[ISEA2015] Artist Talk: Jody Zellen — Expanding Net Art to Mobile Art

Artist Statement

In the presentation entitled “Expanding Net Art to Mobile Art ” I will explore the relationship between net art and mobile apps as both a means to an end and as the finished product. This presentation will include a discussion of the tablet (iPad) as a creative/artistic/poetic medium. I will touch on an exhibition I curated entitled “Poetic Codings” as in the exhibition I brought together the work of eight artists who are making apps as art. These include: Scott Snibbe, Erik Loyer, Lia, Rafael Rozendaal, John Baldessari, Jeremy Rotsztain, Jason Lewis and myself. Poetic Codings was one of the first exhibitions to juxtapose a table with iPads loaded with interactive artworks and interactive installations/projections. While some of the apps in the exhibition are not text based they all take advantage of the narrative opportunities of the app interface, scrolling, tapping, pinching as a way to unfold layers of content. In this presentation I will touch on apps that are content generators like “Visual Poetry” and discuss how those differ from apps intended to be finished artworks. Embedded within this talk will be the relationship between the web and an app.
The second part of this presentation will focus on my net art, apps and interactive installations and the difference between those experiences. The projects I will discuss include my latest interactive installation “Time Jitters,” my web projects “Spine Sonnet” and “Without A Trace,” and my mobile apps “Time Jitters,” “Episodic,” “4 Square,” “Urban Rhythms” and “Spine Sonnet.”
“Spine Sonnet” began a website that randomly juxtaposes 14 books from my library. Each time the page is refreshed a new stack of 14 books is created. As the titles are read they create a poem. I thought this project would work nicely as an iPhone app and transformed it into my first app also entitled “Spine Sonnet.” “Spine Sonnet” (free in the app store) is an automatic poem generator in the tradition of found poetry that randomly composes 14 line sonnets derived from an archive of over 2500 art and architectural theory and criticism book titles. “4 Square” is a project that divides the screen into 4 equal squares. Upon a tap the elements change, and with a swipe they can be repositioned. The elements in “4 Square” are the texts from a comic strip, the 256 web colors, pen and ink drawings and digital collages that reduce news images to grids of pixels. It is a modification of the website “Without A Trace” for this new platform. Both Spine Sonnet and 4 Square also have a parallel website. These apps explore the medium in creative and innovative ways and are designed to be poetic meditations that engage with ideas of remix culture, mash-up and appropriation. Lastly I will discuss my latest app “Time Jitters” and its relationship to a similarly named interactive installation presented at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, SC in January 2014 and a 40 page artists book. In this app twelve short video clips can be scaled and repositioned making new and different narratives from the fragments. “Time Jitters” is my first app to include sound as it repurposed some of the sounds created for the installation.
In my work I explore how a viewer can choreograph their own experience and how that experience differs from hand held to immersive media.

  • Jody Zellen is a Los Angeles, USA, based artist who works in many media simultaneously. She creates interactive installations, mobile apps, net art, animations, drawings, paintings, photographs, public art, and artist’s books. She received a BA from Wesleyan University (1983), an MFA from California Institute of the Arts (1989) and an MPS from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (2009). Her site specific interactive installations include: “The Unemployed” on view at the Los Angeles International Airport from May – October 2019; “News Wheel” created for Long Beach City College, 2017; “Time Jitters” a commission for the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston, SC, 2014 and “The Blackest Spot” created for Fringe Exhibitions, Los Angeles, 2008. Among her numerous interactive net art projects are “Spine Sonnet,” 2011 (commissioned by LACMA); “Lines of Life,” 2010 (commissioned by terminalapsu.org); “Without A Trace,” 2009 (commissioned by turbulence.org). Other net art projects include “Ghost City,” 1996-present, an ever changing poetic meditation on the urban environment; “Urban Fragments,” “Talking-walls” and “Disembodied Voices.” Recently she has been creating mobile apps as artworks. These projects available for free in iTunes include: “Time Jitters,” “Spine Sonnet,” “Art Swipe,” “4 Square,” “Episodic,” “News Wheel” and “The Unemployed.” Zellen was awarded an Artist Fellowship from the City of Santa Monica in 2011 and 2016. She is also the recipient of a 2012 California Community Foundation Mid Career Fellowship, a 2011 Center for Cultural Innovation Artistic Innovation Grant as well as a 2004 COLA (City of Los Angeles) Fellowship. jodyzellen.com