The artist that I chose to discuss is Jody Zellen and her work Ghost City on the website net_condition. She is a contemporary American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She has a BA from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT and a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA. In this net art project, she explores the urban environment through different types of media such as photography, poetry, music, newspapers, public art, and books. “The images are from print media sources, texts from books on urban theory or other written words, generally poetic.”
In my blog I’ve linked four websites that reference her work:
http://aminima.net/wp/?p=492&language=en
http://contactzones.cit.cornell.edu/artists/zellen.html
http://iowareview.uiowa.edu/TIRW/TIRW_Archive/tirweb/feature/zellen/index.html#
The site Ghost City started in 1997 and completed in 2005. It started as a hyperlink and continued as a work in progress, as technology evolved so did her web site. In Zellen’s own words, “Ghost City serves as an archive for all my web based work as well as a place for experimentation.”
Jody Zellen designed ‘Ghost City’ which is a website that presents a maze of multiple changing scenes of an imaginary city. “...A city of fragments, a memory, a ghost of reality, a ghost city.” She calls this net art “an interactive urban environment” and she thinks of her web space as a sculptural space. Viewers participate by interacting with the animated graphics allowing them to “sculpt” different views of city life. Each animated image is a link to a different part of the city. The opening web picture is a square divided into twenty-five individual squares against a black border. The nine center squares each contain a letter against a solid colored background that spells out Ghost City, and the center square has one letter that continually alternates, and also spells Ghost City, one letter at a time. The sixteen colorful border squares each flash and shift pictures of city scenes. To enter the city, you can click on any square and suddenly you are in a complex network of visual, textual, and sometimes auditory stimulus, a city environment. “The viewer is a wanderer through the city either moving forward or backward, discovering new spaces in the city.”
Zellen’s theme is a narrative about being immersed in a city environment; the memories, feelings, smells, sights, tastes, sounds, both past and present. When entering her imaginary city one is immediately sensory bombarded and in constant movement. These are some of the stylistic and consistent feelings Ghost City evoked in me while navigating: congestion, colorful, intriguing, creative, noisy, claustrophobic, frustration, alienated by the energy, frenetic, overwhelming, smelly, smoky, bus fumes, conversation, honking, bodies, pushing, opportunities, laughter, crying, joy, sadness, ringing cell phones, and blinking lights. This is a very in depth net art piece, it envelopes you as you click deeper, you dig deeper into the heart and fragmented history of Ghost City; windows of images of old buildings, signage, cars, and clothes pop up and disappear. Simultaneously, pictures and text of the present contrast pictures and text of the past.
It really stimulates your memory of what one feels like in the midst of a city. I like Ghost City a lot, but I don’t like big cities in general so I have somewhat of a negative reaction to this digital immersion. On the other hand, there are many people who can’t live without the chaos and tempo of an urban environment and they would be right at home in Ghost City. It’s also stylistically consistent because you are always in the confines of an urban environment. Cities are all about growth and expansion and Ghost city as a good example of this process.
Zellen’s work is valuable because it is an example of the changeability and evolution seen in a specific art piece over an extended period of time, which is a distinctive element of digital art. Ghost City is technologically innovative, as digital art advanced, so did her work. In a contemporary arts context, it is important that this work appear on the internet because it’s a very creative forum that one can utilize to interact with “a city” via the web. The digital medium is actually unique and a very artistic way to experience and explore an art piece. Obviously, you can’t interact with a painting or sculpture of a city in the same way you can on- line.
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