Agrippa is a poem and a work of art in its own right, the text being a semi-autobiographical poem by William Gibson and the artwork being its mode of transmission: most famously, the poem itself was included on a 3.5-inch floppy disk programmed to erase itself after the first playback. The book that the disk accompanied was printed with photosensitive chemicals that were meant to eventually fade away. This is not unlike Mémoires by the Situationists Debord and Jorn, which featured a sandpaper cover, designed to devour any books that were unlucky enough to share shelf space with it!
As Gibson himself put it, around the time that the poem came out: “It starts around 1919 and moves up to today, or possibly beyond. If it works, it makes the reader uncomfortably aware of how much we tend to accept the contemporary media version of the past. You can see it in Westerns, the way the ‘mise-en-scene’ and the collars on cowboys change through time. It’s never really the past; it’s always a version of your own time.”
UC Santa Barbara has compiled a tremendous online archive for Agrippa (a book of the dead), containing scans of both editions of the book, the poem itself, video of the poem running on an Apple IIe (rather, an Apple IIe emulator), and an insane amount of archival documentation (essays, interviews, source images, letters, press releases and more).
[check out the online archive of Agrippa (a book of the dead): here.]
[check out "Books of Warfare: The Collaboration between Guy Debord & Asger Jorn from 1957-1959": here.]
Filed under: I am going to Mad Mex after this post, William Gibson, authors, books , a book of the dead, agrippa, Asger Jorn, cyberpunk, cyberspace, Guy Debord, Situationist International, william gibson
