Jody Zellen
The Unemployed
Santa Monica California


"The Unemployed" is an interactive installation that 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. The software instructs the figures to inhabit that shape and move with it for the duration that they are in the camera's scope of view. The silhouette metaphorically becomes an available labor force as well as the visible presence of the jobless. When the viewer leaves the camera's frame the figures return to their urban wanderings. If the country has a large number of unemployed, there are enough figures to fill and move with numerous silhouettes. If the country has minimal unemployment the silhouette is only partially filled.


Jody Zellen is a Los Angeles based artist who is currently a Visiting Artist at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Zellen works in many media simultaneously making photographs, installations, net art, public art, as well as artists' books that explore the subject of the urban environment. She employs media-generated representations of contemporary and historic cities as raw material for aesthetic and social investigations.