Light Waves 

Each morning when he lived as an expat in Berlin, artist Sean O’Brien sat down at his kitchen counter and checked the surf in California. “Before I moved to Germany, I would wander out each morning in Santa Barbara,” he says. “I loved being connected to that rhythm, becoming more and more in tune with what the ocean had to tell me.” Inspired by those feelings of connection and ritual, O’Brien created Ocean Pulse, a series of digital artworks that use light to represent the ocean’s swell patterns. 

He initially sought connection in the buoy data and swell graphs that described the faraway Pacific. Still, the practice felt incomplete. “I didn’t like the screen as my medium to connect with the ocean,” he says. “How do I connect to the ocean that doesn’t involve a screen or a device in my pocket?” 

Art has a way of communicating the abstract and the intangible, and of distilling ideas and emotions. Light offered the obvious medium. “It is elegant that light is a waveform,” he says. “So I used a waveform to describe another waveform.” 

Ocean Pulse is composed of five pieces, and illuminates different areas of the California coast. Built into each piece is a microprocessor with an internet connection. Code written by his father Michael O’Brien, brother Travis O’Brien, and friend Dan Loman pulls swell data generated by NOAA’s offshore buoy network. Then Ocean Pulse transforms each swell’s angle and interval into light. 

“Definitely the part that took the longest was creating a really good color map for swell direction,” O’Brien says. “I took a color wheel and imagined it laid over a compass rose.” He chose blue for north, red for west, and yellow for south. Occasionally, an intense offshore wind will light up a single buoy in green: a rare east swell. Much like a devoted surfer learns the lineup, daily interaction with Ocean Pulse reveals the ever-changing rhythms of the ocean’s wild dance. 

“The pieces that resonate with me most are the Harvest pieces, which are just a beacon of light representing one buoy,” he says. “You’re just getting the data from that source, very abstracted in terms of what it is, and you can process it and build a relationship with it over time.” 

See more of O’Brien’s work on his Instagram, @seanobriendesigns.

[Feature Image by Branden Aroyan.]