Etheric Oasis

Etheric Oasis is a small interactive artwork for the web. It is one page. There is nothing to buy, no account to make, and nothing to subscribe to.

What it does

The page shows a still pool of water reflecting a night sky. Touching or clicking the water sends ripples across the surface, which spread, cross one another, 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 writing

The lines are drawn from writers long out of copyright, together with a few written for the piece. Among them:

• Be still, and know. — Psalm 46
• Muddy water clears if you let it sit still. — Laozi
• Nature does not hurry, and everything is accomplished. — Laozi
• We suffer more in imagination than in reality. — Seneca
• No one is free who is not master of himself. — Epictetus
• Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience. — Emerson
• A man is rich in proportion to the things he can let alone. — Thoreau
• The soul takes on the color of its thoughts. — Marcus Aurelius

How it is made

The water is a simulation of the wave equation running on a grid, drawn to a canvas element. The reflected sky is generated rather than photographed. The whole page is a single file of about thirty kilobytes, with no frameworks, no libraries, and no external services beyond a web font.

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. A single number — how long the visitor has spent with the water still — is kept in their own browser and never leaves the device.