New Piece for Central Library Pushes Art to the Technical Edge

"Making Visible the Invisible" is art, not FBI or Homeland Security research.

Whoever you are, the art isn't engineered to care.

All participants are anonymous.

Whatever is in circulation will be noted, but not the person who put it there.

And because there's an hour's pause between checkout and screen display, the connection between book and reader is lost in the digital delay.

The creator of the piece, George Legrady, is both artist and engineer.

In order to be accepted into his program in media arts and technology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, you have to be fluent in various arcane computer languages and be able to conjure with complicated equations.

What's the result?

"It's information visualization aesthetics," he said, beaming.

"I made it up."

His term's tone deaf, but his product's intriguing.

At 55, Legrady is pushing art's technical edge.

A mere two decades ago, Jenny Holzer wowed us with her LED reader boards. Next to the savvy and elegant word/number streams Legrady sets in motion, Holzer's are first-step fumbles: Stone Age to Jet Age.

Legrady's project is the last major piece of art commissioned for the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas' decisive entry into the 21st century.

Opening last year, the building has been acclaimed around the world and