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The 12hr-ISBN-JPEG Project

Zellen continues the exploration of disorder constrained to a limited spatial entity she has entitled "Visual Chaos". The sum of the project's elements, as she states, "all adds up to 'visual chaos'". Throughout the work space is constantly fractured and images distorted. The pop-up windows appear constantly, confronting the viewer with new images and dividing their attention. The "pop-up windows are meant to be an interuption, a way of breaking up and apart the sameness of the surface space of the screen" says Zellen. Added to this is the fact that almost every image is kept from being completely clear: most are either blurred out of focus or fractured by blocks of colour. This allows the viewer to encounter different sights without ever being completely certain of everything they represent. In some cases the viewer is able to interact with one of the sights, but doing so often furthers the chaos inherent in the elements of the visual space. For example, on one page the user must click on a drop-down menu to continue, but doing so creates a popup where a viewer can click through lines of poetry that flow, and seem to relate to city ideas, but do not make complete sense. This poetry goes on looping forever, until the user realizes that they can now continue the navigating in the main browser window. In another instance, the user can rollover fractured sections of a highway photo, but doing so fractures the image even more by changing each section into a mirror of the section below it. All of the while images continue to appear in pop-ups, filling up the user's taskbar and creating more and more of a clutter of windows; not only is the user's visual field filled with chaos and confusion, but so is the medium upon which the artwork is viewed. This element of chaos is made more apparent when the user reaches the end and closes the window; a clutter of pop-ups moving about on the desktop are left over. As Zellen explains "I wanted to create a journey though a fictional city space down a road, path or avenue cluttered with visual information where there are things to look at and to read." Clicking through the changing windows and fractured spaces, the viewer partakes in a navigation that is not at all like that of a normal website.

Exploring "Visual Chaos", the user is forced to navigate in a way that breaks the paradigms of normal website navigation, and becomes akin to undertaking a virtual journey. Random city scenes are presented in a chaotic manner but like Zellen's other works, are contained within a common visual space - the computer screen - ensuring that the entire experience does not devolve into randomness but is held and contained. As the viewer travels through the various fractured locales and situations in the "visual chaos" browser window, visuals appear in pop-ups like those that one would pass by in a city: they appear out of nowhere and go by, glimpses of people doing everyday things are seen, actions are seen but the causes are not. However, the viewer's attention is not allowed to be taken away by the pop-ups; whenever the viewer is finished looking at or interacting with the pop-ups, they must always return to the main browser window to continue the journey. This technique creates a sort of virtual passage within each subsequent page. The user goes to one place (a page) in which pop-ups occur like events or sights that would occur in that place. The user experiences these events and sights and, having done so, must return to the main page and search for the way out of this place. Doing so, they are brought to the next place, in order to experience it then find their way to the next. By creating this feeling, Zellen creates a virtual space within a web-browser which the user is no longer navigating through, but journeying through. The fact that this space is populated by urban visuals creates an impression the user is traveling through virtual and indistinct cityscape.

 
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Site: www.visualchaos.org