“Ghost City – Avenue S”

By Jody Zellen

When Los Angeles shut down in March 2020 due to the pandemic, and most cities became ghost towns, I returned to making art for the screen, developing what has become a dynamic and multi- layered artwork that is readily disseminated. One of the things that thrilled me about making art for the internet (net art) was that it could exist beyond the traditional gallery space. I saw it as a new form of public art, easily accessible to all and a viable platform where unconventional narratives could be created by combining photographic images, drawings, short poetic texts, and animations through a succession of linked pages. The viewer actively “clicked” on images and words to engage with the work and move through the site.

Since the beginning of the Pandemic, (March 2020) I have been creating a net art project that in many ways is a pandemic journal with reflections about what I see around me as I walk in my neighborhood (Santa Monica, CA) as well as react to events world-wide. I have created images, roll-overs, texts and animations. The site has about 300 pages (or more). It lives within an earlier net art project called Ghost City (www.ghostcity.com) and because it stems from the “S” square on the Ghost City website, I have called it “Avenue S” (www.ghostcity.com/avenue-s). To navigate one clicks on the red squares at the bottom of each page ( … ).

“Avenue S” is a visual record of these disconcerting times as it includes imagery related to the pandemic and interpretations of this fraught national and global political moment. The project is a reflection on isolation, nature, walking, politics and protests. It is meant to be an active yet fragmented viewing experience… just like life today.

Returning to net art has been both a challenging and rewarding experience: challenging as I have had to relearn a lot of the HTML code used to create interactive web pages and rewarding because I love using this medium to create work. It is a pleasure every day to be inspired by what I see and to imagine an interactive scenario while I walk and then come home and create it. This immediacy engenders a feeling of freedom and is why I gravitated to net art originally. It is a dynamic and interactive form of art that can be experienced by anyone, anywhere, anytime.

“Avenue S” is a journey. It began as a meditation on the disconcerting times brought on by the pandemic and remains a visual journal of the now.

The piece can also be experienced through a grid, where audiences can view the full scope of the project with its corresponding dates: http://ghostcity.com/visualchaos2020/AvenueS_grid.html