Out at Sea

Out at Sea

I spent much of the second half of 2015 on a flotel, a floating hotel, parked alongside an oil rig in the southern North Sea. My colleagues and I were there to build the rig. There was no land in sight.

It was a strange time for me. I was preparing to relocate to Australia for an uncertain future. While planning that move, my job moved offshore. Out at sea I felt confined: physically and within an inflexible routine. My personal space was one half of a bunk bed. Allocated at random, but somehow always the top bunk. I worked a 12 hour shift each day, with no great way to spend my 12 hours off-duty. I’d do this for two week stretches, before going back to dry land for two weeks, then flying back out again to repeat the cycle.

Half day shifts. Half the month onshore and half off. Halfway between emigrating and immigrating.

On the flotel, we didn’t have (usable) internet. We had a weak satellite connection meant for use by our workstations, with extra capacity split between 100 people on board. We were plagued by an occasional rogue Facetime or Skype user who would attempt to video call home and take down the entire network.

As a result, I would spend a fair bit of my non-work time out on deck just staring into the distance dramatically. Looking out to sea. I’d see dolphins and whales and birds and passing ships. I grew up looking out to sea from my bedroom window. So staring at the sea is at the very least a habit for me, if not something core to who I am. Being out on deck felt like the best use of my time and I still think of it fondly.

I have been playing around with Three.js recently, an open source graphics library. Part of that fiddling had me set up a not-very-complicated sea and sky scene and putting together some ambient sounds. Once I got it running, it reminded me of being back on the flotel, surrounded only by water. Out at Sea. You can have a little play here if you click below, and travel back there with me. It’s quite simple:

• Look around: Click and drag (or swipe) left and right to look around.
• Change the time of day: Drag up and down to move the sun.
• Listen (sound on): A gentle breeze, stereo white-noise

Out at Sea is one more entry in a long list of calm, ambient web experiments I’ve cobbled together over the last few years, like Big Pause. Maybe in some way this is a subconscious attempt for me to step back into the specific liminal moment I found myself in eleven years ago. Halfway between an old life and new.

I find myself increasingly drawn to quiet, atmospheric web experiences as an alternative to noisy feeds. In Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon’s 2024 essay, they propose rewilding the internet, returning the web to a diverse ecosystem and less of a monoculture optimised for extraction. Out at Sea is a modest thing. But modest things are part of what rewilding means.

There’s a whole world of opportunity beyond the horizon.

You can take yourself Out at Sea in fullscreen over here: https://lewdry.github.io/outatsea/