Etheric Oasis

Etheric Oasis is a small interactive artwork for the web: the open sea seen from the deck of a small boat at anchor, a world of sand to sculpt the island she lies off, and a bench at the end of a pier to reflect at. They go by what they are for: sculpt, rest and reflect. Sculpt is the front page: build your oasis, then go aboard. The pages are two tabs in the lower corner, Sculpt with a hand shaping sand and Rest with an anchor. Reflect has none; the way to it from the boat is through her deck. There is nothing to buy, no account to make, and nothing to subscribe to.

Reflect

Reflect is the view from a bench at the head of the long pier in Lantern Harbour, one of the eight lands, with the harbour and its mouth to the open sea before it, under the same sky as the boat. Touching or clicking the water sends rings out across it, which spread and slowly settle. While the water is disturbed, nothing on the page can be read. When it goes still, a line of writing rises out of it, holds for a while, and fades. Disturb the water again and the line scatters.

That is the whole of it. The site gives nothing while a visitor is busy and opens when they stop, which is the opposite of how most screens behave. The lines are drawn from writers long out of copyright, together with a few written for the piece. Among them:

Sculpt

Sculpt is a small world of sand seen from above, in the last warm light of the day. Dragging a finger across the sea raises sand from the sea floor until it breaks the surface and becomes land. Held still, the finger keeps pouring, and the sand piles into hills and then mountains, with bare rock and snow on the heights. Trees grow to suit the height they stand at: palms on the shore, broad trees in the lowlands, pines up the slopes. Tapping the ground plants one; tapping the water makes rings; the spade in the corner turns the finger into a dredge, to dig the land away. Birds cross now and then, and sometimes a whale comes up to breathe, blows, and rolls back under with a lift of its tail. Turning the device turns the world with it, like a tray of sand held in both hands. It was first made for a young child, so it needs no reading and nothing can go wrong. With the sound on it is the same open air as aboard: surf along whatever coast there is, gulls calling as they cross, the whale's breath, sand running from the fingertip grain by grain, and a wooden note for every tree, walking up a scale so that a row of them plays a tune.

A first visit starts on a ready-made island, chosen at random, and the turning arrow in the corner brings up another, a different one each time: a green peak in a reef lagoon, a ring atoll, a deep bay between two peaks, a scatter of islands to drift among, a sheltered cove, a lake in wooded hills, and a high rocky island with sea stacks off its point. Each is planted already, with the boat riding at anchor where the view from her deck is best in the evening light, and each can be reshaped like any other.

Once there is land, a little sailboat appears out on the water, at anchor off the island. She can be towed anywhere there is sea, lagging behind the finger, gathering way and leaving a wake, and wherever she is let go she drops her anchor and swings round on her line to lie facing the island. So the view is chosen there, on the sand: a tap on her (or on the sailboat in the corner) puts you on her foredeck, at that anchorage, with the island made on the sand all around, full size, its beaches, rock and snow standing up out of the water where they were drawn, and every tree planted on the sand grown into a stand of real ones, and a chart of it lies on her deck. She stays there, riding to her anchor, for as long as anyone likes, and the sea opens at that anchorage from then on, until a new island is started.

Rest

Rest is the view from the foredeck of a small sailboat: laid teak, a varnished rail, and a cream jib drawing on the forestay, with patches sewn on near its foot the way stickers collect on a suitcase: two carrying the initials of five people, and around them badges from fourteen places dear to them, from the Outer Banks, Anna Maria Island and Maui to Smith Mountain Lake, the Ozarks, Amalfi, Capri, Monaco, Nice and Barcelona. A brass compass stands on the deck, its red point always north and the letter on its far side the way she is looking, with a bead on the rim toward the sun, or after dark the moon. The chart of her island lies beside it, and a touch on the chart goes down into it, back to the sand. A mug of black coffee stands there too, a small dark circle of sky. Aft of the mast, where you can look once she is under way, she is finished as a classic is: a varnished cabin trunk with bronze portlights, a butterfly skylight, a pair of bronze dorade vents with red throats, the sliding hatch under its sea hood, the cockpit and its tiller, and a teak taffrail round her stern with a bronze cleat on each quarter and a small stern light. She rides the same waves that are drawn around her, rising, pitching and rolling with the swell, and dragging turns the view with the boat coming round after it, the way a bow answers the helm. A touch on open water sends her there: her anchor comes up with the chain rattling in over the bow, a breeze gets up and fills the jib, and she turns and sails to the spot at an easy pace, the bow wave peeling off her stem, then rounds up and lets her anchor go again. That is her anchorage from then on, on the sand too. She will not run aground; sent at the land, she stops in good water off it. Red wool telltales on the jib show the wind the way a sailor reads it: hanging in light air, streaming aft and fluttering as it fills, lifting when a puff comes, the ones on the far side showing as shadows through the cloth. The sun and moon keep their true bearings on the compass: the evening sun going down in the west-north-west, the morning sun coming up in the east-north-east, the moon rising in the east-south-east. Out on open water, islands lie on the horizon: a sandy cay with palms, green hills with a lighthouse on the point, a high island with a bare summit, and fainter ones beyond. The symbol in the corner shows the sky and changes it, and the skies come round in the order of a day, each easing into the next over several seconds, the sun carried on across the sky rather than back: golden hour, with the sun four degrees up laying a long road of light across the water; dusk, the afterglow at its richest and the evening star out above it; a moonlit night, the moon low enough to lay a glade on the sea, with the jib rolled up, an oil lantern hung on the forestay and the lighthouse sweeping (a touch on the lantern turns its wick up or down); dawn, glassy calm, the lantern going out as the sun comes up; a clear afternoon, the sun high enough for a blue sky and low enough to set the sea sparkling; and a squall, the storm cloud hanging low with rags of scud racing under it, rain sweeping past and curtains of it trailing across the sea, clearing into golden hour again. Each sky has its own grade, as a film print would: amber light and teal shade at golden hour, rose and violet at dusk, silver and blue by the moon. The sound follows the sky and the boat: surf breathing in and out, a low swell far off, wind that gusts, rain, water lapping at the bow as it comes down, and now and then the life around her: gulls going over, a whale blowing somewhere off in the distance, and on some nights its song. Left alone at night with the sound on, it becomes something to fall asleep to: the picture slowly dims to a faint glow of moon and water, the screen stays awake so the sound keeps playing, and a touch brings it all back.

And for whoever finds the way, there are two more things: a cup of coffee deeper than it looks, and a city of small lights somewhere down below the sand.

How it is made

The pool is a simulation of the wave equation running on a grid, drawn to a canvas element, and the sky it reflects is generated rather than photographed. The sand world is a height field with the same wave simulation running over it. The sea is drawn fresh for every pixel of every frame by the graphics card: a sky lit by the sun or the moon through the air, a surface of many travelling waves that each ray of sight is followed down to, islands on the horizon, and the boat, which is worked out from those same waves so that she sits on the water that is drawn. An island from the sand is carried over as a small map of heights, and the detail the map is too coarse to hold, the texture of sand, grass and rock, bushes, boulders and single trees, is grown from it on the spot. The sea is worked out at whatever resolution the device can afford and then printed to the screen at its full sharpness, as a photograph is printed from a negative: sharpened, with the warm glow film gives round bright light, a soft fall-off to the corners, and fine moving grain. The pages share a small runtime, with no frameworks, no libraries, and no outside services beyond a web font. On devices without usable graphics acceleration, the boat and island are drawn by a lighter geometric renderer; the same sailing, anchorage and sound remain. A small viewing-style control offers Oasis, Natural and Reverie. Birds glide and occasionally settle on the water; small pods surface now and then, with long quiet intervals between sightings.

Privacy

The site collects no personal information. There are no analytics, no cookies, no tracking, no advertising, and no third-party scripts. Nothing a visitor does is sent anywhere; the only thing fetched from anyone else is the typeface, from Google Fonts. A few small things are kept in the visitor's own browser and never leave the device: how long they have spent with the water still, the island last made on the sand, which ready-made island comes up next, a best score, whether they had the sound on, and their preferred viewing style. The pages themselves are kept on the device too, so they open at once and still work with no connection.

go aboard