Ivan Zhao writes poetry, makes games, and keeps making room for a multilingual internet. This year he built The Infinite Almanac: a poem of 365 lines, one per day of the year, bilingual, laid across a browser page whose colors shift with the seasons. The background is a sky-and-cloud shader he wrote mainly to teach himself shaders — he admits he still struggles with them. The sound isn't decoration: the poem names insects, thunder, rain, rivers, and as you scroll to those lines the corresponding layer switches on or off. The whole thing is written after the renga form, and he says plainly that it can be read in any order.

It comes out of the Chinese lunisolar almanac. That calendar cuts the year into 24 solar terms, each divided into three pentads — 72 in all, and every one of them carries a name: peach trees begin to blossom, hawks turn into doves, rotting grass becomes fireflies. That system is an already-construct: chiseled, sealed, in circulation for a millennium. It has its beauty, but that beauty is sediment from a finished chisel-construct cycle. The cut that named the year's changes closed a thousand years ago.

What Zhao does lands exactly on the remainder that this construct left behind in itself. Seventy-two pentads means the year is quantized into 72 blocks, and the days inside a block are never named individually — they inherit the name of the block they fall in. The calendar's own resolution generates a residue: the days that don't qualify to be seen on their own. Expanding 72 into 365 isn't a translation of the old system. It is writing into the interval the system rounded away. Each day gets its own sentence back.

The second remainder is in the shape of time itself. Linear developmental time — grow up, settle down, leave something behind — is also an already-construct, and whoever doesn't fit its sequence is its remainder. Zhao is direct about this when he talks about queer temporality and diaspora: he feels pulled toward speculative futures and speculative pasts at once. What matters is that he doesn't lay a counter-sequence over the old one. He takes the sequence out: no year is marked, the poem is read in any order, you come back whenever. The remainder isn't resolved into a new construct. It's given a form that can stay open.

Which is why seeing it now matters more than seeing it later. Right now the work has nowhere to be filed. It isn't a calendar (it has no year), isn't a poetry collection (the sound is bound to scroll position), isn't net art (there's no gallery), isn't a meditation app (there's no goal), and isn't a screensaver — though he reaches for "almost like a screensaver" himself, which shows even the maker is borrowing words. Every category that could digest it sits nearby and none of them fits. Even the shader he hasn't gotten right is live evidence: the craft hasn't closed, so the work is still growing. Once someone coins "seasonal web poem" or "ambient calendar site" and the term starts working, it settles into another layer of already-construct. Go look while it still has no name.

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · SAE Judgment & Aesthetics