Review of Ashbaugh exhibit roughly contemporaneous to the release of Agrippa, including valuable descriptions of his paintings.

“One of a large group of artists dazzled by the direction and social implications of the new sciences, Ashbaugh seems particularly obsessed with electronic network systems and genetic engineering, with computer and biological viruses which can rapidly invade and alter a system or cell and with the post-Orwellian world described by William Gibson in his 1984 high-tech fantasia, Neuromancer, the cyberpunk classic that took us from hyper-reality to virtual reality.
      Long an abstract painter, Ashbaugh situates his new work somewhere between abstraction and representation. Thematically, he divides the show into DNA ‘portraits’ and ‘viruses’. Some of these portraits consist of short, intermittent strokes of black paint, at times edged in green, red or yellow, cradling a touch of color within, and stacked vertically in simulation of chromosomal banding.”

Section 7 of this FAQ discusses Agrippa and includes excerpts from press coverage of the work at the time.

“Gibson has reportedly said that he hopes (encourages) the book will be spread through the net. Supposedly it will be released into the net (uploaded only once, apparently). The problem is that the encryption or virus must be defeated.

Apparently the only people on the net to have seen a copy of Agrippa are Tom Maddox (he quotes it in his sig) and Bruce Sterling. However, there was talk a while ago from Loyd Blankenship who was working to secure a copy. The latest rumor is that it will show up on MindVox.”

Short note accompanied by photos of William Gibson and of the first prototype for the Agrippa book.

[Full text of note; original in all italics:]

At six feet five and 150 pounds, William Gibson is the beanstalk giant of cyberpunk whose novels have transformed the sci-fi scene. Dennis Ashbaugh has weighed in on the cyber-scale with his massive replicas of DNA codes and computer viruses. After meeting last year, the Vancouver writer and the Manhattan artist began work on Agrippa: A Book of the Dead, a mind-bending collaboration that combines a series of Ashbaugh’s otherwordly etchings—which mutate when exposed to light—and a computer disk containing a Gibson tale programmed to self-destruct when read. Is enjoying Agrippa worth destroying it? Chuckles Gibson, “Anyone who would purchase such an annoying contrivance deserves the quandary.”

“Agrippa (a book of the dead) is a cyberpunk form of tribal storytelling, a one-time fiber optic transmission of a tale by William Gibson and artist Dennis Ashabuagh. Using various media, the story changes as it’s told and challenges traditional ideas of literature.”

Article offers a thorough description of Agrippa and locates the object in the context of other experimental, electronic texts.

“Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) (New York, Kevin Begos, 1992, edition of 350, $450; deluxe edition of 95, $1500) could be a conventional livre d’artiste. Inside a slick metallic box, it’s evocative to a fault: there is a burnt-looking honeycomb board and a distressed newspaper framing a substantial bound volume with a singed cloth cover. The book contains a half dozen etchings by Dennis Ashbaugh (reproduced offset in the large edition)—abstractions in rich sepia tones with plenty of textural and tonal range. But there are many twists. The abstractions convey not formal but scientific information, each representing a fragment of a human genome—an individualized biological blueprint. More immediately apparent, there is brassy prewar advertising imagery obscuring each image.

And then watch as the past gives way. These overprinted images are executed in a slow-dissolve variety of disappearing ink. Within a few hours of cracking the cover they vanish forever. Read on, and Ashbaugh’s abstractions themselves give way to page after page of genome fragments as scientists know them—the letters ACTG in varying combination, printed in mind-numbing four-column series. And deeper still, within a square recess cut into blank pages like some long-forgotten drug stash, is a standard computer disk (DOS and Macintosh version both available). This disk represents something of a small press coup, since it contains a new autobiographical novel by science fiction heavy William Gibson. In Neuromancer and Count Zero, among other titles, Gibson has created an ominous anthro-electronic realm he calls “cyberspace.” And that’s just where Agrippa is headed, for it has a self-destructing virus. Publisher Begos is confident the very great majority of readers can’t prevent the text from fleeing forever into the electronic netherworld as soon as it scrolls by their screen. Farewell conventional books—and conventional collecting, and reading, and remembering. Hello electronic communication.

… William Gibson’s chilling vision of prosthetic consciousness is not the only one to illuminate the role of computers in literature. A central feature of electronic publications is that they unmoor the text and require in various degrees that the authors surrender control over their destinies. Such nested narratives and story branchings have their nearest kin in the rash of recent adventure novels that allow readers to pursue alternate clues and plot developments to various conclusions.”

(For additional excerpts from this review and a refutation of the notion of a “virus,” see Unofficial Cyberpunk FAQ (”the Unofficial FAQ FOR alt.cyberpunk”).

For a letter of 1992 from Agrippa publisher Kevin Begos to William Gibson that refers to this article, see letter.

This article provides a thorough description of the work, as well as a summary of its broadcast and reception.

“Agrippa thus becomes, among other things, a model of transduction in which Gibson’s memory is conveyed by means of a computer virus into a work of art with a genetic trajectory. A little chill and distant, but impressive all the same in its suggestions of a past predicted and a future recalled.”

Article offers a substantial analysis and description of Dennis Ashbaugh’s artwork.

“…they are based instead on the DNA analysis that scientists use to identify inidvidual genetic makeup. Ashbaugh enlarges the image taken from isolating the characteristic DNA protein molecule to create his large-scale abstract portraits.”

Description of an exhibition at the Kansas City Art Institute organized around the Agrippa broadcast.

“Gibson’s hardboiled, yet occasionally sensitive, reminiscences of shooting pistols and hanging around the bus station in Wheeling, W.Va., bore little resemblance to the mind-boggling permutations of memory and chromosome common to his science fiction.”

This issue of South Atlantic Quarterly is devoted to discussions of cyberculture, and features a literary analysis of Agrippa.

“The idea has precedents. Maurice Blanchot’s essay on ‘The Absence of the Book’ argues from writerly experience that a work always becomes something other than what it is intended to be—what it is intended to be being, of course, a book. But the book (icon of law, presence, textual-cultural wholeness) is always betrayed by what Blanchot calls ‘the disaster.’ This disaster has to do with the necessary falling short of a work’s concept at the same time that an unexpected otherness beyond the work is evoked. A book never realizes its desired full presence; its realization occurs only and paradoxically through absence—’the prior determination of the book, the game of dissidence it plays with reference to the space in which it is inscribed; the preliminary dying of the book.’ In the end the original concept, and even the very idea of ‘concept’ must be exploded, Blanchot argues, citing Mallarmé’s curious statement that ‘there is no explosion but a book.’

Mallarmé also said that ‘the world exists in order to be put into a book.’ And he made this book—Le Livre—the ongoing preoccupation and project of his last twenty years, a project which came to nothing. Le Livre never appeared; its absence may have been the very point of it. The book’s nonappearance is linked to the disappearance of the world, a crucial component of Mallarmé’s art—so Sartre argues.” (pp. 618-20)