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.

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."