Invisible-5 Audio Project

http://www.invisible5.org

Invisible-5 is a self-guided critical audio tour along Interstate 5 between San Francisco and Los Angeles. It uses the format of a museum audio tour to guide the listener along the highway landscape.

ABOUT

Invisible-5 investigates the stories of people and communities fighting for environmental justice along the I-5 corridor, through oral histories, field recordings, found sound, recorded music, and archival audio documents. The project also traces natural, social, and economic histories along the route.

The I-5 is a critical pathway along the west coast for trade, tourism, and migration, and functions as part of the infrastructure bundle that parallels it – supporting symmetrical movements of water, oil, and gas.

Running along the San Joaquin Valley’s west side, the I-5 is also vital for intermodal shipping, intensive ranching, farming and dairying, new housing development, waste dumping and the gas and oil industry.

And Interstate-5 is an «Intermodal Corridor of Economic Significance» – a category of freeway «corridors that are most essential to the California economy in terms of national and international trade,» as defined by California Streets and Highways Code, Division 3, Chapter 4.7.

As California’s major north-south highway connecting the state’s urban hubs – San Francisco and Los Angeles – the 5 is usually driven at high speed.

Experienced as a blur, few drivers realize the spare, majestic landscape along the I-5 corridor is polluted. Often, there is little to see, smell, or taste of the mostly invisible pollutants: benzene and perchlorate in the water, dioxin and PM2.5 in the air. For residents along the I-5 corridor, often these manifest as just a hazy sky, a faint odor, or the sense that something tastes different about the water.  […]

HOW TO

Full and by-site downloads of Invisible-5 will be available online in April. A 2-CD set, along with a companion map booklet will also be available in April. Please visit this website in April for further information about CD availability.