This site explores the dissonances between “exotic,” beautiful images and their sociopolitical context. It started out simply, as a tool to communicate the difficulty of underwater photography: A friend of mine is conducting marine biology research in Palau, and over the course of his dives he's taken countless photos of marine creatures. He lamented to me, however, that his friends and family didn't seem to grasp exactly how difficult it is for him to take these high-resolution images of creatures that are often small, in motion, and avoidant of humans. So I decided to make a site that reproduced this experience for the user, coding his photos so that they would swim away whenever a user tried to click on and view them.

However, over the course of our continued conversation, my friend ended up telling me about a bill currently being passed in Palau that would open up the national marine sanctuary to oil exploration and commercial fishing. It felt absolutely imperative to include this information on the site, and so I wrote and littered the site with abstract, provocative questions contemplating the role of photographic documentation and exoticizing fantasy. Clicking on these questions leads the user into a short essay my friend and I co-wrote describing the political context, along with links to a petition for users to sign.