And from the realm of art tourism:  earthworks, folk art, and entire towns given over to gallery treatment.  We shall expand on the biofuel stations and wind and solar fields increasingly seen on highways, to create artistic machines and working architecture that act as mechanisms of both aesthetic experience and alternative energy. 

Blacktop Wonderland will combine these models into hybrid chimeras ranging in scale from the miniature to the gigantic:  traffic-generated wind turbines powering billboards, earthworks as solar catchments, and botanical sculpture gardens nourished by highway runoff.  Gas stations will be fed by agriculture and food production, striving for methods that minimize costs while maximizing effects.  Curios and campsites shall be conceived as individual artworks that crystallize into visual, sculptural, and aesthetic form the ideas behind the more technological installations.  

In compliment to their functional-aesthetic aspects, the wonders of Blacktop Wonderland shall also have a conceptual meaning described through an index both specific and general that attempts to catalog a particular all of the universe.  The categories of the index overlap with the environmental/technological agenda of the roadside attraction, including entries in the realms of: <poetics> <physics> <flora> <water> <light> <cold> <green> <mineral> < machines> and <time>. 

To achieve a density of response to each category of exploration, and a fuller “all” of the universe, Blacktop Wonderland will be a collaborative endeavor.  Individual artists will be invited to create artworks that explore one or more of the categories of inquiry, or even expand the index.  In addition to contributing to the conceptual and functional agenda, each piece in the collection must contribute to the sustainable aspect of the venture, while also aspiring to capture an audience from the highway, be it cruising tourists, big rig transporters, or other travelers in need of food, fuel, or a chimerical experience of art and nature.