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Welcome back to the second part of the Day One of the Agrippa Symposium.

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And now we're going to have a roundtable with everyone that has worked on Agrippa since 1992.

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So it's very exciting. And this roundtable is going to be moderated by Caroline Bassett.

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She's the Director of Cambridge Digital Humanities and Chair of Digital Humanities at the Faculty of English, Cambridge.

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Thank you Caroline, over to you.

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Thank you. I am probably the only person that has not worked with Agrippa across who is here,

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but I am very interested in talking to people who have and I think this panel is really about people who in various ways lived with Agrippa or inhabited it.

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So I'm not going to give big introductions because we haven't got much time and I hope there will be time for discussion and conversation.

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So I suggest that we just start off.

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So our first panellist is Peter Schwenger, who is Emeritus Professor of English at Mount Saint Vincent University

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and is someone who's written a lot on asemic writing, which might be where he starts from or not.

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So welcome Peter, I'm timing this ruthlessly.

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Thank you.

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I was the first person to work to do a critical essay on Agrippa and it was something of a cliff-hanger because it was done

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at the same time that the Agrippa editions were being completed - or not completed, because there were a lot of snags in production.

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And on my hand I had deadlines to meet.

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I had been commissioned by Mark Dery to write an essay on Agrippa for his forthcoming issue on cyber

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culture in SAQ [South Atlantic Quarterly]; and the deadlines kept being pushed forward until they couldn't be pushed anymore.

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And at exactly that point, I received the copy of Agrippa.

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I wrote some of the essay beforehand based on descriptions in the press and the fundamental idea of a disappearing book.

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I had been reading a lot of Maurice Blanchot at that time, and so I was glad to see that Kevin Begos cited Blanchot and as well as Mallarmé.

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I used both of these in my article and then added a dash of Derrida.

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My approach then was theoretical, unpacking the implications of a book disappearing.

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Now theory is all very well, but I did need to see the material book and to read Gibson's text.

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When it finally arrived, it came with the master disk.

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Now, I've got a slide show here.

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This is an image of a disk that is not the master disk in fact.

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They weren't ready with the disappearing disk.

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And so they sent me this one on condition that I would send it back.

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Now, this played right into my game.

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I was very happy to get a master disk that did not disappear because then I could look at it again.

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I could ponder it, I could check my quotations.

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I could do what literary critics do. A brief tour

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now of what I got for my $400.

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Oh, well, I'd better just trust that the right images are going to come up.

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What you should be seeing is a box that holds the book proper.

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And following that, another slide that shows what you see when you open the box.

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And here's the first thing you see when you open the book.

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It is signed by Gibson. It's number 150 of the small edition.

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I'm not quite sure why it's number 150

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since I can't imagine that they had 149 copies ready to go when they couldn't get this one ready to go on time.

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What you see on the side of the cover

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are pages from a 1938 newspaper that have been pasted on to the interior of the box and those pages are inserted at interval.

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The pages themselves were unbound.

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I'm not sure if that was a question of--a matter of the haste with which this edition was put together and shipped to me.

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I was glad to get the edition. I was glad to get the disk; and the disk that you saw is actually my disk.

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I sent back the master disk as I had been requested to do, and I had been promised to get a proper disappearing book of disk which I

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wasn't planning on reading, but I wanted the actual artefact.

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It never arrived despite many prompts on my part.

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So I finally found it kind of depressing to look at this empty well and just took an ordinary disk and

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slapped a label and an engraved label, on it to make it look good. That's my experience

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With the book. I think my 5 minutes is probably up.

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Thank you, Peter. Our next speaker is Alan Liu,

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who is Distinguished Professor in the English Department at the University of California in Santa Barbara and is a long time

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Agrippa intimate and also someone who writes astonishingly brilliantly on digital humanities.

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So thank you, Alan, you're next. Thank you very much.

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In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, I think you see my screen now,

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the central ritual is the weighing of the heart in which the heart of the dead person is weighed on the scales to see if it's light enough

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(light as a feather) actually, to be allowed to pass on to the afterlife.

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The Book of the Dead recounts, for example, that 'Thots the Judge of Truths, of the Great Company of the Gods who are in

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the presence of Osiris, saith to the gods, "Hearken ye to this word: In very truth

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the heart of Osiris hath been weighed, and his soul hath born

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testimony concerning him; according to the Great Balance his case is truth..."'

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Now, the application I want to make of this rite here in the Book of the Dead from Egypt today is as follows:

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For some decades, those of us, people in this panel, who have been working in book history, media studies, media

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archaeology have, as it were, weighed the heart of Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) as a book. Is Agrippa at heart a book?

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Is it fit to be the canonical example of a post-print book? A new-media book? A network (as I've suggested) in some recent writing? Or of something else?

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Does Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) (like Osiris) deserve to have an afterlife?

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That was Kevin's great concern. But in retrospect, I think now that a different kind of weighing that is a method of inquiry is also needed.

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I'd like today to add to the established methods of studying this book: book history, print studies, new media studies,

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network studies, cohort studies, etc. the necessary method of the sociology of the book, without which I think in retrospect,

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after all these years of working with Kevin,

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I don't think the story of this book could be complete either in its local context or in the long horizon of the history and the future of the book.

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So one, let's start by putting on the scales of evidence the correspondence between Kevin

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and myself about the 'small edition' of Agrippa that he gave me in 2010,

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which was five years after the team of graduate students and I put together the Agrippa Files site.

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On August 13th, 2010, I wrote again to Kevin there.

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Dear Kevin, just to let you know that the small edition of Agrippa arrived safely.

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It's quite beautiful. I hadn't realised that the small edition came in such an elaborate case of its own.

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Next day he wrote to me: I'm glad you like it.

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Your point about the elaborate case goes to the heart of the difficulty, the whole project.

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Virtually everything was handmade, custom made, which took tons of time and money, and led to legitimate differences of opinion about what works and what doesn't.

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If Kindles and iPads had been available back in 1992

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we probably would have had a huge success selling just an electronic download for $10 or $15.

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But we tried to make a book object and an electronic book.

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Now that phrase about it being virtually everything, being handmade, custom made points to the unstable nature of the book as a media object,

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and it invites the approaches of media archaeology which sees Agrippa as the incunabula of the digital book.

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And of Network Archaeology, which sees Agrippa as the incubula of the network.

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That was what excited the BBS as of the time, for example.

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But to now let me weigh the evidence of the copyright statement that we put together on the Agrippa Files site,

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which I excruciatingly negotiated with Kevin.

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I don't think I've shared this information with anyone else yet.

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And that includes this clause that Kevin insisted be there about the copyright status of Agrippa itself.

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And I've outlined that on the page.

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Design and special contents of Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) is copyright symbol by Kevin Begos Junior. Etchings and Box Design

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copyright Dennis Ashbaugh. Poem copyright

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William Gibson. If you think about it, that's quite extraordinary.

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There's no apparently single copyright for this book.

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There are three separate copyrights for the different artefacts that assemble into the book.

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That points to what I've become increasingly interested in over the years,

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which is the unstable nature of this book, not as a material artefact, but as a contractual object.

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It's an unstable construction on the basis of a formal contract.

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I'm not actually positive that a formal contract existed between Kevin, William Gibson and Dennis Ashbaugh.

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He mentioned it once, but I've never actually seen it.

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And even if it did exist, I think the primary fact is that it was not robust and capable enough to govern a new-media object of this kind.

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That is the social contract on which a formal contract rested was not strong enough.

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The social contract between the publisher, the author, the artist,

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and then the whole assemblage of other people involved that Kevin probably exercised

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some kind of regulatory control over in terms of agreements about what they could do,

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or see, the journalists, collectors, libraries, museums, readers, etc.

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So three. Let me weigh on the scales.

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The reticence Kevin has shown throughout our dealings with him in regard to showing or not showing Agrippa and

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to letting William Gibson or Dennis Ashbaugh know about the website as it was being prepared or after it was launched,

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or that he wanted to show the book in public at all.

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I don't think I've shared this with anyone before. Kevin was very hard to work with in terms of what he actually wanted.

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There's a very paradoxical situation in which he wanted to show Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) but not show it at the same time.

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He changed his mind.

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He had regulations about what photographs could be shown on the Agrippa Files site or not.

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He was always unwilling to let me contact William Gibson and Dennis Ashbaugh about the book and

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about the website, in preparation to ask for consultation and advice.

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This is partly because the artefact, as he said, was unfinished.

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But over the years I've come to believe and I must assert this is my surmise only because at a certain point I stopped asking.

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My surmise is that there was unsettled business between the publisher of this book, the author and the artist.

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They never had a formal contract that was robust enough to span from control over the established Codex-book form,

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as it was known, to this new-media object that they were creating.

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It was never clear who controlled what intellectual property, what relations of the intellectual property was.

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What its afterlife would be, what sustainability would look like.

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And so Kevin was always highly reticent about showing the book in public and letting William Gibson and Dennis Ashbaugh know about it.

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I think it's less important to put this in the local context of the mystery of the book than to put it in the

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long horizon of the unstable social contract that new media objects have when they first come on the scene.

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So I'll finish with two books of reference. One is M. T. Clanchy's highly influential book From memory to Written Record,

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England 1066-1307, which is not about the introduction of writing to England as much as it is about

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the two and a half centuries it took for writing to be naturalised and become familiar in England.

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As you may know, when a new media form arrives, there's a tremendous bang moment when everything seems counterfeit,

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untrustworthy, as in this fake privileged document that you see on the screen here,

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simply because the institutions like the Known Republics, legal court institutions

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and so on had not been invented yet in order to invest trust in such media objects.

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The final work of reference I like to put on the screen is D. F. Mackenzie's Bibliography in the Sociology of Text.

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And I just read this here to finish.

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He writes: '[Bibliography] is the only discipline which has consistently studied the composition, formal design, and transmission of texts by writers,

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printers and publishers; their distribution through different communities by wholesalers, retailers and teachers;

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the collection and classification by librarians, their meaning for, and - I must add - their creative regeneration by, readers. However we define it,

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no part of that series of human and institutional interactions is alien to bibliography...'

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All of those people, he says, are involved in the sociology of the book.

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Their relationships are what matters, and I think this is where we need to go

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in the study of Agrippa

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from this point on. I put on the screen a kind of hypothetical social graph in the making of the artefact itself as a kind of miniature society.

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Agrippa in its not quite bound-in poem, small edition, etchings, press releases, press kits,

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prototypes and so on, and the entire galaxy of other people involved in the making and reception of this book.

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The publisher, artists, author, the printers, the poor typesetters who had to type the ACTG text,

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the 'digerati', journalists, collectors, the BBS users, the NYU students who hacked the poem,

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the readers, the scholars, the curators, librarians and others.

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I would love to go back to the evidence of the early BBS post, for example,

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and put together a social graph of the reception of this book and compare it to the sociology of other new media forms,

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such as the sociology of the Homebrew Club in Menlo Park.

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When the Altair 8800 chip was new, the computer was new, or the sociology of the Radio Amateur or hobbyists of an earlier era,

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which possibly we see compares to the early computing era.

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So I'll close there and let me see if I can find my screen: stop there.

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And just so people can see

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this is my small edition of Agrippa, which Kevin gave me in 2010.

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The case opens. You can see the box in its honeycomb

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cradle. This really is a work incunabula

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if you go back to the meaning of the word 'cradle'. The cheesecloth has kind of degraded over time.

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Now the book opens. There's an endpaper with an autograph of William Gibson.

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This is signed number 85 of 350.

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There are six unbound that is not etching but reproductions in laser printing of Dennis Ashbaugh's etchings.

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These were designed as laser prints for the small edition, as opposed to the original etchings that came in the deluxe.

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There's a title page which Kevin once told me with designed not to be a formal title page in imitation of early incunabula,

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which did not have title pages. There are 63 sheets ran on both sides of the ATGC genome of the drosophila fruit fly.

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But in this small edition, there is no carved out a cavity at the back and there is no diskette, so I close there.

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Thank you, Alan. We can probably go on straight to Matthew Kirschenbaum who's professor of English and also

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someone engaged in digital humanities and with a history of engagement with Agrippa.

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So, Matthew, over to you. Yeah. Thank. Thanks, Caroline.

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And thank you, Justine, for this invitation. Caroline, I loved your introduction to the panel.

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If you've worked with and lived with Agrippa since 1992, there is help available.

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So I don't possess a physical copy of the book to share.

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And so my piece of this story really starts with my encounter with the the electronic incarnations of Agrippa.

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I started graduate school at the University of Virginia in 1992, which, as we can see, was a fateful year.

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It was the year of Agrippa's publication. That same year, I also, for myself, discovered the Internet, such as it was at the time.

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I stumbled across the text of Agrippa a year or two later, probably on Usenet.

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Or Goffer Or FTP.

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Those were all early internet services. I was a William Gibson fan.

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I was also an enthused graduate student, so I was instantly taken with the text.

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I'm using the word text also to really underscore that unlike the exquisite

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material physical incarnations of the work that we've been seeing this morning,

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my encounter with Agrippa was with a plain text digital file, which is to say, I would have been seeing monochrome words on a dark screen.

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There would have been no formatting other than mind breaks.

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It was what is technically speaking, ASCII text.

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This, of course, also was a major part of what allowed for its propagation and migration across early networks.

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I was studying at the time with Jerome McGann, the great textual scholar, and under his influence,

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I began to wonder a little bit about the material circumstances of this plain text digital file, namely, how did it get there?

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How did it come to be on the Internet?

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By then I had learned a little bit more about the Agrippa project itself and the lore and mythology that surrounded it,

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especially in 1994/1995, only a couple of years after its publication.

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So I really wanted to try to understand and document how this text, which was designed to disappear, proved so remarkably durable and persistent.

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I began collecting as many digital copies of it as I could find.

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I came across as part of the lore and the mythology, the idea that the text was continually, quote unquote: 'mutating' and quote unquote: 'cyberspace'.

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This was not true. All of the copies that I had, dozens and dozens of them saved on the one gigabyte hard drive of my 1995 desktop PC.

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Every copy I found on the Internet was identical.

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There was no, you know, sort of mutation in any meaningful sense of the text, or at least in any literal sense.

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I documented this process as part of my first book Mechanisms.

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In the course of doing that, I eventually made contact with an individual whose name has not come up yet

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this morning, Patrick Krupa, who ran a New York City based bulletin board called MindVox.

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This was the digital venue to which the text of the poem was uploaded on December 10,

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1992, the morning after the transmission, which we'll hear more about tomorrow.

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Krupa, who also went by the alias of 'Lord Digital', made the MindVox bulletin board files available to me.

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I remember a harrowing email I received one June afternoon as I was working on the book telling me that he was going to put the files online,

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but only for a few hours and he hoped I didn't miss it.

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Luckily, I was online and reading my email and

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from there I got into the MindVox archives, wrote up as much of the story as I could for the book. As I was reviewing proofs for Mechanisms

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Alan and I were both contacted by some of the individuals we'll hear from tomorrow,

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a.k.a 'RoseHammer', 'Templar' and 'PseudoPhred' who filled in some of the gaps in my story. I will save for tomorrow

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I think the the actual mechanism by which the poem was uploaded to the the bulletin board and then the internet.

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What I would close with today is really a kind of irony.

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So the first line in Mechanisms is about Googling for the string:

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'William Gibson Agrippa' and the phenomenon of dozens and dozens and dozens of copies

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of this supposedly disappearing text instantly populating my browser screen.

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And that was sort of the kind of conceptual paradox that really the whole book that my

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whole scholarly project rested on, understanding that unique aspect of digital materiality.

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However, nowadays, if you repeat that same exercise, it actually turns out to be much harder to find a digital full text of the poem online.

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You can still do it there. They are still out there, but they tend to be buried much further down in one's search results.

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A lot of the scholarship that the people on this panel and others have done about the book is what comes up first.

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But moreover, a lot of these early FTP servers and early websites that hosted copies of the poem have themselves gone away.

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So there is a sense in which at long last,

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the ontology of the poem's supposed disappearance is in fact now playing out as actual

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online copies of that become a little bit trickier to find than they once were.

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And that ongoing transformation of the text is what has kept my interest in it alive after all these years.

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So thank you. And I think: is Quinn up next?

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Great. Thank you. Thank you. Quinn, Business School at York University, Information Scientist,

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Welcome. Yeah. Hi. Thanks, everyone. It should help

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of you see my screen. I'm just going to start with, I'm going to show my intervention here,

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It's so lovely to have this opportunity to have decades and decades, you know, sort of be linearized in front of us.

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And I came to Agrippa actually through Alan. I believe I was actually a master's student in information science maybe at the time.

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And I was really interested Digital humanities and I took this course at Victoria BC called Digital Humanities Summer Institute.

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And at the time Alan was talking about his Agrippa Files project and that's where I learned about Agrippa in the first place.

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And then a little bit while later, of course,

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we just heard Matt's great intervention there and what that I came to was a fairly well investigated artefact in this point.

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You know, all of the sort of bibliographic information had been made available and Matthew and his team had done,

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you know, all this sort of digital work of getting these copies all available.

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And so I was presented with something that wasn't you know, this wasn't greenfield research here.

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This was fairly well investigated.

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But what struck me immediately is and I guess this is my own predilection here is so much of the artefact had been investigated.

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But what was sort of missing and bothered me was there's cryptographic routine in particular was left unexplored.

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And so originally using the Agrippa Files materials, I said, well, maybe I'll see if I can crack the code itself.

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And so, you know, I took a couple of weeks effort at this.

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And as it turns out, you know, my sort of 1992 error programming skills just weren't what they needed to be.

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And there's just a lot of domain knowledge I didn't have. And so I realised this isn't going to be something I'm going to do myself.

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So I created this contest, a cracking contest, and this is actually something that is not uncommon online.

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These notions of cracking contests. And what I want to do is motivate people's interest.

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And so here's the web page. You can go to 'crackingagrippa.net'.

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And you can see the original challenge. And here is my original sort of write up, and I realised I needed to compile these materials for people.

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So here is all of the material you'd see from a group of files.

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And then I think what I'll do is and so very quickly actually, so I posted this online,

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people found it very interesting and I had a number of submissions sort of right away.

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And then I worked with those individuals to come up with a sort of technical description to kind of understand what's really going on.

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And so my last couple minutes here, I'm just going to really quickly walk through my interpretation of what's occurring from inside of the disk.

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So I start with the digital document and I work from there.

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And so what's interesting is when you run this disk,

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there are sort of four stages that occur and a lot of what we thought we knew about it turned out to be not entirely true.

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So the first thing to kind of recognise is that there is this compiled binary on the disk itself so that

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the poem itself comes pre-encrypted. So,

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the first thing is this there's this virus-like mechanism.

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It was actually never developed and as it turns out the cryptographic algorithm itself 

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it's

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an RSA encryption, so it's very simple 12-bit encryption that doesn't actually encrypt the document, but rather provides an encryption effect.

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And this encryption effect is to display the poem and then run it through the repurposed decryption algorithm,

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which basically just sort of scrambles it. And then in the end, what you end up with is not a file that cannot be run again,

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but only because the self-destruction mechanism was a mechanism to overwrite the binary itself.

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So the file does self-destruct, but it doesn't actually re encrypt itself.

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It really just shows an effect and then dumps out the encryption file and just leaves it out in the end.

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And there's lots of kind of interesting things that we discovered, including for instance,

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the self-destruct routine is called 'Make some [INAUDIBLE]', which is a sort of an interesting name for it.

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And there's interesting things that we realised. For instance,

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the self-destruct mechanism itself originally was thought to just sort of write over zeros,

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just sort of overwrite that part of the file itself so that it won't be able to run again.

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But at some point somebody realised you know you might want to be a little bit cooler than just overwriting the files with,

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you know, with ones or zeros or just sort of zeroing it out.

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Maybe what we can do is we can write a bunch of interesting characters that look like the DNA code.

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And the final thing I want to sort of to show is some of the submissions offer very helpful descriptions.

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Technical. It's not the right one. Sorry. The second one here is better where you can actually see the encryption sort of visualised.

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And here's a good example. Time's up.

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So I'll finish up right here. Here's an example

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whereas if you look up here, you can see the permutation where you start with this number zero.

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And the sort of bit scrambling in the encryption process here, this 12-bit encryption.

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And then you end up with the output. And if you want to see it on the real data.

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So here's the beginning of the of the poem, which is a double quote, and then it's 'I' space 'H E S'.

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And then as you know, 'I hesitated'. Right?

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And so what we see is actually you can walk that back and here is the encoded encrypted text itself.

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So there's a kind of a nice fine visualisation.

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And the final thing I'll show is if you want to kind of play around with it, I actually use this in teaching all the time.

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I find it really helpful. One of the people who entered the contest developed this little tool and you can see you can actually just go

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ahead and decrypt the ciphertext right in front of you and you can actually go ahead and just kind of change it.

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One thing to bear in mind is you can break it pretty easily because of the way it's encoded.

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So if you do something other than three characters, you'll probably break it.

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So let's just put QQQ and then we can actually roundtrip it back.

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And then if we just go ahead and delete all that, here we go.

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We just roundtrip to it. And then of course, if you go over here, we change something.

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This is probably we're going to see the encryption itself break.

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Oh, actually, it kind of worked, but so I'll leave it at that.

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That's my contribution to this sort of several decades of this interesting storied history.

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And thanks for the opportunity to chat about it. Thank you, Quinn.

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On to Rollin Milroy from Heavenly Monkey, which is a letterpress studio.

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Let's go. Hi, everybody.

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Nice to meet you all. Thanks, Justine, for including me in this. As Caroline said, I came to Agrippa as a letterpress printer,

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bookbinder. So I really came to it specifically from the aspect of the book.

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Just the book and

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the box, I guess. So I first heard about Agrippa in 92 in the Science Fiction Eye magazine advertisement that ran.

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I thought it sounded intriguing. I was involved in book collecting at the time, and over 20 years, I never saw a copy offered by a bookseller.

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I never saw a copy listed in a catalogue. And for a book published in 92 in the quantities that the ad claimed

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that's very unusual. So I wondered what happened. After that

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I got into printing and binding, by 2000

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I was doing it full time and since then I published about one or two books a year,

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basically using the same methods that were used for the Agrippa book.

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I don't have a particular publishing plan or focus, but over the years I have done a number of projects about books that were not

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completed, not published, not issued in the way that the publisher had originally intended.

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And I find those stories fascinating. And it usually comes down in one way or another to money.

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About 12 years ago, I had to put my studio in storage because we were moving and it was going to be in storage for about six months.

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So I needed something to do. And

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around that time I was at a dinner party at a friend's house and everyone around the table was involved with books in one way or another.

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And so we're all telling bookstories.

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And I mentioned Agrippa because generally in the past when I've mentioned it, nobody knows what I'm talking about.

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And the person hosting the party who was a very good friend of mine said: 'Oh, I have that book.'

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And I said: 'No, you don't.' And she said: 'Oh, yeah, I do.'

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And she went downstairs and rummaged around in her basement for a while and came up with:

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her copy. So I said: Huh?

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Can I borrow that for a while?' So she gave it to me.

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And then I decided what I'm going to spend these six months while my studio's on ice doing

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is trying to find out the story of what really happened with the publication of Agrippa.

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I wasn't particularly interested in the the virtual cyber side,

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partly because I'm not really technically capable of understanding a lot of it, but I am capable of understanding how to make a book.

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So I wanted to know what that was, what the story was. So Alan's Agrippa Files site obviously is the place you start.

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It's fantastic. But it didn't include a lot of the production details, physical production details that I was interested in.

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So I started working backwards and trying to get to primary sources.

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I contacted Begos, said I was working on something,

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I didn't know what it was going to be and would he answer some questions.

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And I didn't get a reply. University of British Columbia here in Vancouver has a connection with Gibson because they have his early

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archival material and I got a request for an interview or something to give him some questions through UBC.

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He wasn't interested. I contacted Ashbaugh through his website and didn't get a reply,

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but I did manage to contact and have discussions with the person who printed the text, the person who printed the etchings and

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I wasn't able to find anything about the binder, which is weird. And anyway, I ended up doing what I called a monograph.

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And just sort of recounting what I found out about the book, what I was able to determine.

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And that's why I'm here today. I would just like to add before I hand back the floor, I thought Alan's comment about the

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lack of a strong social contract, I think was the phrase you used between the people involved in the project.

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I think that's a very interesting comment.

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And maybe we can talk more about that.

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The other thing I'd say, though, is, Alan, you highlighted the copyright statement on the encrypted files site that Begos wanted included.

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And in the strange little corner of publishing that I inhabit that is not an unusual statement.

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I as Heavenly Monkey, have copyright for the book that I issue.

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The author will have copyright of the text. And if there's an artist, the artist will have copyright over the art included.

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Right. Thank you. Maybe we can come back to some of those questions. I think our last speaker is Justine, who is real.

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Oh, yes. Justine is from the University of Cambridge.

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And this is her conference. Thank you, Caroline.

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As you said, I will be very brief because I think it is way more interesting to hear all of the speakers speak together.

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And so, yes, I'm doing my PhD currently, jointly supervised here at the Bodleian and at Cambridge. I work on the nature 

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of books and how there can be many forms of books actually that we could consider and how thee forms of books are

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preserved and accessed in library collections. So I should say that I myself come to Agrippa from actually a book conservator

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perspective. I used to work here at the Bodleian before getting on with the Ph.D.

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And so my approach to the book is from cultural heritage and conservation view.

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And when I think of a book that self-destructs, you could think that it's quite counter-grain to 

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what I do as a book conservator. Or maybe very appealing to me.

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But anyway, I think of Agrippa beyond the sensationalism of the label 'self-destructive'.

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And I use rather this label 'self-destructive' that is very sensational to actually consider what it show

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us at face value of our interaction with this medium of communication 'book' that we actually use every day in the written world,

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as users, viewers and readers.

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And coming back to Agrippa, I go in two directions that I connect at some point, which are: A, it is a book?

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And B, if it is a book, where does it fit in relation to history of the book and library collections?

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So, my answer to: A, is it a book? Actually, yes. To me, Agrippa is a book, and actually it's not one book to me, but it's at least three books.

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And yes, you've seen many copies and you're going to be thinking, well, there is only one book in each of these copies, the one made of paper

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that is folded together, sawn between boards and bound together.

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And that is the codex-form book. I would consider,

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not that all from a computer scientist perspective,

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but more with a creative, critical reading of the computer programme and from the wonderful actually 'cracking the code'

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contest by Quinn and the representation of what it is that you can see with the zeros and the ones and how they are intertwined together,

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that for me, from a bookish perspective, when I see them - zeros and ones intertwined together - I think, oh,

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folds of a gathering of a bookblock that actually support a text that appears then on the page 'computer screen' and it is William Gibson's poem.

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Finally, there is a third book for me that appears actually here, right in the middle of all of that, in Agrippa.

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It is the DNA sequence of the fruit fly or an excerpt of it because I don't think of it as asemic writing.

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I see it more how often we hear about DNA and how DNA is considered to be a kind of way of having a history,

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a kind of book of our own humanity, ancestry and of all of us living organisms.

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So that's how I would consider this kind of third book, metaphorically,

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nested inside the two other books. And from a book perspective,

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and I would very much like to hear what my colleague thinks about that,

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but for example, I think about the two DNA helix strands maybe as two folds again that unfolds inside twoo cover of the book.

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And for instance, you could picture an accordion book when you think of the DNA strands.

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So B, where does that fit if it is a book? If these are books? Well to me it fits in a library,

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because people are: 'oh, if Agrippa is self-destructive, maybe the way people interact with it as readers and they read it for destruction,

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maybe its location is more in a gallery, an art gallery?' But actually when you put it right in the centre of the library,

388
00:44:51,230 --> 00:44:59,990
it brings you within the context of the library basically asking questions like: What do we do with books?

389
00:44:59,990 --> 00:45:02,540
How do we preserve them? For do we preserve them?

390
00:45:02,540 --> 00:45:09,679
And all of these questions that we are actually faced with when we are in the reading room where  our own 

391
00:45:09,680 --> 00:45:20,360
bodily matter is actually constraint in our interaction with a book. We shall not speak, we shall not write on it, you know, leave as little traces of your own body on the book.

392
00:45:20,660 --> 00:45:23,950
And then finally, well, once.

393
00:45:24,040 --> 00:45:28,300
in the library, you branch out and you open it to library collections.

394
00:45:28,480 --> 00:45:34,600
And all of a sudden, to me, Agrippa, and we could see it from this amazing panel, is related to many,

395
00:45:34,600 --> 00:45:39,370
many fields in the history of the book, in the ongoing history of the book,

396
00:45:39,610 --> 00:45:45,160
and how we have been experimenting with the materiality of this object book

397
00:45:45,440 --> 00:45:54,190
that is an interface of communication from the codex-form books to the e-book, between print culture and digital collection, time-based media,

398
00:45:54,280 --> 00:46:00,040
photosensitive surface. Thank you very much and thank you to everyone

399
00:46:00,040 --> 00:46:03,459
who's been on the panel. Thank you, everybody.

400
00:46:03,460 --> 00:46:10,690
I have a question to the panel or a comment, which is, I realised that, I too, I've lived with William Gibson.

401
00:46:11,740 --> 00:46:19,959
And the reason I have is because I'm a science fiction reader and a techno feminist and someone who was thinking about technology,

402
00:46:19,960 --> 00:46:27,430
gender, cultural imaginaries and cyberspace throughout that period and was also an accidental technological journalist.

403
00:46:27,430 --> 00:46:34,420
And my question which actually be about the strange disappearance of William Gibson and everything we have said so far,

404
00:46:35,170 --> 00:46:44,469
which might also be a question to Alan about how a sociology can be a biography in our sociology, but still come back to the question of the text

405
00:46:44,470 --> 00:46:51,790
and the content, there might be a question for the rest of you about the role of Gibson and Gibson's fictional universe,

406
00:46:51,790 --> 00:46:55,689
if you like, and Gibson's writing in Agrippa and in the project,

407
00:46:55,690 --> 00:47:00,370
because that's how I came across it and that's how I was enchanted with the object as well,

408
00:47:00,670 --> 00:47:04,660
which was less real, as a matter of fact, than all the cyber stuff you could steal at the time.

409
00:47:05,320 --> 00:47:08,860
So any comments on Gibson? Any of you.

410
00:47:12,520 --> 00:47:21,610
[Alan] I've had a few, a few brief correspondences with Gibson about this and other matters in the past,

411
00:47:21,610 --> 00:47:25,900
but basically he has been a lurker in the entire conversation.

412
00:47:26,350 --> 00:47:33,940
I think this is true since the very beginning. This was a project I believe was concocted between Begos and Ashbaugh.

413
00:47:34,600 --> 00:47:37,810
Gibson always had a distant relationship to the project.

414
00:47:37,990 --> 00:47:40,960
He was a kind of a fourth wheel, as it were.

415
00:47:41,380 --> 00:47:47,290
They commissioned a poem from him and that was what he was concerned about and that was what he contributed.

416
00:47:47,290 --> 00:47:53,050
After about this, I think Kevin said six months of delay when it finally arrived,

417
00:47:53,590 --> 00:47:59,110
but as I understand it from Kevin, Gibson, never had a close relationship with this project.

418
00:47:59,530 --> 00:48:08,890
And as you may know, over the years, at various times, Gibson has played the public role of a sceptic about the existence of the book itself.

419
00:48:09,490 --> 00:48:17,410
He's on record as saying that he's never seen a copy, that he doesn't know that it exists, even though I think that's counterfactual.

420
00:48:17,410 --> 00:48:24,280
So it's a very strange kind of situation and it's another piece of evidence, I think,

421
00:48:24,400 --> 00:48:32,620
of the weakness of the social contract that underlies this construction called Agrippa (A Book of the Dead).

422
00:48:33,460 --> 00:48:40,000
There is never the firm social basis to bind this thing together institutionally,

423
00:48:40,000 --> 00:48:44,320
contractually and otherwise, as what we would recognise as a book.

424
00:48:45,810 --> 00:48:52,460
[Caroline] Thank you. Justine, I think, you wanted to come back in. Yes but maybe Matthew first.

425
00:48:52,470 --> 00:48:59,480
No, Justine, please go ahead. [Justine] Yes, I wanted to reflect on that because, funnily,

426
00:48:59,520 --> 00:49:06,900
actually William Gibson has been kind of in touch with us. He has retweeted yesterday about the symposium, Matthew told us that.

427
00:49:06,910 --> 00:49:13,950
And earlier too. And actually, I had reached out to him to invite him, we had discussed that

428
00:49:13,950 --> 00:49:21,990
also with Quinn. So, he couldn't come but he wishes us the best of luck so he is kind of still, you know, looking over the project.

429
00:49:22,200 --> 00:49:29,720
And yes, I have exchanged with him a little bit for my research and for him

430
00:49:30,120 --> 00:49:36,450
it's really a project that is mainly tied to actually finding the book about his family and his father.

431
00:49:36,630 --> 00:49:42,660
And also in my exchange with him, he said that you had never seen a copy of the book.

432
00:49:42,900 --> 00:49:47,570
[Caroline] Which we don't necessarily believe. Matthew?

433
00:49:48,060 --> 00:49:52,379
[Matthew] Yeah, I mean, I've also had a little bit of correspondence with Gibson over the years.

434
00:49:52,380 --> 00:49:57,270
My sense is that it's not just a certain kind of estrangement from the project.

435
00:49:57,270 --> 00:50:01,920
I think he also enjoys being mischievous, puckish about it,

436
00:50:02,190 --> 00:50:07,709
and I think he sort of sees this as something he kind of did way back in the day and is

437
00:50:07,710 --> 00:50:15,450
sort of tickled by the notion that this group of academics and curators and book people,

438
00:50:15,450 --> 00:50:20,160
you know, still won't let go of it. I think he finds it a little bit sort of odd and inexplicable.

439
00:50:21,240 --> 00:50:26,880
You know, there there is footage of him examining the NYPL copy.

440
00:50:27,360 --> 00:50:32,759
He was there to do a big reading some years back, and they brought out the copy for him.

441
00:50:32,760 --> 00:50:37,920
And there is I think there's even a short clip on YouTube of him paging through it.

442
00:50:38,940 --> 00:50:43,739
He also, of course, signed the leaves. And I've wondered about that a little bit.

443
00:50:43,740 --> 00:50:46,230
I mean, the signatures are obviously authentic.

444
00:50:47,040 --> 00:50:53,520
The notion, particularly given the kind of elemental circumstances under which the project came together,

445
00:50:53,730 --> 00:51:02,250
the notion that the leaves were somehow, you know, gathered and shipped off to him for autograph in Vancouver.

446
00:51:02,250 --> 00:51:05,570
And that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

447
00:51:05,580 --> 00:51:06,840
I mean, it could have happened,

448
00:51:07,050 --> 00:51:17,610
but it would seem more likely that at some point he was actually in a room somewhere and in a position to sign multiple leaves for multiple copies.

449
00:51:17,820 --> 00:51:22,890
And that would be one interesting sort of tangent of this to rundown, if anyone could.

450
00:51:23,820 --> 00:51:30,210
[Alan] Just on that point, I wanted to ask Rollin about this, because over the years, I gathered this strong impression, which may be wrong,

451
00:51:30,780 --> 00:51:38,040
that the book that we're calling a book basically consisted of a bunch of parts that were assembled more or less just in time,

452
00:51:38,040 --> 00:51:47,580
depending on whether in order came in. So on that basis, it's not, you know, unbelievable that Gibson only saw a bunch of leaves of the book.

453
00:51:48,090 --> 00:51:58,550
Rollin, what do you think of that? [Rollin] It's I would say it's more common when you're doing a book like this with people spread out.

454
00:51:58,570 --> 00:52:01,750
What you do is you send the sheet to the person who is going to sign,

455
00:52:01,760 --> 00:52:08,260
so you send a hundred sheets or whatever to Gibson, and he just signs those and sends them back to you.

456
00:52:08,260 --> 00:52:09,480
And then they get collated

457
00:52:09,490 --> 00:52:16,060
and when you're binding copies, you wouldn't necessarily wait for all the copies to be bound and then fly him into town.

458
00:52:16,330 --> 00:52:20,140
Not to say that it didn't happen that way, but it's a lot more expensive.

459
00:52:20,620 --> 00:52:26,699
It's easier to get a bunch of signatures on sheets and then deal with it. Sorry,

460
00:52:26,700 --> 00:52:33,210
was there another question? I don't think so. [Caroline] No, I think that was it. I suppose my question following that would be.

461
00:52:34,650 --> 00:52:43,620
The role then of Gibson, even assuming he had a peripheral role in the construction of the work?

462
00:52:44,460 --> 00:52:51,600
Somehow, how then, really are you thinking about the pervasive influence of Gibson as a writer of cyberspace,

463
00:52:51,600 --> 00:52:55,650
as somebody interested in the end of the book and the beginning of writing?

464
00:52:56,040 --> 00:53:00,800
How does his culture imaginary play into Agrippa?

465
00:53:00,840 --> 00:53:03,640
Because I think it does. I think it always has.

466
00:53:04,840 --> 00:53:11,160
So I don't know whether we can really abandon Gibson and turn him into a bit player in his own destructing

467
00:53:11,310 --> 00:53:19,720
book. Quinn? [Quinn] I'll just comment maybe in addition to sort of the fascination around the print object itself,

468
00:53:20,020 --> 00:53:24,820
there was also at the time, of course, 1992 sort of transport ourselves back.

469
00:53:24,970 --> 00:53:30,760
This is early Internet and before there was a lot of fascination from a sort of a

470
00:53:30,760 --> 00:53:35,890
political cultural side as well with regard to the encryption and encryption effect.

471
00:53:36,730 --> 00:53:49,130
There is materials that on the Agrippa Files showing the role of others who are broadly speaking interested in,

472
00:53:49,420 --> 00:53:54,190
you know, challenging the cryptographic universe, I suppose.

473
00:53:54,760 --> 00:54:03,640
And so that includes, of course, famously the Electronic Frontier Foundation and those folks were involved in.

474
00:54:03,850 --> 00:54:14,890
But what I think actually was interesting from my perspective is, despite all of the interest in this, in the cryptography or the potential virus,

475
00:54:16,390 --> 00:54:22,450
it's actually it was never really, you know, in reality, it would have never been a concern.

476
00:54:22,450 --> 00:54:29,320
It was a very weak cryptographic tool and not one that would have concerned regulators or any of that.

477
00:54:29,330 --> 00:54:34,989
So there is a kind of a cultural moment attached to it, but it was like any good art project,

478
00:54:34,990 --> 00:54:38,440
maybe one that was just sort of drummed up from from interest.

479
00:54:38,440 --> 00:54:43,150
And in reality, I don't think it actually posed any huge source of challenges

480
00:54:44,910 --> 00:54:51,540
like William Gibson would be really fascinated with and interested to sort of see the pushing of a kind of a cultural frontier,

481
00:54:52,080 --> 00:54:59,250
especially in the cyber space. [Matthew] Yeah. And just to, you know, just sort of continue Caroline's line of thinking.

482
00:54:59,250 --> 00:55:07,350
I mean, Alan and I have both and Peter, too, written about the mechanism as kind of the central trope of the poem.

483
00:55:07,620 --> 00:55:19,050
And a mechanism is very much a mechanistic technological image, although it resonates far more, I think, deeply than that in the context of the poem.

484
00:55:19,230 --> 00:55:29,760
But I absolutely see this. It's at once different from any other public text that Gibson has authored.

485
00:55:30,420 --> 00:55:41,010
But I also I personally see it as very much of a piece with his larger body of writing and also autobiographically and otherwise.

486
00:55:41,010 --> 00:55:45,569
I see it very much as his voice in the text. [Alan] Well,

487
00:55:45,570 --> 00:55:51,000
just to support both Quinn and Matt's statements here, on Quinn's part the

488
00:55:51,000 --> 00:55:55,850
reception history of the work at this very beginning with the BBS excitement about it and so on

489
00:55:55,860 --> 00:56:01,200
it has everything to do with Neuromancer and the Sprawl trilogy, which had come out at that point.

490
00:56:01,740 --> 00:56:08,850
The book was received as, as I put it, the incunabula of the Internet, a kind of early version of the Internet.

491
00:56:09,570 --> 00:56:15,810
And secondly, to support what Matt was saying, you know, I really when I teach this work,

492
00:56:15,930 --> 00:56:21,560
the 305 line poem by Gibson provides that theory for a new medium.

493
00:56:22,430 --> 00:56:28,590
It's memory of his father's photograph album, that Agrippa album from Kodak,

494
00:56:28,740 --> 00:56:35,110
which I tried to get a copy of from the Kodak firm, but they had gone bankrupt by that time and disbanded their archives.

495
00:56:35,610 --> 00:56:41,909
That poem is the theorisation of the book, which itself has become, on that basis,

496
00:56:41,910 --> 00:56:49,860
one of the canonical examples of new media forms and the transition between media ages.

497
00:56:50,040 --> 00:56:55,469
So it's very difficult to put Gibson to the side because strangely enough,

498
00:56:55,470 --> 00:57:02,550
the interpretation of this book came before the book was finished in the form of the poem that is the theorisation of this work.

499
00:57:03,290 --> 00:57:11,400
[Caroline] I think I really see it as a materialisation of his writing, which I think many people at the time, they see it in that way.

500
00:57:11,510 --> 00:57:16,950
So I'm not sure that if anyone wants to come back, we're running out of time, are we?

501
00:57:17,820 --> 00:57:21,900
Yes. I think we have to stop. I think we're going to have to.

502
00:57:22,080 --> 00:57:26,610
[Justine] Yeah, I wanted just to know if Peter has had an interaction with William Gibson at the time,

503
00:57:26,610 --> 00:57:30,240
because you were just there writing the article as the book was being made.

504
00:57:31,270 --> 00:57:39,069
[Caroline] Peter, did you hear that? Justine is asking about your sense of the relationship between cyberculture at the time

505
00:57:39,070 --> 00:57:43,290
I think and as the book was being diffused,

506
00:57:43,300 --> 00:57:50,620
[Justine] If you actually have been in touch with William Gibson at the time because you know you were writing the article and the book

507
00:57:50,620 --> 00:57:57,930
was still in the process of being mad, you received a copy that was not, you know, encrypted.

508
00:57:57,940 --> 00:58:08,500
[Peter] So I think that I might take some issue with Matthew's statement that the mechanism is, in fact, mechanistic.

509
00:58:09,280 --> 00:58:15,910
[Matthew] Just to be clear, I said it was not solely mechanistic.

510
00:58:16,390 --> 00:58:24,220
[Peter] Well, yeah. That word took on a different meaning for me 30 years later, reading my own essay.

511
00:58:24,490 --> 00:58:31,870
Of course you can't get everything in. We know that about books, but we also know that about reader responses.

512
00:58:32,110 --> 00:58:39,099
And my response this time focussed much more on Ashbaugh, who has had very little attention paid to him,

513
00:58:39,100 --> 00:58:50,980
actually, relative to the frenzy about decoding the disappearing digital aspect.

514
00:58:51,310 --> 00:58:54,730
I was glad for that reason that Justine talked about Ashbaugh.

515
00:58:55,120 --> 00:58:58,920
What I noticed or I think I noticed, was that the code,

516
00:58:58,930 --> 00:59:08,890
the DNA that we have on those pages by Ashbaugh is also a code and can be connected to the Agrippa code.

517
00:59:09,040 --> 00:59:19,830
It reminds us, I think, that we too are mechanisms, we run once, we disappear and all that we all that is left is a

518
00:59:20,170 --> 00:59:26,860
futile attempt through things like memory or photography to reverse that disappearance.

519
00:59:27,400 --> 00:59:36,750
It raises the question, then larger question about the relationship between the book and the body, which could be explored further.

520
00:59:36,760 --> 00:59:47,140
I think Peter Greenaway does some some of some of that exploration in his movies, but we might think about moving in that direction as well.

521
00:59:48,820 --> 00:59:52,090
[Caroline] Thank you. I suspect we're out of time.

522
00:59:53,110 --> 01:00:02,049
But the final line of Gibson's time is something like 'laughing in the mechanism', which I think is interesting,

523
01:00:02,050 --> 01:00:09,100
because one of the questions I would have is that we think about the degree of seriousness with which we might needto

524
01:00:09,120 --> 01:00:19,779
take this project and also the degree to which I think it's partly a joke and a really interesting and intriguing,

525
01:00:19,780 --> 01:00:26,710
imaginative, beautiful joke probably on us, or with us that might be a place to finish for the moment.

526
01:00:27,160 --> 01:00:33,370
So thanks everybody and I think everyone is staying with us. [inaudible]