William Gibson’s poem played from a 3½-inch diskette on a 1992-era Mac computer running the System 7 operating system. When the diskette ran, the text of the poem scrolled up the screen (accompanied by infrequent sound effects: a camera shutter click, a gun going off) while an encryption program on the diskette encoded each line and made the poem “disappear” after its first reading.
      On December 9, 2008—the sixteenth anniversary of the original “Transmission” event debuting Agrippa—The Agrippa Files was aided by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and the Digital Forensics Lab at University of Maryland, College Park, in unveiling an emulated run of the poem based on a bit-level copy of an original diskette loaned by collector Allan Chasanoff. The copy was played on a computer with software emulating the functions of a 1992-era Mac. For a discussion of the forensic process by which the code was accessed and emulated, see Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, with Doug Reside and Alan Liu, “No Round Trip: Two New Primary Sources for Agrippa.”

The Poem Running in Emulation »
Context & Related Items

Fading Ink Simulation »
Context

Brief press notices of Agrippa (a book of the dead). See also press releases from the publisher and press reviews.

Material related to the “hacking” of the self-encrypting diskette containing William Gibson’s poem and the release of its text onto the MindVox BBS on Dec. 10, 1992 (and subsequently into the wilds of the Internet). See Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s discussion of the competing explanations of the “hack” and whether it was a code hack at all or instead a low-tech hack accomplished by transcribing from video footage shot at the screening of the poem at one of the “transmission” events of Dec. 9, 1992. Subsequent evidence, including the discovery of the original bootleg video recorded Dec. 9, 1992, at the Americas Society in New York City and correspondence with one of the video makers confirms that it was the low-tech hack that occurred. (See Kirschenbaum’s follow-up discussion.)

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.”
      Gibson’s text is a trans-generational memory poem about his father’s and his own youth—the father captured by a camera and a 1920 Kodak “Agrippa” brand photo album; the son reflecting upon the interface for a vanished world thus provided by the “mechanism.” Disappearance is a central theme (“Inside the cover he inscribed something in soft graphite / Now lost”). But the poem reimagines blurry human disappearance as an effect of sharp, decisive, binary transitions in an existential “the mechanism” (“The shutter falls / Forever / Dividing that from this”). Beyond elegy, the mechanism—which abides only in the moment, and so “forever”—also knows how to laugh (“tonight red lanterns are battered, / laughing, / in the mechanism”).
      Currently, the Agrippa Files does not have permission to reproduce the full text of the poem. Many wild copies of the text exist on the Internet. The official copy is on William Gibson’s Web site.

Additional and detail photos of the Archive-1 copy of Agrippa (a book of the dead).

Resources and tools to facilitate study of Agrippa on this site include an Itemized Inventory of materials collected in “The Book” and “Archival Documents” categories and the Virtual Lightbox.

The Virtual Lightbox is a browser-based Java tool for studying, juxtaposing, comparing, and resizing multiple images as if arranging slides on a “lightbox.” Users can also populate the lightbox with images from their own hard drives. Requires Sun Java® runtime environment 1.3+ plug-in.

Artist Dennis Ashbaugh intended to print antique newspaper and photographic equipment catalog advertisements of technological artifacts (TV, phone, magic lantern, etc.) in “disappearing” ink over his copperplate aquatint etchings featuring DNA-gel motifs (not actual DNA stain patterns but aesthetic renderings). Exposing the pages to light or air were to have made these “overprints” gradually vanish, leaving behind just the underlying etchings. The art would thus have matched William Gibson’s disappearing poem, which disappears into encrypted code when played.
      However, while some extant copies of the book contain overprints created in uncured photocopy toner as a gesture toward the original idea, technical problems prevented the implementation of the fading ink. The uncured-toner images blur over their base etchings and stain facing pages, but they remain.

Itemized inventory of materials collected in the “Agrippa” and “Archival Documents” categories.