INTRODUCTION The "the driving diaries" is an on-going, collaborative, work-in-progress. The project will be available indefinitely via the internet. It is intended to be viewed as an evolving casual dialog on the theme of driving. The web site is one component of a body of work on the subject of driving as movement-drawing-writing. The basic structure presented here is meant to initiate a dialog that will ultimately emerge as the primary content of the web site. Visitors to the site are encouraged to participate by posting in the Response section. "the driving diaries" was originally inspired by my move from New York City to Baltimore. The move required that I purchase a car and get a driver's license---all very unfamiliar to me since I hadn't had a car for years and had misplaced my driver's license long before. Up until the time of my move I had been working on a project that involved the notion of a hike or walk as constituting a kind of drawing. As I began to acclimate to my new environment this interest was transposed to a preoccupation with driving as a car culture analog to walking-thinking-drawing-writing. The move from a city where most people walk or take public transportation to a city where cars dominate the physical and cultural landscape was dramatic. I became especially intrigued by my new lifestyle which involved driving everywhere. I was immediately swept up in a routine that included jumping into my car at least once a day to dash off to some suburb and sit in traffic on the freeway for interminable hours in the heat and humidity of late mid-Atlantic summer. Driving about in dense traffic during these first few weeks I wondered, "Who are these people?" As I looked around my gaze was met by the expressionless faces of drivers, most of whom, like me, made their journeys alone. Oddly, I came to know this transient crowd of disassociated drivers as the most vibrant social pulse in the city. Whenever I longed for the energy of a street teaming with pedestrians I found myself heading for the highway. There I could move freely, weave through traffic with speed, grace and dexterity, and enjoy the feeling of being "jostled" by the crowd of motorists. The spontaneous choreography of traffic lured me like an addiction. It seemed no day was complete without a jaunt in the car to run errands, see the city, just go---go anywhere. It occurred to me that Baltimore, like so many American cities, is designed for the maximum benefit of drivers. A neglected (possibly even "quaint") mode of transport, walking is awkward. It often involves traversing long expanses of industrial or commercial "nowhere-ness", and ironically, usually means tolerating the noise, pollution and danger of ubiquitous traffic. Walking as a means of social interaction is ultimately frustrating since fewer people walk than drive, even to travel short distances. In most contemporary American cities the locus of social interaction in public spaces is not on the sidewalk, in the plaza or in the park, it's in traffic on the freeways and on surface streets. In traffic we escape the isolation of our private lives and become subsumed by the crowd; a crowd that's always waiting for us, requires minimal commitment, and offers the allure of public gathering, yet allows for the comfort and convenience of our personalized mobile microclimates. While the more overt political implications of such a society are myriad, "the driving diaries" takes as its focus emotional and psychological needs that are both met and exacerbated by this social order. Movement as mediated by machines like the car is particularly interesting to me since it begs the analogy of navigation in virtual environments. The complex experience of the crowd in street traffic is echoed and transformed in network traffic. Telecommunications networks represent another space of public gathering in which we are insulated from the touch, the smell, and the physical apprehension of the other that demands such a high degree of social and interpersonal engagement, responsibility and accountability. As a web-based diary about movement and social interaction, "the driving diaries" takes advantage of the internet as a dynamic communications medium. Through the form of a public collaborative diary the web site evolves over time as new elements are added by reader/participant/authors. Responses are greatly appreciated and can be read and contributed on the page titled RESPONSE. BIBLIOGRAPHY AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS