Spotlight — Kazmier Maslanka

The Flammarion engraving, 1888 — a traveller reaches the edge of the sky and pushes his head through it. Colored by Kaz Maslanka, 2026.

Interactive Mathematical Poem

Psychronometrics

1983 · Radio Shack Color Computer

When you were four, a summer lasted forever. It doesn’t anymore, and nothing about the summer changed.

I first noticed this at about eight years old, and it terrified me: I was going to be in school until I was eighteen, and eighteen was an eternity away. Then I turned eighteen and hardly any time had passed at all.

The explanation I arrived at in 1983 is that we judge a span of time against how much time we have already had. One year is a tenth of a ten-year-old’s life and a sixtieth of a sixty-year-old’s — and one tenth of your life is an enormous piece of time next to one sixtieth. A forty-year-old experiences twenty years about the way a twenty-year-old experiences ten. Each of them is reflecting on half a life.

What made it a poem rather than an observation is what I did next. That shrinking ratio has the same shape as Einstein’s time dilation — the slowing of a clock aboard a ship approaching the speed of light — so I mapped one onto the other and wrote it as a computer program. Enter your birthday and a parent’s, and the piece will tell you how fast their clock is running relative to yours, and then how close to light speed a ship would have to travel to reproduce, physically, the difference the two of you already live with.

It was written on a Radio Shack Color Computer — thirty-two columns, sixteen rows, capital letters only — at a time when using an equation from physics as a vehicle for poetic metaphor was not a thing anyone was doing. It has been carried across three machines and forty-three years to reach you: CoCo in 1983, IBM 8088 in 1988, the web in 2026.

Push the frame of reference out toward eternity and the two clocks almost agree — but never quite. Sameness is the limit, never the arrival.

Read it & run the program Between Einstein and Bergson

Equal Momentum Study of Isosceles Images with Seven Times Difference in Velocity, 1981. Oil on canvas, 36″ × 48″. The narrow figure reads as seven times faster — yet the two carry exactly equal momentum.

Painting & Theory

The Psycho-Vector Series

1981–1988 · Oil on canvas, 36″ × 48″

Look at the two shapes beside this text. One of them is moving faster than the other. Neither of them is moving at all.

Kandinsky taught a generation to see a canvas as a field in motion — lines that advance and recede, a point pressing on the plane that holds it, forms crossing the surface at visibly different speeds. But he described all of it in the vocabulary of tension and inner life. I was studying Newtonian mechanics at the same time I was looking at those pictures, and I became convinced the correspondence was more than metaphor. A painted movement has both magnitude and direction; that is not like a vector, that is the definition of one.

So the series sets out to prove it, and it does so in stages you can follow with your own eye. A triangle’s slope is its velocity. Its area is its mass. Multiply the two and you have a momentum you can actually calculate — which means two figures can be built to carry identical momentum while one of them reads as seven times faster, and the eye will confirm the trade the moment it is pointed out. Find a way to read time off the form and you get force. Add the distance and you get energy. Restore the missing directions and whole fields of triangles resolve into a single resultant.

Those last three paintings, made in 1988, have their totals inscribed along the bottom edge in units that did not exist and had to be named: the chron for visual time, the Kandinsky for visual force, the Apollinaire for momentum, the Matta for energy.

The whole argument starts with a hand in a swimming pool — and the reason a canvas, which offers nothing at all to the hand, can still deliver a force to the body that reads it.

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