Guest
.TV is a found footage essay film: Voicemails left by an anonymous caller from the future guide us to the remote islands of Tuvalu, a place the global media has described as “the first country to disappear due to rising sea levels“. Surrounded by thousands of miles of open water, much of Tuvalu’s revenue comes from its country-code web extension .TV, a popular domain choice among global video-streaming and television industries. The caller describes how heat, digital screens, and distance gave him no choice but to leave his sinking home and escape into cyberspace where rising waters will never reach him. “I asked myself: why is it easier — and more exciting — to envision a future where ‘cyber-countries’ exist, rather than radical change in our present systems, behaviors, values, and policies to avert such a scenario?” G. ANTHONY SVATEK For Svatek, this project began as a rabbit hole of online forums where he discovered Tuvalu’s urgent environmental circumstances. “Users and commentators failed to recognize the existential tragedy at hand and instead projected wild hypotheses about the prospect of thousands of lucrative streaming websites,” he says. Much of Svatek’s work is interested in how technology can alter our relationships to nature and our own corporeal selves. At the same time, his films retain a sense of ambivalence, relying on technology to capture the world on camera as it slowly fades away.
