Jody Zellen: Crowds and Power

October 2002

Screenshot of a webpage with a grid of square images in the top left, 3 square images leading off screen in the top right over black with text that says "The crowd, suddenly there where there was nothing before", with gray behind and a smaller grid of images across the bottom.

Jody Zellen’s Crowds and Power combines fragmented visuals of protests and mass gatherings with excerpts from Elias Canetti’s 1960 book Crowds and Power to explore the psychology of crowds, as well as the phenomena of groupthink and herd behavior. The main interface presents itself as a collage of frames showing hordes or swarms of people. Clicking on them launches more visuals and texts, often staggered and sequenced, that reflect on the power structures of crowds. The unpredictable pattern and order of the pop-ups mimic both the chaos and the coordination of mass movements. Zellen’s work challenges the power of control, collective memory, and spatial transformation in urban environments by amplifying the authority and influence inherent to large numbers of people.

Enter project View original Gate Page

Jody Zellen (b. 1961; Boston, Massachusetts) works in animation, interactive installation, app art, net art, drawing, painting, photography, public art, and artist’s books, among other mediums. She earned an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (1989) and an MPS from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (2009). Zellen received a California Arts Council Established Artist Fellowship (2023) and other awards in the state, including project fellowships from the City of Santa Monica (2021, 2016, 2011); a California Community Foundation Mid-Career Fellowship (2012); a Center for Cultural Innovation grant (2011); and a 2004 COLA (City of Los Angeles) Fellowship. Her site-specific interactive installations have been shown in California at Nan Rae Gallery, Woodbury University, Burbank (2022); the Los Angeles International Airport (2019); Long Beach City College (2017); and Fringe Exhibitions, Los Angeles (2008); as well as in South Carolina at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston (2014).

Gate Pages

Every month from March 2001 to February 2006, the Whitney invited an artist or collective to present their work in the form of a “Gate Page” on artport. Each page was meant to function as a portal to the artist’s own sites and projects. The Gate Pages comprise a range of artistic approaches to the format—while some of them are designed as entry points to the respective artist’s website or promote a recently launched work, others take the form of a more complex stand-alone project.

Wherever necessary and possible, these works are made functional through emulation and reconstructions from the Internet Archive. Not all of them have been restored to their original state and their conservation is ongoing. You can also view the original Gate Pages archive to see how they were presented at the time of their creation.

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