In The Relativity Engine, the impossible is treated as a working machine. A single driver turns at one corner of an architecture borrowed from M.C. Escher — a room of three perpendicular gravities, eleven staircases that converge on shared landings, each ascending in its own “down.” Every other gear in the scene follows the driver. Bevels redirect rotation through the wall; helical pairs run in cancelling hands; a worm whittles speed through a heavier wheel. Twenty-four gears in all, every one meshing physically with at least one neighbour, together tracing a continuous chain across three orthogonal axes. Where one moves, all move, in ratios set by tooth count alone.
The architecture argues against itself. The mechanism does not. A figure walking the loop visually would climb every stair and return to the same height they started at. The work runs without spectacle, at the modest tempo of a clock.
The piece is generated in the viewer’s browser. Tooth geometry is built from involute curves; helical bodies are swept along axes that twist linearly; bevels are conical tapers of the same profile; worm threads ride a helix. The kinematic graph — which gear drives which, and at what ratio — resolves at sixty frames a second. There is no recording.
After M.C. Escher’s Relativity (lithograph, 1953).