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The 12hr-ISBN-JPEG Project

Fractured visuals of city scenes, colours, and texts make up the visual tour which is part of Jody Zellen's net-art piece entitled "Visual Chaos" (www.visualchaos.org). On entering and navigating through the piece, one realizes the layout is purposely confusing and cluttered while attempting to present a balance between theme and aesthetic. Throughout the work, photographs of generic cityscapes are presented alongside each other. The photos survey common city aspects representing images of architecture, crowds, and isolated individuals caught in activity. This imagery is augmented and offset by blocks of colour, often arranged in large vertical or horizontal bars. The accompanying photo-imagery is usually unclear or out of focus and altered so its colour matches the accompanying slabs of pure colour. Often colour bars are inserted between fractured pieces of larger photographs. To add to this chaotic and moving montage, random phrases and poetical musings about city concepts are occasionally inserted alongside the fractured imagery. This visual space is further interrupted by image containing pop-up windows moving over or lying on top of the main browser's main content. Such content delivery adds further dynamic to fractured space by offering another layer of information. At other times, images are animated, whether it be flashing through a slide show, expanding image size, or changing image information as contingent on rollover actions. The overall effect of these differing techniques seems to be to create a visual space on screen that is constantly changing, moving and being fractured. Every new occurrence is different and unexpected, and the end result is an impression of visual randomness.

There is a definite cohesive design in Zeller's work that vies with the visual randomness. Indeed the aforementioned colours are coordinated to be complimentary, where pictures are purposely fractured with a consistent vertical or horizontal movement. Pop-ups are placed so that they seldom overlap each other and are arranged in accordance with the main browser window.

Much of Zellen's other work is visually and compositionally driven whether it be in her prints, installations, or other websites. A great deal of her artwork deals with the concept of the city, and many of the works tackle this concept by the interspersing of colours with cityscape imagery, like "Visual Chaos". Her "LA Seen", "The Building Series", and projects, for example, all feature collages with photographs of city imagery - akin to those featured in "Visual Chaos". In "Still Series", words are also overlaid into the composition. The different pictures are arranged beside, above, below, and inside one another, and are each coloured, and overlaid with colour, differently in a way that is complimentary, but emphasizes the difference between the individual images. Within each piece, the different pictures and colours appear interconnected, as one work and one theme, yet at the same time each frame create a sense of fractured disorder across the space of the piece.

 
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Site: www.visualchaos.org