Film’s relationship with dimensionality has always fascinated me: two-dimensional representations of three dimensions printed onto a strip whose length adds the dimension of time. Time is strikingly represented by the rapidly unspooling rolls of celluloid on a projector. If you’ve ever been in the booth when the film spills off the reel and onto the floor while the movie is running, you have a very tactile idea of the relentless and frightening passage of time by which we all live.

A magazine offers a far more comfortable relationship with time—we can flick through it, stop, flip back, keep it forever. It can do a good job of representing spatial dimensions through photography and design, but ultimately it’s the reader’s mind that defines the dimensionality of the magazine. Years ago, discussing Memento with a journalist, I revealed that as a left-hander I tend to leaf through magazines back to front, and we agreed this might go some way toward explaining Memento‘s backward structure. I resisted the urge to try to give you my experience of magazines by reversing the entire issue, opting instead to encourage the WIRED staff in their fool’s errand of attempting to represent five dimensions in the very substance of the magazine. Why five? Because if we can get our heads around the idea that time is just a fourth dimension, no more noble or abstract than the other three, then the fifth dimension reveals itself as the perch we have to climb onto to be able to actually view the four dimensions we know. A massive leap, but a leap we can almost conceive of.

It feels like it should be possible, which lets us imagine a complete understanding of our four-dimensional existence rendered instantly by our new, higher-dimensional perspective. Many of the people and ideas springing from these pages push so hard in this direction (a direction we know exists but cannot visualize) that the limits of our world start to seem a tiny bit more porous than they did.