Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)
Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) is a work of art created by science fiction novelist William Gibson, artist Dennis Ashbaugh and publisher Kevin Begos Jr. in 1992. The work consists of a 300-line semi-autobiographical electronic poem by Gibson, embedded in an artist's book by Ashbaugh. Gibson's text focused on the ethereal, human-owed nature of memories retained over the passage of time (the title referred to a Kodak photo album from which the text's memories are taken). Its principal notoriety arose from the fact that the poem, stored on a 3.5" floppy disk, was programmed to encrypt itself after a single use; similarly, the pages of the artist's book were treated with photosensitive chemicals, effecting the gradual fading of the words and images from the book's first exposure to light. The work is recognised as an early example of electronic literature. Origin and concept The impetus for the initiation of the project was Kevin Begos Jr., a publisher of museum-quality manuscripts motivated by disregard for the commercialism of the art world, who suggested to abstract painter Dennis Ashbaugh that they "put out an art book on computer that vanishes". Ashbaugh—who despite his "heavy art-world resume" was bored with the abstract impressionist paintings he was doing—took the suggestion seriously, and developed it further. A few years beforehand, Ashbaugh had written a fan letter to cyberpunk novelist William Gibson, whose oeuvre he had admired, and the pair had struck up a telephone friendship. Shortly after the project had germinated in the minds of Begos and Ashbaugh, they contacted and recruited Gibson. The project exemplified Gibson's deep ambivalence towards technologically advanced futurity, and as The New York Times expressed it, was "designed to challenge conventional notions about books and art while extracting money from collectors of both". The project manifested as a poem written by Gibson incorporated into an artist's book created by Ashbaugh; as such it was as much a work of collaborative conceptual art as poetry. Gibson stated that Ashbaugh's design "eventually included a supposedly self-devouring floppy-disk intended to display the text only once, then eat itself." Ashbaugh was gleeful at the dilemma this would pose to librarians: in order to register the copyright of the book, he had to send two copies to the United States Library of Congress, who, in order to classify it had to read it, and in the process, necessarily had to destroy it. The creators had initially intended to infect the disks with a computer virus, but declined to after considering the potential damage to the computer systems of innocents. Release and replication The work was premiered on December 9, 1992, at The Kitchen, an art space in Chelsea in New York City. The performance—known as "The Transmission"—consisted of the public reading of the poem by composer and musician Robert Ashley, recorded and simultaneously transmitted to several other cities. The poem was inscribed on a sculptural magnetic disk which had been vacuum-sealed until the event's commencement, and was reportedly (although not actually) programmed to erase