Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)

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.^[1][2][3][4] The work consists of a 300-line semi-autobiographical electronic poem by Gibson, embedded in an artist's book by Ashbaugh.^[5] Gibson's text focused on the ethereal, human-owed nature of memories retained over the passage of time (the title referred to a Kodak photo album from which the text's memories are taken). Its principal notoriety arose from the fact that the poem, stored on a 3.5" floppy disk, was programmed to encrypt itself after a single use; similarly, the pages of the artist's book were treated with photosensitive chemicals, effecting the gradual fading of the words and images from the book's first exposure to light.^[5] The work is recognised as an early example of electronic literature.

Origin and concept

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,^[6] who suggested to abstract painter Dennis Ashbaugh that they "put out an art book on computer that vanishes".^[7] 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.^[7][8]

A few years beforehand, Ashbaugh had written a

Some people have said that they think this is a scam or pure hype … [m]aybe fun, maybe interesting, but still a scam. But Gibson thinks of it as becoming a memory, which he believes is more real than anything you can actually see.

— Kevin Begos Jr., End Notes, [9]

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.^[10] Gibson stated that Ashbaugh's design "eventually included a supposedly self-devouring floppy-disk intended to display the text only once, then eat itself."^[11][12]

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.^[8] The creators had initially intended to infect the disks with a computer virus, but declined to after considering the potential damage to the computer systems of innocents.^[8]

Release and replication

OK, sit down and pay attention. We're only going to say this once.

— William Gibson,

National Public Radio, December 9, 1992.^[13]

Agrippa owes its transmission and continuing availability to a complex network of individuals, communities, ideologies, markets, technologies, and motives. Only in the most heroic reading of the events … is Agrippa saved for posterity solely by virtue of the knight Templar. … Today, the 404 File Not Found messages that Web browsing readers of Agrippa inevitably encounter … are more than just false leads; they are latent affirmations of the work's original act of erasure that allow the text to stage anew all of its essential points about artifacts, memory, and technology. "Because the struggle for the text is the text."

— Kirschenbaum, Matthew G., "Hacking 'Agrippa': The Source of the Online Text", The Agrippa Files.[20]

On December 9, 2008 (the sixteenth anniversary of the original Transmission), "The Agrippa Files", working with a scholarly team at the University of Maryland, released an emulated run of the entire poem^[21] (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).^[22]

Cryptography

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"^[23] 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",^[18] which enlisted participants to solve the intentional scrambling of the poem in exchange for prizes.^[24] The code was successfully cracked by Robert Xiao in late July 2012.^[18]

There is no encryption algorithm present in the Agrippa binary; consequently, the visual encryption effect that displays when the poem has finished is a ruse. The visual effect is the result of running the decrypted ciphertext (in memory) through the re-purposed bit-scrambling decryption algorithm, and then abandoning the text in memory. Only the fake genetic code is written back to disk.^[18]

The encryption resembles the

In order to prevent a second running of the program it corrupts itself when run. The program simply overwrites itself with a 6000 byte long

Weakness

• A memory dump of Mini vMac can be obtained with Linux ckpt^[25] 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.

Content and editions

The book was published in 1992 in two

The construction of the book and the subject matter of the poem within it share a metaphorical connection in the decay of memory.^[35][36] In this light, critic Peter Schwenger asserts that Agrippa can be understood as organized by two ideas: the death of Gibson's father, and the disappearance or absence of the book itself.^[37] In this sense, it instantiates the ephemeral nature of all text.^[38]

Theme and form

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.

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.

— Gibson, as quoted in Details, June 1992.^[8]

In its original form, the text of the poem was supposed to fade from the page and, in Gibson's own words, "eat itself" off of the diskette enclosed with the book. The reader would, then, be left with only the memory of the text, much like the speaker is left with only the memory of his home town and his family after moving to Canada from South Carolina, in the course of the poem (as Gibson himself did during the Vietnam War).^[39]

"The mechanism"

The poem contains a motif of "the mechanism", described as "Forever / Dividing that from this",^[40] and which can take the form of the camera or of the ancient gun that misfires in the speaker's hands.^[41][42] Technology, "the mechanism", is the agent of memory,^[41] which transforms subjective experience into allegedly objective records (photography). It is also the agent of life and death, one moment dispensing lethal bullets, but also likened to the life-giving qualities of sex. Shooting the gun is "[l]ike the first time you put your mouth / on a woman".^[43]

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

Agrippa was particularly well received by critics,[46] with digital media theorist Peter Lunenfeld describing it in 2001 as "one of the most evocative hypertexts published in the 1990s".^[1] 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".^[47] 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."^[48] The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, which described the poem as "a mournful text", praised Agrippa's inventive use of digital format.^[42] However, academic Joseph Tabbi remarked in a 2008 paper that Agrippa was among those works that are "canonized before they have been read, resisted, and reconsidered among fellow authors within an institutional environment that persists in time and finds outlets in many media".^[10]

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.^[2] 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."^[2]

Footnotes