Agrippa Online

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 art 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 encrypting itself into oblivion); 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.

Agrippa has a disk buried in its last pages. That disk, which contains the 305-line text of Gibson’s memory poem about his father and his own youth (captured for reflection by the “mechanism” of a camera and a 1920 Kodak “Agrippa” brand photo album), scrolls its text up the screen once as an encryption program makes it seem to vanish, locking it up irretrievably in a kind of zen code (actually, RSA-based code) for nothingness.

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via Christian Bök