“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 camera and if you put your hand in front of it the figures become your hand, etc. Of course when its in an installation the camera is not attached to the computer and the camera’s field of view is wider, but this can give some idea of how it work.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 at 12:41 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.