The Agrippa Files

Markoff, John. “A Public Battle Over Secret Codes.”

New York Times 7 May 1992: D1.

When this article by the well-known Times writer on the cyber-beat appeared, the programmer of the encryption code on Agrippa‘s diskette faxed it along with a letter to Agrippa‘s publisher. “I think it explains why [John Perry] Barlow has said that a fuss is being made over the encryption of this thing [Agrippa],” the programmer’s letter comments. (more…)

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. “Ashbaugh and Gibson’s Agrippa: A Description of the Book Based Upon My Examination of the NYPL Copy.”

MGK (Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s blog). 4 June 2004. Retrieved 26 Sept. 2005. http://www.otal.umd.edu/~mgk/blog/archives/000804.html

Kirschenbaum, whose introduction to his Mechanisms: New Media and the New Textuality (under contract to MIT Press, scheduled publication Fall 2006) discusses Agrippa and its early reception, provides a bibliographical description of the the copy held by the New York Public Library. (more…)

Center for Book Arts. Physical Description of Agrippa (a book of the dead).

Center for Book Arts. 1993. Retrieved 26 Sept. 2005. http://www.centerforbookarts.org/archive/workdetail.asp?workID=747

Brief bibliographical description of Agrippa concentrating on the physical artifact; created for the Center for Book Arts’s exhibition of Agrippa, NYC, 24 April-19 June, 1993. (more…)

Publicly Accessible Copies of Agrippa

Three copies of Agrippa (a book of the dead) are known to be in the collections of libraries and museums: the New York Public Library in New York, NY < http://catnyp.nypl.org/ >, Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI < https://www.library.wmich.edu/ >, and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, England < http://www.vam.ac.uk/nal/catalogues/ >. It is noteworthy that neither the Library of Congress nor the British Library owns a copy.

The Frances Mulhall Achilles Library at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, New York < http://library.whitney.org/ > has a promotional prospectus of Agrippa.

First Mock-Up of Agrippa (Jan.-Feb. 1992)

Item #A9. Promotional mock-up of Agrippa (a book of the dead), created January-February, 1992.

Facsimile Image
Variant photo (with box-case)

The mock-up was made by artificially distressing a used book (not the eventual Agrippa) and cutting a cavity into its back pages to hold a disk labeled “AGRIPPA.” The mock-up lacks Dennis Ashbaugh’s etchings, and features the text of some old used book (not the DNA sequence text of the final editions of Agrippa).

Highlights

"The surface of the top case is irregular, distressed, and looks as though it has been unearthed from the debris of some future catastrophe, a kind of relic from the future. Its size and weight do not allow for casual reading/viewing and therefore demand that one recognize its sheer artifactuality. . . ."

—James J. Hodge, "Bibliographic Description of Agrippa"

(Full text)

"The first trace of text from “Agrippa” (the actual poem){1} on the public internet I can isolate is 21 May 1992, 16:05:30 PST, when Tom Maddox—fellow cyberpunk, Gibson confidant, and then USENET stalwart—began including the line “I swear I never heard the first shot” in his message signature file. It was tantalizingly attributed to “Wm. Gibson, ‘AGRIPPA: a book of the dead’.” Pointedly perhaps, his post that spring day was to a thread on rec.arts.books that had arisen in response to some advance publicity for Agrippa, then being erroneously described as a short story. Maddox continued to use the line throughout the summer and fall, but dropped it immediately after the events described below placed the text in general circulation. . . ."

—Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, "Hacking ‘Agrippa’: The Source of the Online Text"

(Full text)

"But we do know that the work is indeed a testament, compendium, or edition of the generalized destructivity of the twentieth century—the first work, as it were, copy-edited by bomb. Nor is the catastrophe over and done with so that we can expect the trauma to be stabilized. A persistent radioactivity of destructivity continues. We first notice it when Ashbaugh’s images (at least as the book was originally conceived) alter in appearance like some picture of Dorian Gray updated to the processes of pixel-rot, gene-splicing, or molecule-creep that are the usual symptoms of cyberpunk’s fetishization of digital, biotech, and nanotech fungibility. . . ."

—Alan Liu, Excerpt from The Laws of Cool

(Full text)

Highlights