In this Artist Talk, Jody Zellen introduces her new work News Wheel as well as showing some of her other works in which she uses 'the news', namely All The News That's Fit to Print, Without a Trace, and Time Jitters.
News Wheel, 2016 is an iOS app that explores the poetics of ever changing news headlines. It begins as a static disk divided into nine sections each representing a different news source. Tapping anywhere on the screen causes the wheel to spin. Another tap stops the wheel and suddenly a headline in one of nine pre-selected colors appears on the screen. This playful interface invites users to start and stop the wheel eventually filling the screen with a collage of current headlines. Individual words can be deleted and repositioned so users can create their own poems from this content. In addition, dragging one's finger across the screen creates an animated chain of fragmented and poetic text derived from today's headline news. News Wheel is a creative and poetic way to view, juxtapose and interpret world events. (Source: http://www.jodyzellen.com/newswheeltalk/)
Wish4[0] takes as its inspiration the perpetual tugging at a user’s consciousness by the digital. Each work takes as its immediate inspiration a headline (or item) drawn from the electronic news cycle of that specific day. The resulting block of poetic works: 1) Act as a digital and creative “literary snapshot” of a specific period. 2) Highlight the accelerated nature of an electronic/networked-based news cycle. 3) Illustrate the discrepancies – and perhaps similarities - between how a digital audience responds to items deemed newsworthy and creative responses to such items. 4) Echo (and partially emulate) elements of digital culture that have become seamlessly integrated into our everyday lives (including programs such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Vine, Snapchat and Instagram). This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.
"Mez Breeze’s WISH4[0] is something like a forty-day odyssey through contemporary consciousness. Billed as creative interpretations of news items, the work addresses such issues as fake Facebook likes, online surveillance, climate change, and NASA’s 3d pizza printer (to name a few) through video poems, infographics, and classic mezangelled texts that respond to and resonate with cultural obsessions of immediate access to information. As such, the work produces a compelling and resonant reading of our times; a puzzling yet familiar zeitgeist that haunts rather than convinces." - Talan Memmott
"Wish4[0]" is set of 40 code poems based on a poetic interpretation of the maxim “Be Careful What You Wish For”. The title of the work, “Wish4[0]” is a truncation - and linguistic reworking – of the idea of wish fulfilment in the digital age. The project examines how willing users and audience members are subjected to an “always-on” news cycle, where social media and content streaming are now a primary method of information sourcing, and privacy is an elastic concept. As extensive use of mobile devices such as smart phones, wearable tech and tablets is now the norm, it’s apparent that the Internet has become a crucial component of our everyday news and entertainment cycle, as well as an omnipresent social tool. From a cultural standpoint, we seem to be reaching a critical point in our consumption and production of digital media, with privacy concerns starting to push back against constant oversharing and the incessant rush of accelerating digital news cycles. And yet, deliberate poetic responses to such critical social issues seem underutilised: Wish4[0] readdresses this imbalance.