The Unemployed

The Unemployed is an interactive artwork by Jody Zellen. The app has three sections. Scene 1 is a creative drawing tool where tapping on the screen creates figures in different colors and sizes. Scene 2 uses world wide unemployment statistics as a point of departure. It presents the unemployed as animated figures moving within their country's perimeter. A tap to the screen randomly displays the different countries world wide. Section 3 links to a table of unemployment statistics. Using data culled from online sources that list unemployment rates by country, The Unemployed represents the jobless as animated figures. The number and rate of unemployed varies from country to country ranging from a few thousand in sparsely populated places to many millions. Each tap to the screen reveals a different array of figures in different colors, depicted as aimless wanderers moving within the confines of their country's borders. The clusters of figures metaphorically become an available labor force, as well as the visible presence of the jobless.