style="margin: 1em 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: AvenirNextLTW01-Regular; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 20px; ">First, some cold, hard facts.

FACT: A signed first edition of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch will set you back $2,000 at Powell’s City of Books.
FACT: You can get it in digital format for $10.91, or free if you’re willing to click on some sketchy-looking pdfs.
FACT: I sometimes miss holding things in my hands.
FACT: It’s not an either/or proposition.

Last week I visited Portland, Oregon; naturally, my first stop was Powell’s and its 68,000 square feet of books. While it does have thriving e-book and print-on-demand departments, Powell’s is primarily a living monument to the printed word, a magical place where throngs of readers crowd the aisles in the middle of a weekday.

I had been thinking a lot about the alleged death of print, so I climbed the stairs to the Pearl Room, which houses the rare books. The rare books are kept in a climate-controlled glass enclosure and monitored by a friendly and vigilant employee; the room has more in common with a museum than with the ramshackle chaos of the fiction aisles downstairs.

The attendant and I get to talking, and soon enough I've arrived at several theories about the future of the printed word.

1. A book’s value is not necessarily linked to content, but a book’s value is totally linked to content. Popularity can decrease value because when a book is popular, more copies are printed, and editions become ordinary. The most exciting collectibles work both angles: they surpass popularity and vault into that unique realm we call a “classic” or (machismo intended here) “seminal.” East of Eden versus Eat Pray Love is no contest. However,East of Eden versus the first Harry Potter might get tricky, due to the ever-present wrench of fan obsession. And cover art matters.

2. E-books and e/print hybrids push readers away from collecting because the content is not encased in a physical object; it is always available, always floating in the ether and ready for consumption.

3. At the same time, e-books push us in a more accelerated fashion toward collecting books, because we fetishize the physical object more. When technologies go obsolete, their artifacts become more collectible. The boards and pulp become special. Rare.

4. As publishers get more creative with electronic and hybrid print/electronic packages, what constitutes a “collectible” edition of a given title is unclear.

5. As books change, bookstores will change. Powell’s may become more of a museum and less of a store — an archive, a physical representation of literature. It’s already halfway there: most of the customers I see crowding the entryway are there to buy souvenir tote bags and t-shirts, not books.

6. I don’t think printed books will ever disappear entirely, but they are certainly in the process of losing their popular monopoly. As e-books grow in prominence, used bookstores grow more specialized; independent stores will carry a smaller spectrum of titles geared toward small, dedicated audiences. Like vinyl record stores, bookstores are on their way to becoming boutique retailers, with a customer base made up of aesthetes and collectors. Print freaks.

7. Powell’s has a 1924 edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables hand bound by Virginia Woolf. It’s $9,500. When I hold it, even through plastic, I pause. I think about Woolf’s hands holding it. She madethis book. Does that make me want to read it? Not particularly. But it kind of makes me want to take it home and pet it whenever I want.

Images courtesy the author

Everybody loves a good infographic. Need to summarize a complex set of statistics (like, say, alternate band names for Pussy Riot)? Try a pie chart. When scientists have trouble understanding data, they use 3-D imaging to map the invisible patterns of airplane turbulence or visualize how a woman’s hair might rumple if she uses X Brand of shampoo, as illustrated inDiscovery Magazine.

But how do you portray invisible occurrences that are not data-driven? What are my options if I want to visualize the emotional ups and downs of my new favorite song, or understand the subjective history of a public space? Can I get an infographic of some feelings over here?

Here are five artists who are making the invisible easier for us to see.

Music: Andrew Kuo

Andrew Kuo makes infographics based on unreliable information. His minimal, brightly colored graphs chart the unchartable, with a particular focus on music: he might rank the emotions of Kanye West’s “Robo Cop” in comparison to other "great" break-up songs, or plot his reaction to a new 9-minute Joanna Newsom single. If music really is just another kind of math, I want Kuo to be my trigonometry teacher. 

Motion: STREB
Choreographer Elizabeth Streb approaches dance like a scientific experiment. In performance and at her Williamsburg "lab," STREB dancers test the invisible laws of motion by throwing their bodies against them. Like, literally. Want to know what gravity looks like? Watch the dancers fly off scaffolding and land hard on their bellies, or balance impossibly on giant spinning hamster wheels. Seeking a spectacle that demonstrates the principle of inertia? Streb's got you covered: dancers run into walls at full speed, duet with lethal projectiles like steel beams, and generally stomp all over the limits of time, space, and muscle.

Cities: Rebecca Solnit
With 13 books under her belt, nonfiction writer Rebecca Solnit has made a career out of exposing subtle truths. (Full disclosure: I once worked for her.) Her 2010 book, Infinite City, visualizes the layered history of San Francisco through maps of seemingly unrelated sites: "Monarchs and Queens" overlays the natural history of the monarch butterfly with queer civil rights history. The result is an atlas of previously unseen connections, a shifting paper record of a living city. A New Orleans version, Unfathomable City, is due out in 2013.

Institutions: Anna Schuleit

There’s the invisible, and then there’s theinvisible — the people pushed beneath the narrative because, as Ralph Ellison’sInvisible Man put it, we refuse to see them. When the Massachusetts Mental Health Center closed in 2003 after 90 years of operation, artist Anna Schuleit was commissioned to create a work memorializing the building. Her stunning installation, BLOOM, filled the decommissioned mental institution with 28,000 living flowers paying tribute to the lives that passed through the space.

Media: Teju Cole’s Twitter feed
There’s invisible, there’s invisible, and then there’s dead. Novelist Teju Cole, author of Open City, tweets about the news — specifically, newspaper notices of death and crime from 1912 New York. He calls the project “Small Fates." Taken as a whole, Cole's timeline is a chorus of funny/sad ghosts. These are the long-forgotten voices of regular folk — criminals, victims, and reporters — a quotidian citizenry of the city, distilled into poetry.

Did I miss any? By all means list your favorite visible/invisible artworks in the comments. Granted, the question of whether what we see is truly "real" is always open to dorm-room-stoner interpretation. But I'm thinking that art has science beat on this one.
 

Images: BOMB Magazine, Andrew Kuo, Anna Schuleit

“I feel like I’m supposed to be here,” he said.
Kathy was silent.
“It’s God’s will,” he said.
She had no answer to this . . .
Kathy rolled her eyes.
“Of course,” she said.
“I love you and them,” he said, and hung up.
—Dave Eggers, Zeitoun

Let's talk about Dave Eggers's Zeitoun. It's the story of Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun, who survive Hurricane Katrina — Kathy because she left beforehand with their children, Abdulrahman through luck, resourcefulness, and bravery, but not without great despair. Their reunion is perpetually delayed by the strange machinations of governmental agencies who imprison Mr. Zeitoun and consider him a danger, not a hero. We could consider the book a call to action or an act of reportage. Fundamentally, though, it’s a love story.

That story became a whole lot more complicated earlier this month, when Abdulrahman was arrested for assaulting Kathy. Judging by its Amazon rankings, Zeitoun is flying off the shelves again. So what should the book’s publishers do? They’ve already ignored the couple’s divorce, but assaults and arrests are much more difficult to shrug off. It's hard not to read the telephone conversation I quoted above without a new sense of irony.

For print, the options are scant. Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine was recalled and refunds made available. They could print new editions with a preface or afterword, like James Frey's A Million Little Pieces. And let's not forget that the paperback edition of Eggers's first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, comes with the upside-down bonus section "Mistakes We Knew We Were Making: Notes, Corrections, Clarifications, Apologies, Addenda." Basically, that's how physical books are handled — as products of a specific moment, with cumbersome revisions.

But what happens with e-books? Technically, they can adapt to the shifting fortunes of their content. In Zeitoun, I'd love to see footnotes that acknowledge what Eggers couldn't have known earlier. I'd love the backstory to this statement to the press.

I’m reminded of Black Balloon publisher Elizabeth Koch’s essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books. She wonders what would happen “if, through evolving books, we could somehow shock ourselves awake enough to recognize that we hold the power to narrate, and live into, a different story of our lives.” As for readers, so for writers and their subjects: these e-bookscan change.

So far, evolving books are hard to come by. (Example? Oh, I don't know...there is Louise: Amended, the latest Black Balloon title.) But the possibilities are dizzying. A Farewell to Arms could incorporateHemingway's 47 alternate endings seamlessly, without an appendix. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance could let its readers map their own journeys onto Pirsig's — ditto for Kerouac. We've seen the Waste Land app, but what if we could pull up different performances of Waiting for Godot(especially Robin Williams and Steve Martin's run) whenever we wanted to see Beckett's words made flesh?

So many books can be unshackled from their origins in a specific time. The original words don't change, but our understanding of them does, and the possibilities are limited only by what our technology can do. We've invented e-books; now we can let them evolve.

image credit: flickr.com/photos/gruber

Until the computers take over and start making all the decisions (thanks to James Cameron, we know how that ends), military analysts have a keen problem: too much data. Everything, from digital phone records to constantly updated satellite imagery, must be sifted, interpreted and employed by the intelligence services to make Very Important Decisions. Managing all this data has been an insurmountible task, but time, it rolls along, giving us shinier gadgets and sleeker iPhones. And according to a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) just might have come up with a solution.

Essentially, neuroscientists have devised a computer system that tracks the brain activity of analysts as they follow visual stimuli; there is a measurable spike whenever they respond to a scene or an image that seems to contain information. So, analysts wired up to electrodes will have as many as 20 images per second flit before their eyes, and a computer keeps track of the ones that excite their brain with tantalizations of possible meaning. The system isn't fully automated—it's piggybacking on the analysts' ability to discern sense from dross—but it greatly compresses the amount of time needed to needle-hunt in haystacks of visual data.

There are several interesting aspects to this technology, if you can get past the fact that it's being used to more efficiently direct military decisions. The main one, I think, is that it relies on latent capacities of the individuals whose heads are being scanned. There is no way to externalize the sense-finding capability of human sight (yet), but by scanning the way in which seasoned analysts passively respond to stimuli, the DARPA project makes visible what would seem to be an invisible part of our habitual, reflexive interpretation of reality. Because the snap of recognition that information might be present—it occurs about 300 milliseconds after a stimulus appears—passes so rapidly, a person's conscious inclinations or beliefs do not enter into the situation.

Which of course makes you wonder whether this tech could be used to reveal our most cherished, and unvocalized, assumptions about the world. Hitch somebody to the rig, flash a series of images in front of their eyes, and measure their response: you could find out if they can discern script from chickenscratch, what sort of body ellicits the most excitement, and probably whether they harbor prejudice toward specific types of person. The hidden aspects, the habituated, reality-informing reflexes that incline our minds to see this or that as a bearer of significance, could be teased out, investigated, and responded to.

The military probably won't be very interested in these personal DARP-lications, except maybe in determining which circle of hell to condemn folks to at a black site. But, just as Big Dog gave us Roomba, you can expect cortex-scanning products to trickle down into consumer markets. In the Chronicle article, they postulate a catalog you don't even read: there's merely a flit of images, and the computer lets you know what struck your fancy.

In the future, you won't even have to admit your own desires to have them gratified.

Image: Qubik Design