Talk:Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)

Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) has been listed as one of the Language and literature good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
October 10, 2008	Good article nominee	Listed
December 3, 2008	Peer review	Reviewed

Current status: Good article

Books

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Electronic literature

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Citation reservoir

In which the author deposits morsels of verifiable coverage. Skomorokh 02:10, 2 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

By opting to show the contents of this list, you irrevocably pledge to work slavishly to integrate these references into the article. You have been warned!

Center for Book Arts Presents an Exhibition of Agrippa (a Book of the Dead): A Collaborative Artist's Book by William Gibson and Dennis Ashbaugh ; on View April 24-June 19, 1993. By Brian Hannon, William Gibson, Dennis Ashbaugh. Published by Center for Book Arts, 1993.
Schwenger, Peter (1995). "Agrippa, or, The Apocalyptic Book". In Dellamora, Richard (ed.). Postmodern Apocalypse. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. pp. 277–278. ISBN 0812215583. In a gibe at the art world's commercialism, publisher Kevin Begos Jr. suggested to Ashbaugh that "what we should do is put out an art book on computer that vanishes (personal communication). Ashbaugh took him seriously, took him further; Gibson was recruited shortly after.
Rosenheim, Shawn (1997). The Cryptographic Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 250. ISBN 0801853311. Agrippa contains engravings by artist Dennis Ashbaugh and an on-disk semiautographical poem by William Gibson…
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. (2002). Burns, Edward (ed.). "Textual Studies and First Generation Electronic Objects". Text: an Interdisciplinary Annual of Textual Studies. 14. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press: 15–16. ISBN 0472112724. Gibson's text is a mediation on time, memory and family, refracted through the prism of an old photograph album that also functions as the conceit for Ashbaugh's accompanying artist's book. The electronic Agrippa's principal notoriety, however, stems from the fact that its textual data file is programmed to erase itself after it is read through to completion a single time. Likewise, the pages of the artist's book are treated with photosensitive chemicals that cause the words and images printed on them to gradually fade from view as soon as the book is opened and exposed to light.
Lunenfeld, Peter (2001). Snap to Grid. Cambridge: MIT. p. 46. ISBN 0262621584. One of the most evocative hypertexts published in the 1990s was Agrippa: A Book of the Dead. Agrippa was a collaborative project among book publisher Kevin Begos, artist Dennis Ashbaugh, and author William Gibson, best known as the author of the previously mentioned Neuromancer, the most influential cyberpunk science-fiction novel. Agrippa, however, is something quite distinct. Described as "a black box recovered from some unspecified disaster," Agrippa opens to reveal charred-edged pages, covered with repeated letter patterns
Laura Lambert, Chris Woodford, Hilary W. Poole, Christos J.P. Moschovitis, ed. (2005). "William Gibson (1948–)". The Internet: A Historical Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. pp. p.13. ISBN 1851096590. Hackers needed only three days to crack the encryption code — copies of "Agrippa" soon began circulating on the Internet and, since Gibson did not use email, fans sent hacked copies of the poem to his fax machine. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
Abbott, Chris (2001). Information Communications Technology. New York: Routledge/Falmer. pp. p.91. ISBN 0750709510. Agrippa was extremely influential. It was important both for its effect on the artistic community, who began to see the potential of electronic media, and for the extent to which it entered public consciousness. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
Barber, John (2001). New Worlds, New Words. Cresskill: Hampton Press. pp. p.176. ISBN 1572733330. William Gibson, inventor of the term cyberspace, published, in 1992, Agrippa, a book that self-destructed as it was read. He was assisted by Kevin Begos, a publisher of museum-quality manuscripts, and Dennis Ashbaugh, an artist… {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
Johnston, John (1998). Information Multiplicity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. p.255. ISBN 0801857058. What makes Agrippa important, then, is not only its foregrounding of mediality in an assemblage of texts but also that media in this work are explicitly as passageways to the realm of the dead. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
Walker, Janice (1998). The Columbia Guide to Online Style. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. p. 187. ISBN 0231107889. The link Agrippa: A Book of the Dead originally pointed to http://www.astro.utoronto.ca/~reid/htmldocs/agrippa.html, the text of a "book" by William Gibson and artist Dennis Ashbaugh that, although disguised as a mild-mannered traditional text, ceases to exist upon being read. This book, then, is an example of the ephemerality of all text, both traditional print and hypertext. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help); External link in |quote= (help)
"AGRIPPA: (a book of the dead)". Center for Book Arts. Retrieved 2008-08-03. The deluxe edition of AGRIPPA was set in Monotype Gill Sans at Golgonooza Letter Foundry, and printed on Rives heavyweight text by the Sun Hill Press and by Kevin Begos Jr. The etchings were made by the artist and editioned by Peter Pettingill on Fabriano Tiepolo paper. The book was handsewn and bound in linen by Karl Foulkes. The housing was designed by the artist, and the encryption code used to destroy the story was created by (BRASH), with help from several other individuals who will go unnamed. The regular edition of AGRIPPA was also set in Monotype Gill Sans, but in a single column page format. It was printed by the Sun Hill Press on Mohawk Superfine text and the reproduction of the etchings were printed on a Canon laser printer. The book was Smythe sewn at Spectrum Bindery and is enclosed in a clamshell box. Published by Kevin Begos, Jr.
Kraus, Chris (2004). Video Green : Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). pp. p.15. ISBN 1584350229. Dennis Ashbaugh at The Kitchen in New York explored this confluence of objecthood and vanishment in slightly different terms. Simulcast to several cities, Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) (1992) was the public reading of a Gibson text inscribed by… {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
Liu, Alan (2004). The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. p. ISBN 0226486990. Now we are ready for Agrippa (A Book of the Dead). Agrippa, to start with, is a book whose physically distressed form enacts Gibson's distinctive patina…
Aarseth, Espen (1997). Cybertext. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. p. 46. ISBN 0801855799. In general, nonlinear text types perform more effectively on a computer system than on paper, but the same can be said of texts whose linear integrity must not be compromised, such as William Gibson's Agrippa (Gibson 1992)… {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
Landow, George (1994). Hyper/Text/Theory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. p. 62. ISBN 0801848377. Since I developed mine in 1991, a new type has appeared, invented by the science fiction author William Gibson. His Agrippa: A Book of the Dead (1992) displays its script at a strict scrolling space on the screen and then encrypts it by a technique cryptically known as RSA… {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
Cavallaro, Dani (2000). Cyberpunk and Cyberculture. London: Athlone Press. pp. p. 198–199. ISBN 0485004127. Gibson's Gothic aesthetic is epitomized by Agrippa: A Book of the Dead, a text that addresses the issues of loss, death and mourning…The project was inspired by Gibson's discovery of an album belonging to his dad, who died when the author was little. The images contained in the album became a means of reconstituting childhood memories and of singling them out from the adult's body of accumulated recollections… {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
Marcus, Laura (2004). The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. p.794. ISBN 0521820774. This was a mournful text, written after his father's death, focusing on the faded images of a family photograph album to structure fragile memories. Digitisation allowed form to follow content: the reader could only read the text once, because as it scrolled up the screen, it also erased itself. The play with ephemeral human memory used the digital format inventively, although 'Agrippa' equally invited… {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
- Marcus, Laura (2004). The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. p.802. ISBN 0521820774. Gibson's 'Agrippa' lovingly works over the decaying materiality of the photograph album put together by his father, memories organised around 'the revealed grace / of the mechanism' - whether the camera, his father's gun, an umbrella, or the changing technologies of a small Canadian town. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
Hodge, James J. "Bibliographic Description of Agrippa". The Agrippa Files. University of Santa Barbara, California. Retrieved 2008-08-05.
Killheffer, Robert (September 6 1993). "Publishers Weekly Interviews — William Gibson". Publishers Weekly. Reed Business Information. Retrieved 2008-08-05. Published in a very expensive limited edition, Agrippa caused fierce argument in the art world and also among museums and libraries. The text's disappearing act challenged ideas about the permanence of art and literature, and raised serious problems for archivists interested in preserving it for future generations {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. (June 04, 2005). "Ashbaugh and Gibson's AGRIPPA: A Description of the Book Based Upon My Examination of the NYPL Copy". MGK. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
Moulthrop, Stuart (1993). "Deuteronomy Comix". Postmodern Culture. 3 (2). Retrieved 2008-11-17. Of course, writing in an electronic mode does not necessarily promote utopian or post-hierarchical forms of disourse. Consider William Gibson's recent foray into digital composition, his conceptual artwork Agrippa. Far from opening up to permutation, this text actually erases itself after a single reading, locking the reader out of its imaginary space (see Quittner). As Joyce points out, even multiple fictions as we now know them usually consist of "exploratory" texts in which the range of variation is strictly limited, hence at some level deceptive. So perhaps the hypertextual enterprise must also go where everyone has gone before, namely to a Disneyverse of delusive referendum where every apparent difference traces back to some determinist engine. Yet as Henry Jenkins has shown, there are signs even in non-interactive contexts that a more "participatory" cultural front may be emerging. Ambiguous or polysemic forms like the graphic novel (as in Moore and Sienkiewicz's abortive Big Numbers) imply a fraying or complication of traditional, monolinear narrative. Forms like hypertext suggest that the language virus may be capable of even more radical outbreaks. For if our narrative forms embrace inconsistencies and contradictions, then they are no longer adequate defenses against memetic invasion. If the protocols of the imaginary world advertise their own contingency, then what is to stop someone not authorized by the Association for Cosmological Machinery from further interventions--which are in fact facilitated by the ease of copying and modification inherent in electronic media? {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

existance of books

What is this supposed to mean?

"there remains doubt as to whether any books were actually made"

it comes at the end of a paragraph listing libraries where copies of the book can be found. Uucp (talk) 22:12, 11 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Encryption is now cracked, information available

Given that I was part of the process behind cracking the encryption (hosted the contest), it would be preferable if someone else moved the pertinent details from http://www.crackingagrippa.net/submissions-toc.html to the article. The cryptography is now fully cracked and fully understood. --Quinn d (talk) 00:21, 24 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I'll do what I can, but you're in the best position to explain things clearly. Just keep WP:NPOV and WP:COI#suggestions in mind, which you obviously have done already. If in doubt, write out what you'd like to add/change here, and someone else can then copy it into the article if they agree that it's acceptable (or tweak as needed). -- Quiddity (talk) 01:52, 24 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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External links modified

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What does the following mean?

"Gibson's text focused on the ethereal, human-owed nature of memories retained over the passage of time"?

More specifically, what is, "the ethereal, human-owed nature of memories retained over the passage of time"?

And, what is, "the ethereal, human-owed nature of memories"?

And, what is, "ethereal, human-owed nature"?

I don't think the sentence stands up to scrutiny or actually makes sense. Perhaps I'm missing something Can someone either explain or write a meaningful replacement or delete the sentence altogether?

I suspect that the sentence might have been included as a joke at Wikipedia's expense. If so, it has succeeded. 86.180.11.217 (talk) 23:59, 6 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]