Global Longing

Global Longing is a participatory net art installation that transforms individual stories of displacement into a living, breathing visualization of collective homesickness. In an era of unprecedented human mobility, where over 281 million people live outside their country of birth, this project asks: What does it mean to miss home in a globalized world?

Each submission creates an arc of light stretching across a digital globe, connecting where someone stands now to the place their heart remembers. These luminous traces accumulate into a real-time map of global longing, revealing patterns of migration, displacement, and the invisible emotional geography that connects us all.

The work exists at the intersection of data visualization, participatory art, and emotional cartography. Unlike traditional datasets that reduce human experience to statistics, Global Longing preserves the poetic tension between abstraction and intimacy. Each glowing arc represents both a data point and a lived story of separation.

Drawing from theories of networked publics and collective memory, the piece challenges the notion of the archive as static. Here, memory is alive, constantly growing, responsive to each new submission. The visualization breathes (literally pulsing with light when someone, anywhere in the world, adds their story) creating a sense of shared presence across distance.

The project acknowledges its position within conversations around digital diaspora, techno-aesthetics, and the phenomenology of place. It asks viewers to consider: How do we represent feeling on a map? What does a visualization of collective displacement look like? Can technology create space for vulnerability rather than extraction?

The work engages with:

• Migration & Diaspora: Personal narratives of movement, displacement, and belonging
• Memory & Place: How geography shapes identity and emotional attachment
• Networked Intimacy: Creating vulnerability and connection through anonymous, collective participation
• Data as Poetry: Finding aesthetic and emotional meaning in structured information
• Real-Time Collective Memory: Building archives that grow and breathe with ongoing human experience

This project emerged from my own experience of displacement and the inadequacy of language to capture what "missing home" truly feels like. I wanted to create a space where that feeling could be shared without words, where the accumulation of individual longings could reveal something about our collective condition.

Every arc on this globe is a real person, sitting somewhere in the world right now, thinking about somewhere else. The visualization doesn't solve the distance. It honors it, makes it visible, lets us sit with it together.

noiseRandom, November 2025

Global Longing is designed for flexible installation across contexts:

• Web Installation: Accessible at globallonging.com, inviting global participation
• Gallery Display: Full-screen kiosk display with QR code for visitor submissions, designed for museums and art spaces
• Large-Scale Projection: Optimized for wall-sized installations with ambient breathing animations and soundscapes

For exhibition inquiries, technical specifications, or collaboration opportunities, please contact the artist at taha@noiserandom.com.