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William Gibson's AGRIPPA Recovered and Revealed
Bud Cook writes "While the text of William Gibson's elusive electronic poem AGRIPPA is widely posted around the Web, it has not been seen in its original incarnation — custom-built software designed to scroll the poem through a single play before encrypting each line with an RSA algorithm — since 1992. Today is the 16th anniversary, to the day, of the poem's initial release. A team of scholars at the University of Maryland and UC Santa Barbara used forensic computing to restore the code from an original diskette loaned by a collector and have placed video of the complete 'run,' as well as never-before-seen footage from the night of AGRIPPA's public debut in 1992, up on a Web site called the Agrippa Files. There's also a detailed essay documenting the forensic process, plus a mess of stills, screenshots, and a copy of the disk image itself."
We finally found the Epitaph of the Twilight?!
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
Could this be the first DRM? It's much more draconian than the 3 activations and buy a new game from EA.
...it's quite heartbreaking to see a work that intentionally removed itself from your grasp. It's quite the change from people who expect immortality simply for having cameras pointed at them or semi-literate fiction aimed at people who think MTV is the height of culture.
site already down
Does this mean that this post will erase itself after initial posting?
I know this is art, but what's the big deal. So a poem scrolls up a screen and dies. Talk about read once approach to processing.
Is this a big deal because it got marketed well, it had big names associated with it? I feel like I did when I walked through the Delaware Arts museum, stopped to look at a canvas with colored straight lines and thought...huh? I love art, I love the idea of creativity (which is why I love programming), but Agrippa? it is a 5th grade programming project or a hackers toss off. The polygon Mona Lisa was a better article.
So for the first and maybe last time burn some karma and say "nothing to see here, move along please".
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
"The 2008 incarnation of the poem consists of custom-built software that, when /. readers try to read the poem, it is encrypted in a weird Web-based algorithm that transforms the text into a message saying 'Error establishing a database connection'.
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
I have to say the book is beautifully put together - a real work of art.
But I have read the poem (a copy of it is on Gibson's website) isn't it a bit pretentious?
However as a piece of art it is an interesting idea (minus the poem).
...but I know what I like."
Good art requires the viewer to think. What is more indicative of the state of social consumerism and the temporary nature of anything, than a document that allows precisely one viewing then removes itself from the page. Not to mention the indirect commentary on the transitory nature of language as a communication mechanism. It doesn't matter what the theme of the poem was, the art was the action of allowing one reading then visibly degrading the communication to the point where it was no longer communicating anything other than loss. What is poetic about a sunset ? The scientific fact that the sun is merely being hidden by the rotation of the earth ? Or the mental notion of the day coming to an end, time passing, out with the old, everything dies, sadness, hope etc. ?
I would see Gibsons work as deliberately demonstrating the sadness of work being published, read, then being removed from view and denying future readings. Very nice work considering the date it was first published, and our current problems with DRM and copyright.
an alternative interpretation is that in a world that Gibson envisioned where data is fleeting and we are deluged with it, there are times when you need to pay attention.
This poem, for all intents and purposes self destructs after the first reading. Therefore, you should pay attention the first time--you won't get another chance.
That was, I think, the intent. Whether he could have written a program that would have enforced that intent better is beside the point (apparently it was "broken"). For the average reader, you'd get one shot.
It's still a compelling thought.
This is only news if your opponent has studied his Agrippa.... which I have.
That's a major factor in Buhddist/Nepalese sand art (proper name escapes me): a great deal of effort goes into making an intricate work of art, only to have it brushed away a few days later.
From the Japanese samurai classic text Hagakure: "In the Kamigata area, they have a sort of tiered lunchbox they use for a single day when flower viewing. Upon returning, they throw them away, trampling them underfoot. The end is important in all things."
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
AGRIPPA will achieve conscience just by sheer slashdotting.
NO SIG
I found some CDs with old DOS games that I thought were lost.
A friend of mine that has been collecting them since the late 80's once burned me a copy. CD Writer it was burned on was a powerful 2X Traxdata SCSI drive.
And I have kept them safe all these years, but one of them still got lost. Probably borrowed to someone who forgot to return it.
BUT...
Since he has recently decided to make another backup on a DVD, he gave me his original CDs. Didn't have the heart to throw them away.
And what do you know - his copy of the CD I was missing is just fine and readable despite being scratched a bit.
And to top it off - he lost his DVD he made the copy to.
And called me today to ask if I can make him a copy.
He also completely forgot he gave me his originals.
I wonder... Had I submitted this a story, would 39 guys find THIS story as interesting as the story about how they managed to copy a floppy?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I don't understand why there are so many bigoted articles on this web site. You guys are a bunch of racist. Why the hell are you all throwing around racist slurs like "black holes?" Good grief. Why can't we simply refer to them as "luminescence-challenged singularities" or something else which isn't so racist? You've offended my hyper-sensitive politically-correct psyche!
Now excuse me while I go emo and sulk for a bit.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I love art
Thanks for clarifying that.
Lookit, I'm no expert on the topic, but as I recall the whole thing from when it debuted in '92, the use of the self-scrolling, self-encrypting gimmick was Gibson's toe-dip into a whole new creative medium.
The poem was about his mother, memories for whom were very dim, ephemeral even. Gibson selected this new "self-destructing" medium as a metaphor, to facilitate the poetry: Once you had read the poem, you could not go back and re-visit it, you had to rely upon your memory only -- as did the poem's writer, creating it.
Don't compare it to what Da Vinci did with fine art, compare it to what Ernie Kovaks did with the new medium of television. Now, you watch Kovaks' schtick with switchers today, and it all seems goofy and trite -- but back then it was obviously well though-out, never before seen, and geeky as hell.
Kinda like "Agrippa."
call the poweroff function, not shutoff. and while you're at it you might as well write that instruction into the jump table address of the debugger.
then, when the power goes off, the connection between the data and resource forks is broken.
I remember working on this for a bit. One reason it was a bit more difficult than normal to crack open is we replaced all the appropriate 68k exception vectors with RTEs, so you couldn't hop into Macsbug or do an NMI and disassemble anything.
Once multifinder came out that method died, because the exception vectors were on a per-process basis. You could just break into another app and dump the RAM.
I vaguely remember that it was a fun and interesting idea back in the day. Plus, it was william gibson, and his aura was much stronger back then.
How dare you preserve something That Must Die!
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
FROM SITE:
Due to overwhelming demand, The Agrippa Files site has been moved to a new server. There may be some delay as the DNS change propagates. Please try again in a few hours.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
-- The Agrippa Files Web Hosting Service
The Digital Sorceress
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/SF-Archives/Misc/Agrippa
Most printer paper these days is essentially throwaway stuff, like much of the rest of our society.
Archival paper is special. Not only is it acid-free, but it is made with a base reserve of alkaline to resist later exposure to acid in the environment. It also has a different composition, most notably low amounts of lignin (from wood pulp). Basic stuff should last 100 years, good stuff maybe 500 years, the best maybe 1,000.
I bet your Bible is yellowed and the paper is slightly brittle. I have one like that. That's the acid in the paper causing the brittleness and the lignin causing the yellowing. It will continue to deteriorate unless it's very expensively restored.
People worry about the permanence of information in the computer revolution. Before that was the problem of permanence of information in the revolution of cheap wood-based paper. Before that things were usually written on parchment/vellum, which lasts effectively forever if kept in moderate storage conditions.
LOL, I wanted to see this William Gibson Demo for the Mac so bad I found a MAC emulator for the PC to run it on. This C#*% doesn't work!
For those of you involved with this project who want to correctly analyze that 800k diskette, you need a Catweasel card. This is an FPGA-based floppy controller which can be set to read just about any floppy that cannot be read by the standard PC controller chip. Yes, there are Linux drivers available.