The work of Anupa Kulathunga.

Orbital Artifacts is a one-person studio working at the seam between Earth observation and image-making. The source material is open: Sentinel-2, Landsat, ASTER — the same data climate scientists use every day. The output is print.

Every scene starts as raw satellite bands — channels of infrared, shortwave, thermal — and gets composited through SNAP into a false-color frame that reveals what the human eye can’t see. Lakes read as copper. Deserts as deep blue. Volcanoes shout. The colors are lies in the kindest way: they tell truths about chemistry, vegetation, mineralogy that natural light simply can’t.

I’m Anupa Kulathunga, based in Sri Lanka. This project started as a question on a Pinterest board — what if the way satellites see our planet is itself a kind of art? — and became a catalogue, a framing system, and a shop. Every print carries its own coordinates. It’s Earth, in its own handwriting.

The archive will keep growing. If a place matters to you and isn’t in the catalogue yet, commission one →