Exploring Avenue S by Jody Zellen was an experience that felt both visual and emotional. I should start by saying that I chose this piece purposefully because I originally was a fine art major and I felt like it had a good amount of art attached to it.
I then looked-up Jody Zellen, the author/artist, and discovered that she was an artist (graduated RISD) and was a Los Angeles resident. I was surprised by her residency, because I really believed when she spoke about the ‘city’ she was talking about Manhattan (I guess since I consider that my city). What I liked about her approach is that sues movement, layering and interactivity to create experiences, rather than just images or a story. Avenue S truly explored city life during the time of COVID-19.
From the moment I entered the piece, it had a quiet, almost eerie energy: Urban streets without people, fragments of text, and shifting images that seemed to appear and disappear on their own. It didn’t feel like something to “read” in the traditional sense, but more like something to move through, at my own pace, noticing what caught my attention. Also, I felt like I needed to take my time, that it brought me right back to COVID.
My experience with COVID was different then others, much like this piece. We were asked to work-from-home, but only for about 5 or 6 weeks. I had worked at home in a previous career and found it to actually be more work then in you went to your office, so I was somewhat enjoying my house. I was able to take walks around my neighborhood and do my own art. It seems that Jody Zellen and I do not share a similar feeling about such things. For one thing, her experiences is very much city oriented (lots of people – then none, etc.) My experience was very suburban – no people down the shore in March anyway, so this was a kind-of welcomed solitude.
The stark, black-and-white imagery gave the work a haunting kind of beauty. It reminded me of walking through a city on a summer weekend night when the city (my city) would empty out and go to the Hamptons. The emptiness and repetition of certain visuals felt intentional, as if Zellen was trying to capture the rhythm of the city when no one’s around, places in the city you would find that are small forgotten corners. It also paced the passing of time.
Zellen captured a real sense of monotony in parts of the navigation, where certain images or patterns repeated, and the clicks didn’t always lead somewhere new or not new. At first, it felt a little repetitive, but then I realized that was probably the point. It seemed to mirror the routines and rhythms of everyday life, he way days can blur together, especially in the city. I started to see it as Zellen showing us her own day-to-day experience, with its cycles, small shifts, and familiar scenes that might feel the same on the surface but carry quiet differences if you really look.
Because the piece didn’t follow a straightforward story, I wanted to understand how it worked beneath the surface. Again, I’m new to this way of reading and my curiosity and the need for some kind of story seemed to allude me. I looked up things I may have missed in Zellen’s narration, such as secret hyperlinks or hidden paths that others had found while navigating the project. I found it difficult to get these “secrets” to work, even the ones that I thought I had figured out from the calendared page I stumbled upon eventually. Still, that process of searching added another layer to the experience. It made me think about how we try to make sense of these digital pieces of literature, always expecting some kind of clear direction or payoff that doesn’t always come. Plus there’s the personal experience of it directing you down your very own story.
As I continued, I realized Avenue S was more about mood, perception, and even a sense of redundancy than about any kind of clear narrative. he random clicks, the shifting pages, and the unpredictable visuals became their own kind of language. The work made me think about memory and how my memory seems to come in pieces, not in order, and while the memories may not be repeated sometimes they are repeated endlessly.
By the end, I saw Zellen’s Avenue S as less of a story and more of a meditation on solitude, movement, and urban life. It challenges what we consider “literature,” blending photography, design, and poetic fragments into a single experience. Even though I couldn’t access every hidden detail, I still felt like I had wandered through something meaningful. The act of exploring became the story itself.
