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 Dec. 9, 1992, “transmission” event at The Kitchen in New York City, where the poem was played on a big screen.

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).

Photos of details in 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.

Alan Liu, Professor, Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3170

Photos of the book, correspondence and press releases by Kevin Begos, Jr., are used on The Agrippa Files by permission of the publisher, and may not be reproduced without express written permission.

Design and special contents of Agrippa (a book of the dead) is © by Kevin Begos, Jr. Etchings and box design © Dennis Ashbaugh. Poem © William Gibson.

Text, images, and design created specifically for the Agrippa Files site, are © the UC Santa Barbara Transcriptions Project and University of California, Santa Barbara.

Where indicated, copyright for texts, images, and materials by other authors or organizations used by permission on The Agrippa Files site is retained by those entities.

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.