Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)

Book by William Gibson

Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) is a work of art created by science fiction novelist William Gibson, artist Dennis Ashbaugh and publisher Kevin Begos Jr. in 1992. The work consists of a 300 line semi autobiographical electronic poem by Gibson, embedded in an artist's book by Ashbaugh. The work is recognised as an early example of electronic literature.

The impetus for the initiation of the project was Kevin Begos Jr., a publisher of museum quality manuscripts motivated by disregard for the commercialism of the art world, who suggested to abstract painter Dennis Ashbaugh that they "put out an art book on computer that vanishes". Ashbaugh—who despite his "heavy art world resume" was bored with the abstract impressionist paintings he was doing—took the suggestion seriously, and developed it further. A few years beforehand, Ashbaugh had written a fan letter to cyberpunk novelist William Gibson, whose oeuvre he had admired, and the pair had struck up a telephone friendship. The project manifested as a poem written by Gibson incorporated into an artist's book created by Ashbaugh; as such it was as much a work of collaborative conceptual art as poetry. Ashbaugh was gleeful at the dilemma this would pose to librarians: in order to register the copyright of the book, he had to send two copies to the United States Library of Congress, who, in order to classify it had to read it, and in the process, necessarily had to destroy it. The work was premiered on December 9, 1992, at The Kitchen, an art space in Chelsea in New York City. The performance—known as "The Transmission"—consisted of the public reading of the poem by composer and musician Robert Ashley, recorded and simultaneously transmitted to several other cities. neither this disk nor the diskettes embedded in the artist's book were ever actually hacked in any strict sense. Academic researcher Matthew Kirschenbaum has reported that a pirated text of the poem was released the next day on MindVox, "an edgy New York City based electronic bulletin board". (derived from an original diskette loaned by a collector) and an hour's worth of "bootleg" footage shot covertly at the Americas Society (the source of the text that was posted on MindVox).

Since its debut in 1992, the mystery of Agrippa remained hidden for 20 years. Although many had tried to hack the code and decrypt the program, the uncompiled source code was lost long ago. Alan Liu and his team at "The Agrippa Files" created an extensive website with tools and resources to crack the Agrippa Code. They collaborated with Matthew Kirschenbaum at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and the Digital Forensics Lab, and Quinn DuPont, a PhD student of cryptography from the University of Toronto, in calling for the aid of cryptographers to figure out how the program works by creating "Cracking the Agrippa Code: The Challenge", which enlisted participants to solve the intentional scrambling of the poem in exchange for prizes. The code was successfully cracked by Robert Xiao in late July 2012. or a similar tool after the Agrippa program has been loaded. The executable code could be reverse engineered. The encryption itself due to the block cipher exhibited a regular pattern due to repeated text in the original plaintext. The LZW compression itself does not hide the letter frequencies. The scramble display has exactly the same letter frequencies as the underlying plaintext.

quote box|quote=Agrippa comes in a rough hewn black box adorned with a blinking green light and an LCD readout that flickers with an endless stream of decoded DNA. The top opens like a laptop computer, revealing a hologram of a circuit board. Inside is a battered volume, the pages of which are antique rag paper, bound and singed by hand.|align=right|bgcolor= #c6dbf7|
width=30%|source=Gavin Edwards, Details, June 1992. The final 60 pages of the book were then fused together, with a hollowed out section cut into the centre, containing the self erasing diskette on which the text of Gibson's poem was encrypted. with the reproduction of the etchings printed on a Canon laser printer. The edition was then Smythe sewn at Spectrum Bindery and enclosed in a solander box. Fewer than 95 deluxe editions of Agrippa are extant, although the exact number is unknown and is the source of considerable mystery. The Victoria and Albert Museum possesses a deluxe edition, numbered 4 of 10. The Victoria and Albert Museum's copy was first exhibited in a display entitled The Book and Beyond, held in the Museum's 20th Century Gallery from April to October 1995. The same copy was subsequently also included in a V&A exhibition entitled Digital Pioneers, from 2009 to 2010. Both V&A shows were curated by Douglas Dodds. Another copy of the book was exhibited in the 2003–2004 exhibition Ninety from the Nineties at the New York Public Library. Gibson at one point claimed never to have seen a copy of the printed book, spurring speculation that no copies had actually been made. Many copies have since been documented, and Gibson's signature was noted on copies held by the New York Public Library and the V&A.

The construction of the book and the subject matter of the poem within it share a metaphorical connection in the decay of memory. In this sense, it instantiates the ephemeral nature of all text.

The poem is a detailed description of several objects, including a photo album and the camera that took the pictures in it, and is essentially about the nostalgia that the speaker, presumably Gibson himself, feels towards the details of his family's history: the painstaking descriptions of the houses they lived in, the cars they drove, and even their pets. blockquote|text=It starts around 1919 and moves up to today, or possibly beyond. If it works, it makes the reader uncomfortably aware of how much we tend to accept the contemporary media version of the past. You can see it in Westerns, the way the 'mise en scene' and the collars on cowboys change through time. It's never really the past; it's always a version of your own time.|sign=Gibson|source=as quoted in Details, June 1992.

The poem contains a motif of "the mechanism", described as "Forever / Dividing that from this", and which can take the form of the camera or of the ancient gun that misfires in the speaker's hands. Technology, "the mechanism", is the agent of memory,

The poem is, then, not merely about memory, but how memories are formed from subjective experience, and how those memories compare to mechanically reproduced recordings. In the poem, "the mechanism" is strongly associated with recording, which can replace subjective experience. Insomuch as memories constitute our identities, "the mechanism" thus represents the destruction of the self via recordings. Hence both cameras, as devices of recording, and guns, as instruments of destruction, are part of the same mechanism—dividing that (memory, identity, life) from this (recordings, anonymity, death).

Agrippa was extremely influential—as a sigil for the artistic community to appreciate the potential of electronic media—for the extent to which it entered public consciousness. It caused a fierce controversy in the art world, among museums and among libraries. It challenged established notions of permanence of art and literature, and, as Ashbaugh intended,

Agrippa was particularly well received by critics, with digital media theorist Peter Lunenfeld describing it in 2001 as "one of the most evocative hypertexts published in the 1990s". Professor of English literature John Johnson has claimed that the importance of Agrippa stems not only from its "foregrounding of mediality in an assemblage of texts", but also from the fact that "media in this work are explicitly as passageways to the realm of the dead". English Professor Raymond Malewitz argues that "the poem's stanzas form a metaphorical DNA fingerprint that reveals Gibson's life to be, paradoxically, a novel repetition of his father's and grandfather's lives." The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century English Literature, which described the poem as "a mournful text", praised Agrippa'''s inventive use of digital format. In a lecture at the exhibition of Agrippa at the Center for Book Arts in New York City, semiotician Marshall Blonsky of New York University drew an allusion between the project and the work of two French literary figures—philosopher Maurice Blanchot (author of "The Absence of the Book"), and poet Stéphane Mallarmé, a 19th century forerunner of semiotics and deconstruction. In response to Blonsky's analysis that "[t]he collaborators in Agrippa'' are responding to a historical condition of language, a modern skepticism about it", Gibson disparagingly commented "Honest to God, these academics who think it's all some sort of big time French philosophy—that's a scam. Those guys worship Jerry Lewis, they get our pop culture all wrong."