Amy Balkin

Who is Amy Balkin?

Amy Balkin is an American artist who studied at Stanford University and is now located in San Francisco. Her work "combines cross-disciplinary research and social critique to generate ambitious, bold, and innovative ways of conceiving the public domain outside current legal and discursive systems.". She focuses on how humans create, interact with, and impact the social and material landscapes they inhabit. Ultimately, one of her long-term goals is to create a physical shared space with society.

Invisible-5 is an audio commentary on land use along the highway corridor between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The project investigates the stories of people and communities fighting for environmental justice along the I-5, 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. This project was developed in collaboration with artists Kim Stringfellow and Tim Halbur, and the organizations Pond: Art, Activism, and Ideas, and Greenaction for Health & Environmental Justice. The project is available to listen online or download from invisible5.org.

She has also proposed a project that challenges the scope and intent of current US or international laws relating to property ownership and pollution, and which are intended to expose the limitations and ideological biases of these laws. One such project Public Smog involves the creation of clean air parks created by retiring emission offsets, paired with an attempt to add the Earth’s atmosphere to UNESCO’s World Heritage list. However, these ideas have art-based roots.