GHOST CITY by Jody Zellen - Rhizome.org


GHOST CITY is an eerie piece. Sitting and viewing it conjures strange feelings in one's very core. This is not due to any explicit or troubling content, but rather to the fact that it is so successful in transporting the viewer to this place, envisioned by Zellen, in which everything is constructed by various representations by the mass media. The images that comprise this work, while individually are very stunning, combine to create a virtual landscape that in effect surrounds the viewer with small captured moments in time making the experience incredibly compelling, like opening a time capsule or viewing old family photographs.


Turning now to the analysis of the piece. While from the above one might conclude that the most prevalent of the multimedia concepts in this work is immersion, as a work of Internet art, the linking of the various sections of the GHOST CITY together makes the concept of hypermedia the most functionally vital to the work. The varied and decentralized nature of this piece is reminiscent of Mark Amerika's Grammatron. However, the two differ in the purpose of Grammatron being the telling of a story and the objective of GHOST CITY being the construction of a virtual realm changing not by the flow of a plot or the influence of characters but rather solely by the selections of the viewer.


This brings me to the concept of interactivity in this work. Depending upon the choices the viewer makes, GHOST CITY can be a very different place. Much like the streets of a real city, entering certain back alleys will provide a very contrasting experience to staying on the well-lit main avenues. In his lecture at San Jose State University, David Ross described one of the paradigms of net art as being the shift of authority from the artist to the viewer. In the case of Zellen's piece, the landscape, if you will, is laid out and it is left to the viewer to wander in it creating infinite new experiences.


Finally, GHOST CITY seamlessly integrates photography, poetry, prose, random text and dynamic web design to create what the Rhizome.org description aptly refers to as a "collage of moving parts". Like Fragment 2 for Composition VII by Wassily Kandinsky, many of the sections of GHOST CITY require the viewer to look deep within to find a meaning that ultimately becomes as personal as the nonlinear trip through the work itself. Particularly impressive, however, is the fact that the rapidly changing and incredibly varied sections are never jarring or disjointed but rather always seem to fall into place within the cohesive whole. Perhaps this is the genius of GHOST CITY and of all excellent multimedia works: the combination of disparate parts to create a unified work of art.


In conclusion, Zellen's GHOST CITY is the epitome of multimedia art. By providing perfect examples of the concepts of immersion, hypermedia, interactivity, integration, and to some extent, narrativity, this piece shows that good net art has both inherent structures and archetypes but also remains fluid and constantly relevant. GHOST CITY proves that multimedia deserves as much consideration as its more traditional counterparts, and that the experimentation in this field may alter the way we think of and experience art forever.