I have to admit I dropped the ball. I think I was hoping that I would find a collaborator who would help me with the code and we’d work together on the movements of the figures, find a way to create multiple color systems for tracking more than one viewer. Of course this kind of interaction and testing would happen best when we had a space to work in together and were sitting side by side analyzing how people interacted with the project. I have only had the opportunity to present this once and while I have submitted the idea to numerous festivals I have not found a second venue to show the project and work out some of the issues. I appreciate the feedback I have received and think the comments reflect the issues I am grappling with. I would love to have the opportunity to present The Unemployed in a public space. What happens when some one interacts with the code on the computer screen is really different then when a video camera tracks the people in a space. My idea of having that silhouette become a representation of a labor force is not clear nor is the …

“The Unemployed” is an interactive installation that I have been working on and for which I would like to engage in conversation with other about, and get both conceptual as well as technical feedback on. This project visualizes world wide unemployment. Using data culled from online sources that list unemployment rates by country, “The Unemployed” represents the jobless as animated figures who inhabit a generic cityscape. The number of monthly unemployed varies from country to country ranging from a few thousand in sparsely populated places to many millions in places like the United States, India, and China. The software randomly cycles through approximately 200 countries, drawing the number of unemployed as aimless wanderers, ambling across the screen (as they are unemployed). Whenever a viewer enters the space of the installation, their silhouette is captured by a video camera causing the figures to flock to that shape and move with it for the duration the viewer is in the camera’s range. When the viewer leaves the space, the figures return to their random wanderings.

To see project documentation click here

To download the Processing app click here

So in the Processing app what happens locally is the app uses your computers …

Watching people interact with the work posed numerous questions which I would like to find solutions to. This include how does the viewer know what to do? How do they understand how they are affecting the work? What happens when numerous of viewers engage with the work? Can I program the software to see each person individually and track them as different populations making overlaps and comparisons on the display wall? Do viewers understand that the small animated figures represent the unemployed and that their silhouette becomes a labor force, or the potential for one? Is there a way to better represent “the city”– the space the figures occupy when no one is in the camera’s scope of view?

I would welcome feedback, suggestions and the potential for technical collaboration on this project which I believe is culturally and socially relevant at this time as so many people are unemployed. I find it seductive and compelling to look at but am not sure that my aesthetic resonates so would be interested in discussion and critical feedback about the presentation as well as the content of the work.

My interests in the relationship between hand and computer drawing led me to code and an investigation into how and if I could program the computer to make stick figures like the ones I draw with my pen. Using Processing I was able to plot points to create stick-like figures. These figures were then programmed to move across the screen according to steering behaviors –algorithms that followed specific rule sets with respect to properties like velocity, attraction and cohesion. The motivation for this project came from my own urban wanderings. From the experience of bumping into people as I walk down crowded streets, I began to think about the paths people travel when they walk through the city. After experimenting with different incarnations of a fixed number of figures, I began to search for relevant data sets that could be continually updated from the internet in order to map actual statistics to the number of figures on the screen. Struck by the growing number of unemployed I was reading about in the daily newspaper, I decided to turn the project not only into a visualization of world wide unemployment, but also into an interactive installation mapping the number of unemployed …