Art in America 81.10 (Oct 1993): 130.
Retrieved 21 Nov. 2005.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_n10_v81/ai_14607803
Review of Ashbaugh exhibit roughly contemporaneous to the release of Agrippa, including valuable descriptions of his paintings. (more…)
Business Week 21 Dec. 1992.
The citation is available, but a copy of this article cannot be found in the above issue of Business Week. We do have a photocopy of the original piece without a date or issue number.
(Please leave a comment if you know the citation for this article.)
I made up a sticky page for the resources. I had to do this through the editor login.
http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu/resources
I didn’t include everything that has been posted so far, because there were a few I wasn’t sure about. Here is what I think we still need to do in terms of the resources:
Some of the entries don’t have quotes or comments. Is this okay?
Our entries are not all consistent. We need to go through with an MLA or Chicago guide and fix them to one style. (On this note I have included as the first and last entries two different ways of citing websites.)
How do we want to cite authors with multiple articles? (I did most recent on top.)
Schwenger, Peter. “Agrippa, or, The Apocalyptic Book” South Atlantic Quarterly. Fall 1993 92:4, 617.
Literary analysis of “Agrippa”; this issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly is devoted to discussions of cyberculture. “At the end of the process that is Agrippa we are left not merely with emptiness, but with our awareness of that process both in and beyond the mechanism.”
Holderness, Mike. “Vanishing act caught in the net.” New Scientist. March 20, 1993 137:1865, 45
Short review of the work and its early transcription on the net. “[Begos] believes the encryption is secure, and that the hacker videotaped a computer screen at the exhibition and retyped it from that.”
Baker John F. “Electronic Art Book … for One Read Only.” Publishers Weekly, June 29, 1992 v239 n29 p28(1)
Straightforward review of “Agrippa” with valuable observations from Begos and Gibson. “The whole creation is thus in the process of alteration, like human perception and memory.”
Ehrenman, Gayle C. “Write Once, Read Once Literature.” PC Magazine, August 1992 v11 n14 p34(1)
Includes interesting comments on the ephermeral character of the poem’s content and the technology platform itself. “These memories, like the technology that’s being used to convey them, exist only as a moment in time.”
Jillette, Penn. “Agrippa – One Shot to Download Dad.” PC/Computing, Sept 1992 v5 n9 p436(1)
Humorous review of “Agrippa” by the famed magician. “These two guys have teamed up and done the hippest non-Lou Reed thing this year.”
Killheffe, Robert KJ. “The Shape of Books to Come: a Collaborative Book (?) Challenges Ideas about the Immorality of Art.” Omni, Jan 1993 v15 n4 p14(1)
Excellent review of the book and its broadcast and also has great comments from Ashbaugh and Begos. “In fact, Agrippa is more art object than book–the arbitrary division between art and literature is wholly erased.”
SIDE NOTE: the title says Immorality of Art but I’m pretty sure it means Immortality, but that’s how it is in the electronic database (without the ‘t’).
Chollet, Laurence. “It’s the Story You Just Can’t Forget This Book Is Read on a Computer – And One Time Only.” Record (New Jersey), May 17, 1992
This piece is useful both in its discussion of the genesis of the project, apparently from a chance meeting at an art and technology fair in Barcelona, Spain, and for some interesting comments from Gibson on the nature of the book. “The project can be read on many levels, but it’s designed to comment specifically on how art, commerce, and time distort personal memory.”
Chollet, Laurence. “A Story that Fades in Time,” Record (New Jersey), December 13, 1992.
Short discussion of the “reading” of “Agrippa” broadcast around the country in 1992. This one occurring in Manhattan. The work was also read aloud by Penn Jillette.
Quittner, Joshua. “‘Webs’: Avant-Garde Storytelling On Computer,” St Louis Post-Dispatch, June 24, 1992.
Although there isn’t as much specifically on “Agrippa” here, it does nicely lay out the hypertext landscape into which the work was received. Includes quotes by Landow, and hitech jargon that, as far as I am aware, never seems to have caught on (like the term ‘webs’ in the headline).
Von Ziegesar, Peter. “You Can Read This Book Only Once,” Kansas City Star, December 11, 1992.
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.”.
Chollet, Laurence B. “William Gibson’s Second Sight In Meetings of Man and Machine, Ecstacy and Dread, the Cyberpunk Guru Divines the Future,” Los Angeles Times, September 12, 1993.
Discussion of Gibson’s novel “Virtual Light.” Although the article primarily deals with other work by Gibson, it includes a few comments on Agrippa, including the explication that “[t]he book was designed to work on many levels, but in one real sense it was intended to replicate Gibson’s memories of his late father-vanishing words and fading pictures that change with each glance.” Mr. Chollet has also provided a nice introduction to Gibson himself, the man behind the text.
Fein, Esther B. “Read It, and Its Gone,” Book Notes, New York Times, C26, November 18, 1992.
Review of the book, “and the word is used in the loosest sense possible,” contemporary to its release. Includes the pithy observation that “[a]nyone who buys the book will have to decide whether to enjoy its content or save it as a collector’s item.”
Jonas, Gerald. “The Disappearing $2,000 Book,” New York Times, BR12, August 29, 1993.
A thoughtful full-length discussion of the text including comments from Begos, Gibson and Ashbaugh. Also includes a description of the book and the reading experience: “The first time the disk is inserted in a computer, the words of the story begin scrolling up the screen at a preset speed as if the computer and not the reader were scanning the text.”
