Zellen explains, "the project tries to simulate the experience of being in a city, being bombarded with sites, decisions, etc." Cities are full of unconnected sources of stimuli that can easily create a chaotic bombardment to the senses. Zellen makes the viewer aware of this by bombarding them with constant pop-up windows, movements, and animations that all arise differently and react differently to the viewer's interaction. This simultaneously makes the viewer aware of what can happen not only within a city, but within their own computer screen. It is in this vein that "Visual Chaos", with everything that it seeks to do, does not forget what it is: a website. Zellen uses "the mechanics of the medium" to create movements and interruptions from a survey of web apparatuses: pop-up windows, pull-down menus, gif and flash animations. Seeing these visibly web-specific devices used to create art over the canvas of their computers screens, users will likely think of the content of "Visual Chaos" in context as a city and as a website. Seeing the site in this way, the user will think about how the concept of the city relates to the World Wide Web. As Zellen states, "the network, the WWW is a global city." The Web connects people and places on a network like a city connects people and places through streets. The internet is full of diverse and unexpected stimuli, and so is the city. In this way, Zellen's work incites the viewer to think about how communities today can be established through both the force of urbanization and the medium of the internet. Furthermore, the distinct element of unexpectedness and disorder throughout the work is a direct comment on the chaos inherent in many of these communities. Whether connected through cemented streets or TCP/IP protocol, human nature and population size will always ensure that even the most organized, networked community will always be home to some degree of chaos.

It is clear throughout much of Jody Zellen's work that she is very interested in analyzing and deconstructing the concept of the city. To do this, she has developed a layered response technique towards amalgamating different photographic, colour, and text elements into a fractured visual space. By expanding her works onto the internet, she is able to add a new degree of dynamism and interactivity to her experiments with imagery. As the internet continues to evolve, Zellen says that her "goal is to keep making projects that combine my aesthetics with more sophisticated programming and greater interactivity." In this endeavor, Zellen has combined her imagery technique with internet technologies in order to make a relevant net-specific adaptation of her work: "Visual Chaos".

Jody Zellen currently lives in Los Angeles, California. She received her BA from Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut in 1983 and her MFA from California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California in 1989. She has received a number of grants, including The City of Los Angeles (Cola) Fellowship (2003) and The Banff New Media Institute (BNMI) Co-Production Grant (2003).

Ms Zellen's work spans a variety of media, including photography, installation, net art, public art, and artists' books that explore the subject of the urban environment
Her web site "Ghost City" (www.ghostcity.com) which she began in 1997 is an ever changing, poetic meditation on the city and was included in Artfuture2000 in Taipei; it was featured in the 1998 LA Freewaves festival and in the 6th Annual New York Digital Salon and was included in the festival "film+arc. graz 3" in Graz, Austria in 1997.

Recent exhibitions that included her websites include: "Downtown Digital" Pace Digital Gallery, New York, 2003; "Day Job" New Langton Arts, San Francisco, 2002 and the XXV Bienal de Sao Paulo. Another work, "Visual Chaos" is a short web work that that explores the idea of chaos on the web. It uses the space of the web as a sculptural space.
A recent project "Crowds and Power" was the October 2002 portal for the Whitney Museum's artport. "Disembodied Voices" (www.ghostcity.com/disembodiedvoices) is her latest project.