The Agrippa Files » 2005

Bibliography » Scholarly Writings

Scholarly writings that discuss Agrippa or its creators, together with selected works addressing the larger contexts in which Agrippa is significant—for example, the transition from the codex book to new media, the nature of digital literature, cyberpunk literature, and so on. (To let The Agrippa Files know about other scholarly writings that touch upon Agrippa, please contact the editors.)

Bibliography » Reviews

The following citations and quotations are from reviews and/or pre-publication press coverage of Agrippa. Caveat emptor: because of limited access to the book, “review” is in this case a fuzzy-logic concept. Some press coverage is clearly based just on pre-publication announcements and some on actual acquaintance with the artifact. But the status of others is blurry.

Bibliography » Interviews

Radio and print interviews with the creators of Agrippa (a book of the dead).

“I hesitated before untying the bow that bound this book together…”

Agrippa (a book of the dead) appeared in 1992 as a collaboration between artist Dennis Ashbaugh, author William Gibson, and publisher Kevin Begos, Jr. The Agrippa Files is a scholarly site that presents selected pages from the original artist’s book; a unique archive of materials dating from the book’s creation and early reception; an emulation of Gibson’s included poem in its original born-and-die-digital form (it ran from a diskette once before an encryption-like effect made the diskette unrunnable); analysis of the code on the diskette resulting from a 2012 hacker’s contest; a simulation of what the book’s intended “fading images” might have looked like; a video of the 1992 “transmission” of the work; a “virtual lightbox” for comparing and studying pages; full-text scholarly essays and interviews; an annotated bibliography of scholarship, press coverage, interviews, and other material; a detailed bibliographic description of the book; and a discussion forum. (continued…)

New on the Site

“Small Edition” of Agrippa (no. 85 of 350, signed by William Gibson)

Results of the “Cracking the Agrippa Code” contest run by Quinn DuPont in 2012, with archived results, highlights, and commentary

Agrippa cryptography algorithm implemented in Javascript by Ayal Ryger. Can be used to decrypt the pre-encrypted text of Gibson’s poem; or to encrypt any plain text. (Only the decryption function was present on Agrippa’s disk to act on the pre-encrypted poem. The encryption function in this Javascript implementation was reverse engineered.)

Original Text of Gibson’s “Agrippa” Poem Extracted From Computer Memory During a Run of the Disk by Freek Wiedijk

Recovery of the code from an original 1992 diskette containing Gibson’s poem and an emulated “run” of its software. (Go to The Poem Running in Emulation)

Original footage from December 9, 1992, public debut of Agrippa at the Americas Society in New York City during the “Transmission” event. (Go to The “Hack”)

Essay by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, with Doug Reside and Alan Liu, “No Round Trip: Two New Primary Sources for Agrippa

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