The Pacific island of Tuvalu is the world’s least visited country, with its highest point 15 feet above sea level. It risks losing statehood once sea levels rise above its land mass.
DATABLIND proposes a counternarrative of unsinking. It uses bathymetric data, multimedia scripting, and spatial exploration to visualize Tuvalu’s mapped and unmapped territories. DATABLIND preserves unmapped narratives, countering Tuvalu’s digital systemic connections with local knowledge, memories, and perspectives.
This visualization maps the systems embedded beyond the surface of Tuvalu, including the sea level, air space, and digitized sphere that’s above. It highlights this space as one territory, challenging the existing precarity of losing sovereignty after sea level rise. The land masses will still be there - they won’t disappear within the water. DATABLIND highlights Tuvalu’s place within a global system, including its geopolitical connections through imports and the digital sphere. This includes fishing and cargo vessels in the marine territory, fiber optic cables along the sea bed, flight paths through Tuvalu’s air space, and the ever-growing Starlink System that quietly colonized the orbit above Tuvalu.
As a contrast to visualizing the network Tuvalu’s global systems from top down satellite imagery, we unearth the bottom-up perspectives of the satellite from Funafuti. Part of this mapping is to explore perspectives from the island, such as living amongst the digitization. Moments of domesticity, local knowledge, and livelihood, are represented through a digital framework.
