Flyover is an aerial phenomenon, a view from the clouds detached from the ground. Flyover typically means to bypass, to fly-by or fly-through. "Flyover land" is often used as a pejorative term, signifying a "boring place where more flights pass over than land." This premise of the rural must be challenged, as a complex imaginary space and as a necessary link to urban supply chains.
At its core, the rural can only be characterized as a place with low density of human populations, but its populations of other species and materials are often robust. In Flyover country, new infrastructures and new technologies are yielding strange designs, differently apprehended from near encounters and far perspectives.
Flyover starts from its home in Nebraska, but our inquiries extend nationally, globally, and into outer space. Flyover investigates the rural mega-region as a place that feeds the urban, a place that contains pockets of micro-urbanization and that is rapidly transforming due to new technologies. The plains of Nebraska, long known for farming fields, are now research sites for energy systems, animal cultivation, and plant pathology.
FLYOVER bridges science, technology, art, and design to consider the production, allocation, and distribution of resources outside cities and towns. We propose alternative ecologies and reflect on the futures, past and present possibilities that shape urban-rural interdependence.