An Online Archive of Agrippa (a book of the dead)


Agrippa the book contains a diskette buried in a hollowed-out cavity. When played in a 1992-era Mac computer, the diskette scrolls a 305-line poem by William Gibson unstoppably up the screen once, then encrypts it and makes it disappear. 

"Agrippa (a book of the dead) appeared in 1992 as a collaboration between artist Dennis Ashbaugh, author William Gibson, and publisher Kevin Begos, Jr. The Agrippa Files is a scholarly site that presents selected pages from the original art book; a unique archive of materials dating from the book’s creation and early reception; a simulation of what the book’s intended “fading images” might have looked like; a video of the 1992 “transmission” of the work; a “virtual lightbox” for comparing and studying pages; full-text essays by scholars; an annotated bibliography of scholarship, press coverage, interviews, and other material; a detailed bibliographic description of the book; and a discussion forum."   

"The Disk and Its Code
Documents and code related to the functioning of the Mac diskette containing William Gibson’s poem in Agrippa. The diskette contained a custom-built program that rendered the poem as black text on white background scrolling up the screen at an unstoppable pace, and also a custom-built encryption program that then made the poem disappear after it had been seen once. In these documents, the programmer’s name and signature have been blacked out due to his wish (according to Agrippa’s publisher) to remain anonymous."

http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu/  

Posted: Dienstag - Dezember 13, 2005 at 11:28 vorm.          

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