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William Gibson's AGRIPPA Recovered and Revealed

Posted by kdawson on from the gripping-hand dept.

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."

6 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. Harold AI? by PakProtector · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We finally found the Epitaph of the Twilight?!

    --

    Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
    man: no entry for woman in the manual.
    "Qua!?"

  2. In a world of art that's mostly disposable... by The+Ultimate+Fartkno · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...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.

    1. Re:In a world of art that's mostly disposable... by smoker2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      - 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.

  3. pay attention by hal9000(jr) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Could this be.. by Lisandro · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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...

  5. Re:Good art by fracai · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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".

    --
    -- i am jack's amusing sig file