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

Good art

[smoker2]

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.

Re:Good art

[Omestes]

Though creating something and destroying is rather a cliche. How many artists have painted a picture, then dowsed it in gasoline and destroyed it forever immediately after? Or, like Duchamp, made intentionally made installations of materials that decay to add the aspect of time and temporariness to them.

This isn't to rain on anyones parade, or say the idea isn't valid. Being that it is a common theme among modern arts, it surely represents something in society, some important concept.

I was tempted to write this post, then click "cancel" to prove my point.

Re:Que?

[Magada]

Old enough to get it, are you? Hrm. haven't gone far enough in your thinking though. The text is not destroyed after reading. It is encrypted. It's the digital equivalent of locking something away and then throwing the key into the sea.

It was probably Gibson's way of saying he's trying to forget whatever made him make Agrippa in the first place. I also think he did it knowing full well that the text will be recovered. Dunno what this means in the context of the work (it's not a poem, although it contains a poem).

At this point, you're probably pondering if Gibson really gave that much thought to what was essentially a side-project for him. He did. He's careful like that.

Re:Que?

[je ne sais quoi]

At this point, you're probably pondering if Gibson really gave that much thought to what was essentially a side-project for him. He did. He's careful like that.

To this day I am still amazed at how prescient he was in Neuromancer. The details -- all wrong, killing each other over a few megs of RAM, the virtual reality helmet, yadda yadda. The real interesting part is the atmosphere, e.g., at one point they go to a site that where people have been scrawling passwords for various high profile computers everwhere, where Gibson comments that a few days later the passwords would be covered up, but the site would spring up somewhere else, it sounds just like the game of whack-a-mole that the content distributors play with the pirates. Pirate bay gets shut down? Mirrors spring up in three different countries. Or the idea of mobs playing a heavy influence in the workings of the internet underworld, where now a lot of the botnets seem to be controlled by mobs, as well as the myriad small-fry scammers, cheats, etc. who are always willing to hack your credit to make a few bucks.

Buhddist sand art

[dazedNconfuzed]

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."

Re:pay attention

[Fnord666]

Interesting iinterpretation, but it is contradicted by William Gibson's own blog post about Agrippa. In that post Gibson says:

Ashbaugh's design eventually included a supposedly self-devouring floppy-disk intended to display the text only once, then eat itself. Today, there seems to be some doubt as to whether any of these curious objects were ever actually constructed. I certainly don't have one myself.

From this I would have to conclude that Gibson wasn't involved in the whole "one chance" aspect of the work.