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."

Comments

Harold AI?

[PakProtector]

We finally found the Epitaph of the Twilight?!

In a world of art that's mostly disposable...

[The Ultimate Fartkno]

...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.

Re:In a world of art that's mostly disposable...

[smoker2]

- 1 Missing the point.

The whole point of this was to show you it disappearing. End of. No more. Done.

Putting into a medium designed for longevity would be precisely against the intention of the work. How do you demonstrate the effect of a highly mobile medium on literature if you protect against that effect ? Do you (can you) see DRM in action through the medium of paper ? It is impossible because you can always go back a page - not so with this. This is ice sculpture for the modern age.

Re:In a world of art that's mostly disposable...

[xouumalperxe]

Modern mass produced paper is comparatively low quality and has a much higher acid content than older paper, thus aging much, much worse, to the point where early 20th century books are much worse off than much older ones (I assume modern high-end paper has better durability than that though, and old paper is, by definition, the high-end stuff because that's all there was). Not sure how the printer ink itself ages.

Yawn

[Bucc5062]

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".

Re:Yawn

[Abcd1234]

Actually, interestingly enough, RSA is about as simple a cryptosystem as they come (next to OTP, that is). Really. The complexity is actually in the key generation (and even that is pretty simple once you've got a couple large primes). But once you have them, the actual encryption algorithm is dead simple.

'course, that's not to say it ain't still an impressive accomplishment. But it's no DES implementation. :)

Re:Yawn

[HTH NE1]

RSA encryption: c = m^e mod n.

It really is something a 5th grader could write. The security is in the selection of e and n (and d, for decryption).

Assuming of course you wanted to decrypt it. That doesn't seem to be part of the design in this case.

Que?

[mrpacmanjel]

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).

Re:Could this be..

[gEvil (beta)]

And apparently just as ineffective.

Considering it took 16 years for it to become widely available in its original form, I'm not sure I'd exactly call that ineffective.

pay attention

[hal9000(jr)]

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.

Re:Could this be..

[Lisandro]

Considering it took 16 years for it to become widely available in its original form, I'm not sure I'd exactly call that ineffective.

Maybe it's just no one cared too much about it...

Re:Good art

[fracai]

I think the real trick is to display a work of art, while concealing said art, while also not allowing the act of concealing to turn into art itself. It seems to me that many would consider the "performance" of concealing the poem a work of art in itself.

I also have a hard time stating that "bad art" is "not art".
And I struggle over whether "not art" can be "accidental art".

Gibson Channeling Kovacs

[RobotRunAmok]

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."